"Follow Me" Luke 9:23-27 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Well thank you, uh JJ and Jen and Wesley.

Thank you for leading us.

If you have your copy of God's Word with you, and I hope that you do, please turn to Luke chapter 9.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

Luke chapter 9, we'll be reading verse 23 through 27.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

And he was saying to them all, if anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it.

But whoever loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it.

For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?

For whoever is ashamed of me in my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory, and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

Thus reads the word of the Lord.

Are you a follower of Jesus?

That is the inescapable question that our passage forces upon us tonight.

Are you a follower of Jesus?

The question is not, have you prayed a prayer?

The question is not, have you been baptized?

The question is not how orthodox is your doctrine?

The question is not, how often do you attend?

The question is not, how much do you give?

The question is not how many ways do you serve?

The question is not how many ministries do you volunteer with.

The question is, are you a follower of Jesus?

This question cuts us to the bone.

It pierces the heart and it is designed to do that.

It is intended to have that effect on us as we are reading this passage.

It's a question that wakes up the unconverted and it sobers up the unfaithful.

The follower of Jesus.

Good questions are like a scalpel in the hand of a master surgeon.

They cut you open and they reveal what is wrong and they slice away what is damaged and they prepare you to live.

Don't be afraid of a good question.

And Luke chapter 9 is all about good questions.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

If you remember the context, just a few verses earlier, that Jesus has been performing miracles.

He's sent the 12 out who've then performed their own miracles with his authority.

They come back, Jesus feeds the 5,000.

There are crowds all around Jesus.

This is the pinnacle of Jesus' popularity.

There are thousands of people who are following him all the way out into the wilderness, all the way out into the desert.

They're giving up all of their days and all of their time just to sit and listen to Jesus.

So that prompts a question, a very good question from Jesus.

He asks them in verse 18.

It happened while he was praying alone, the disciples were with him, and he questioned them, saying, Who do the crowds say that I am?

It's a fantastic question.

Who do you say that I am?

And the crowds have all kinds of answers, the disciples say.

Maybe you're Elijah, maybe you're John the Baptist, maybe you're just one of the old prophets that's come back to life.

The crowds have all kinds of good answers.

Well, we don't really know what to make of Jesus.

Maybe he's a radical teacher, maybe he's a religious leader of some kind.

You know, maybe even Jesus is a prophet.

Maybe he's speaking God's wisdom.

But Jesus is not satisfied with any of those answers.

So he asks the disciples, Who do you say that I am?

And Peter, of course it's Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, answers, the Christ of God.

Matthew's account of this story gives us a fuller version of Peter's answer.

He says, You are the Christ of God, the Son of the living God.

Because Jesus isn't just a good teacher, he's the source of truth itself.

Jesus is not just a religious leader, he is the great high priest who will offer himself as the sacrifice for the salvation of his people.

Jesus is not just a prophet, he is the word of God.

The reality is the world will accept a lot of answers to the question, who is Jesus?

But it will not accept the truth.

Jesus is God.

He is God come to dwell in human flesh and to bring his people to be with them.

And so to make that confession that Jesus is God is already to be at odds with the world.

You are already swimming upstream as soon as you're willing to say that Jesus is God.

But sadly, to make that same confession is now to be at odds with much of the modern evangelical world.

I don't know if you guys know this, but Lig in your ministry every year sends out a survey, a broad-ranging survey from lots of people and all kinds of demographics, and it's they call it the state of theology.

And the results just came back just this past month, and here's several dozen questions, but one of them was just sadly sobering as you looked at the results.

The statement, you had to agree with it or disagree with it.

The statement said, Jesus was a great teacher, but he wasn't God.

Now you're not surprised to find out that the vast majority of respondents agreed with that sentence.

Yeah, Jesus has some good things to say.

He's got a lot of wisdom.

I like that whole thing about not judging people, but he's not God.

You're not shocked to know the world doesn't think Jesus is God, but you might be shocked to find out that when you filter the results, for people who identify themselves as evangelicals, 47% of them aren't sure or they strongly agree with the sentence.

Don't think Jesus is God.

That's a sobering statistic.

This is the confession upon which Jesus says he's going to found his church.

And he goes on to say immediately after that confession, what the Christ of God is going to do.

That he's got to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and raised up on the third day.

And so everyone who seeks to be a member of our church must join us in this confession.

This is the confession that is the foundational statement upon which our church is built.

That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And every true believer in Jesus Christ makes that confession.

But not every person who makes that confession is a believer of Jesus Christ.

That's the startling reality.

That there are many people who are comfortable saying those words, but with their life deny it and reject it.

So Jesus moves on to perhaps the most penetrating words in Luke's gospel.

And so in keeping with that theme, we are going to follow some questions here.

Our first question is: what does it mean to follow Jesus?

Verse 23, and he, that's Jesus, was saying to them all, that's the disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Now Jesus has just said where he's going to die.

And he looks at his disciples, those who are confessing his name, and saying, Are you coming too?

Now the first thing that you should notice about this, the first thing you should notice about what it means to follow Jesus is that this is an open invitation.

What does he say?

If anyone would come after me.

And do you know what anyone means there?

Anyone.

It's open to all.

The gospel has a narrow gate, but it has a broad invitation.

It's an invitation that we are compelled to go bring people in from the byways and the highways and the hedgerows.

We are called to bring anyone who would come to come.

Now listen, I believe in the doctrines of grace as strong as anybody in this room.

I'll go toe-to-toe with you.

I absolutely affirm that God is the one who predestined us for salvation as adoption to sons and daughters in Christ Jesus before the foundation of the world.

I believe that God wrote names in the Lamb's Book of Life before he ever spoke of the world into existence.

I believe that it is God who opens our hearts, who regenerates them by the power of the Holy Spirit to repent and believe the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I believe that God is the one responsible for our salvation.

I'll affirm total depravity and unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and what I like to call preservation of the saints.

But you know what else I believe?

Anyone.

Because Jesus said it.

It's been said before that the gates of paradise are unlocked to anyone who seeks entrance to them.

Amen.

This anyone means that there is no one here, no one in the world who is beyond the reach of God's grace.

It does not matter who you are or where you came from.

It does not matter what you've done or how far you've run from God.

Anyone is welcome to come.

The great physician came for the sick, and he will not withhold his healing from anyone who asks it of him in faith.

My friends, anyone can come.

In John 7, Jesus says, if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.

John 6.

Now, this is going to be a very hard invitation that he's giving.

These are perhaps the most difficult words you're going to hear.

To deny yourself and take up your cross and follow him, but it's an open invitation.

There's no one outside the reach of God's grace, and this invitation is here for you tonight if you have never accepted it before.

If for the first time in your life you begin to ask, would Jesus accept me too?

That anyone is you.

But you need to understand what you're being invited to.

And as we make the invitation to all, we need to understand what we are inviting them to.

It is a broad invitation, but it is a narrow path.

So what does it mean to follow Jesus?

Well, Jesus answers that question with three imperatives.

He gives three commands.

If you're going to follow Jesus, you're going to do these three things.

And they are a complete package.

You cannot take them buffet style.

You can't say, well, I'm fine with denying myself.

The cross thing sounds a bit much, and I'll obey whenever it's convenient.

Three commands that are the necessary part of what it means to follow Jesus, the first of which to deny himself.

If anyone wishes to come after me, if you want to go where I am going, let him deny himself.

It's very straightforward.

In fact, this whole passage is pretty straightforward.

Just means you have to reject yourself.

A complete and total disavowal of all of yourself.

Anyone who wants to follow Jesus has to begin by relinquishing all trust in yourself, relinquishing all trust in your good works, relinquishing all trust in your own wisdom.

To count yourself as little and low and even nothing compared to the Christ you have chosen to follow.

This is nothing different than what Jesse's been teaching in the Beatitudes, the very first Beatitude.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

This is just another way of saying the same thing that the followers of Jesus Christ are those who recognize their spiritual bankruptcy, who realize that they have nothing to offer in and of themselves on the table.

There's a bankruptcy of personal righteousness.

And it's easy to misunderstand what self-denial here means.

He's not speaking of the kind of asceticism or privation that some religions, in fact, I would say every religion seems to follow.

Jesus is not saying, if you want to make it into heaven, if you want to be with me at the end of the road, if you want to get to the finish line, what it takes is making sure you live the hardest life possible.

That's just not what he's talking about.

He's saying that you have to have nothing of yourself.

To summarize, the Puritan Thomas Watson, the proud sinner must look upon Christ and trust wholly in him.

Following Jesus begins by denying yourself, but then you have to take up your cross.

Take up your cross daily.

I fear that we have allowed the cross to become too tame of a symbol.

We're just too used to it.

I have bought my wife jewelry that has a cross on it.

It's beautiful, it's magnificent.

It's like a loopy thing with a diamond in the middle of it.

It's very pretty.

We're used to seeing it on our home decor.

I was driving to Georgia with my wife and my kids recently, and we stopped at a Bucky's.

If you haven't stopped at a Bucky's, you haven't lived.

We stopped at a Bucky's.

Bucky's is like if a home goods and a Walmart and a gas station and a butcher shop all landed in one location.

But it's magnificent.

And you walk down the Bucky's through the home decor aisle and see cross after cross after cross after cross and beautiful pastels and pinks and magentas and barbed wire because it's a bucky's and we think of architecture.

The cross is an instrument of death.

When Jesus is saying this to his disciples, what would they have thought of?

You have to take up your cross.

They wouldn't have thought K-je jewelers.

And not only was it a death, it was the most horrific and painful and embarrassing death that could possibly be imagined.

To endure not only excruciating pain, but to do so at the hand of your mortal enemies, the Roman government.

To be stripped and mocked publicly in front of everyone.

And then to not even have the privilege of a proper burial, as your body would be picked at by the birds.

When Jesus says take up your cross, he's asking them to die to themselves.

And that means, yes, to die to your own desires and your own fleshly nature, but also to be prepared to embrace death if it is necessary in God's providential plan for your life.

To pick up the emblem of death and to carry it willingly.

Daily, he says.

Not when it's convenient, not when the cost seems manageable, but every day.

To lay your own desires and wants and needs down and put them to death.

Then he says, to follow me.

Anybody that wants to can come.

You have to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.

Self-denial, sacrifice, and now submission.

This is what it looks like to follow Jesus.

A follower's life will be marked by following.

That's why we call it following.

It's a lifelong pattern of obedience.

Jesus, who is so good at asking penetrating questions, asks in Luke 6, why do you call me Lord, Lord, but you don't do what I say?

I have three daughters.

They're wonderful.

You've met them, you already knew that.

Now I want you to imagine if one of my daughters came up to me and said, Dad, I love you.

You're the most important person in my life.

I'm literally right now wearing a I Love Daddy bracelet that I promised my daughter I would not remove until God's providential hand broke it.

Any day.

I'll follow you.

You are my daddy.

But you know, I don't really like your rules.

They're pretty lame.

So I'm gonna stay up whenever I want, and I'm not gonna do what you tell me to, and I'm not gonna obey you, I'm not gonna respect your authority, but I do love you.

And we're cool, right, Dad?

I wouldn't be okay with that.

It should cause us to tremble when Jesus closes his Sermon on the Mount by saying, On that day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord.

What's he gonna say?

Depart from me, I never knew you.

There is no such thing as a believer in Jesus Christ who does not follow him in obedience with their life.

It does not exist.

It's an oxymoron.

John's gospel would record, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

But I want you to notice when Jesus says that, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

It's not vice versa.

Jesus is not saying, if you keep my commandments, I will love you.

He's saying, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments.

There's a wrong way to read all of these commands.

Jesus is defining for us what discipleship looks like, what it means to follow him, and there's a wrong way to read them.

The wrong way to read these commands is to think, okay, these are the prerequisites to salvation.

I've got it figured out.

I can get to heaven.

All I have to do is deny myself and live a really hard life.

All I have to do is take up my cross and put all the things I love to death.

All I have to do is just keep Jesus' rules really, really well, and then, then I'll get to heaven.

That is not what Jesus is saying.

That's never been what Jesus is saying.

These are not prerequisites to salvation, they're the marks of the saved.

It's a picture of devotion.

When you add these three things together.

The answer to the question is very simple and it's very straightforward, even as it's incredibly challenging.

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

It means to be holy and completely devoted to Him.

And to live your life as Jesus lived it in obedience to your Lord and your Savior.

That's what John would write in 1 John 2.

By this we know we've come to know Him if we walk as He walked.

Now, my friends, I know that those are challenging words.

I know they're hard.

I want you to be encouraged to know that Jesus never expects us to match him step for step.

We never could anyway.

His spiritual legs are a lot longer than ours.

But he does demand that we fix our eyes on him and run the race that is set before us with endurance, following the path that he already blazed for us.

And this passage, as painful as it is, forces us to recognize that if someone's life is not marked by ongoing obedience and a willingness to endure and a self-denial that puts everything and all of its hope in Jesus Christ, if those things are not present in a person's life, that person should ask themselves this question.

Am I following Jesus?

That's what it means to follow Jesus.

But the next question you've got to ask is what does it cost to follow Jesus?

Verse 24 and 25 are an incredible paradox.

Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, he's the one who will save it.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?

You gotta ask, what does it cost to follow Jesus?

I remember when we first moved here.

We moved here in 2007, we bought our house in 2008.

And I was not prepared for that experience in my heart or my wallet.

Neither of those places were prepared for what's gonna happen.

We bought our house.

We called our dad, my dad, our dad.

It's our dad.

Called our dad.

Said, Dad, we're buying a house.

It's$300,000.

And when my dad picked his jaw back up off the ground, he said, I can't believe you're gonna spend that much money.

I said, Yeah, well, dad, that's just what it is up here, that's how it goes.

$300,000, I'm prepared in my heart.

Then we went to the actual closing of the thing.

And they handed me a document that was painfully titled the Truth and Lending Document.

And they showed me how much I was actually paying for the house.

Wow.

My heart was not ready.

And I had to ask a very serious question.

Am I really willing to pay that much money for this house?

The like, you know, the townhouse with the no-parking and the, you know, the hive of killer bees in the backyard?

Like, is this really that much money for this house?

Is it worth it?

Luke 9, 24 is a truth and following document.

That's what it is.

There's no fine print.

There's no hidden fees.

It's very straightforward.

Anyone that wants to follow Jesus can do it.

But you need to know what it's gonna cost you.

Everything.

It will cost you your entire life.

And so if you're gonna follow Jesus, you need to have a very serious conversation with yourself and ask this: Am I really willing to pay this much to gain Christ?

Am I really willing to give everything up?

Am I ready to sign over the deed of my life to Jesus Christ?

Because that's what he's saying.

You give everything up.

All of it is yours now, Jesus.

You bought it with your blood on the cross.

And I'm gonna follow you because I belong to you now.

So you've got to ask: am I willing to lay down my life on the altar?

Am I willing to nail my life, my former dead life, to the cross and to continue to put my disobedient passions every day to death in order to gain Christ?

Am I willing to potentially lose family and friends and finances and work and aspirations and dreams and goals?

Am I willing to lose all of that to gain Jesus?

And here's the deal, friends.

The only way you'll ever be able to do that.

The only way you'll be able to make that kind of exchange is if you love Jesus more than you love your life.

You're making a value judgment with your life, and you have to love him more.

Your life has value.

You know that.

We all understand that our life has value.

Our job has value.

We wish it had a little more value, but it has value.

Our cars and our homes, our family, our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations and goals, they have value.

They're important.

And the only way you would be willing to give up all of that value is if there was something in exchange that you thought was more valuable.

So the only way to follow Jesus is to love him more than you love everything else.

And that is why, at its core, Christianity cannot be reduced to a series of propositions or truth claims or even doctrines.

It's gotta be more than that.

At its core, Christianity is about loving Jesus and surrendering yourself entirely to him and now making him the captain of your everyday forward.

In our salvation, at the moment of your conversion, what is happening at that time is not that you are changing what you believe.

It feels like that, but that's not what's happening.

Rather, what is actually happening at the moment of your salvation, is that God is changing your heart completely about what you love.

In fact, God is just giving you a brand new heart all together.

Salvation is a supernatural, miraculous transformation of our hearts so that we begin to love Jesus more than we love everything else in this world.

And that new heart that He gives you, the heart of a believer, the heart of a Christian, the heart of the one who confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, that heart delights in denying itself and dying to its old self and following Jesus.

It loves that.

That heart can say, I count it all rubbish compared to the surpassing value of knowing you.

And this new heart knows the cost.

It sees everything that it's got to give away, but it values Christ more than those things, more than work, and more than family, and more than friends, more than goals, even more than this mortal life itself.

More than your heart values the next breath your lungs will take.

Your new heart values Christ.

And so I hope you understand that following Jesus isn't it's not just an issue of discipline.

It's not just about being more regimented, it's about being reoriented.

And you might be sitting here thinking, like, how can I possibly, how can I do that?

How can I possibly accomplish those things?

How can I change what I love?

And the answer is you can't.

You cannot change what you love.

Not on your own.

You don't have control over your heart like that.

Only God has control.

The kind of transformation of desire requires the supernatural work of miraculous heart change.

But I've got good news for you if you're here.

The God of Scripture is a miraculous, heart-changing God.

That's what he does on his business card.

Create everything, rule everything, save people.

He loves to give people new hearts.

Following Jesus is so much more than doctrine.

Do you believe that God is one?

Good.

Your doctrine is in order.

You do well, but even the demons believe that.

Do you confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God?

Yes.

You are confessing the truth.

But you know what?

Both the sheep and the goats make that confession.

The wheat and the tares are in the same field.

And so the question is: do you love Christ?

Is Jesus the object of your heart's desire?

Is Jesus Christ the delight of your soul?

And if not, my friend, what you need is a new heart.

But praise be to the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that he loves us way more than we could love him.

And because of the great love with which he loves us, he gives us those new hearts to all who would in humility and sincerity ask him.

And so if you're here tonight and you need this new heart, if you know that you need to follow Jesus and you know that he's God, don't walk out without asking for a new heart.

But before you do, I want you to count the cost.

And I want you also to count the cost of not following Jesus.

Verse 26, for whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

If you remember, this is an invitation.

Anyone that wants to follow can come.

But that means you can choose not to come.

And I want you to know the consequence of that choice.

When Scripture warns, the preacher has to warn.

I'm constrained, I have no other choice.

So I need you to know that there is a day coming when Jesus Christ himself will return.

And he will appear in the sky, he will descend on the clouds, he will land on the Mount of Olives, and He is going to bring His followers to Himself.

And when He shows up, He is going to claim this world and everything in it as His.

And on that day, there's a one-question survey.

There's only two kinds of people: those who belong to Christ and those who don't belong to Christ.

There's no option C, there's no abstentions.

Just a one-question survey.

Do you love me or were you ashamed to know me?

Did you with your life deny that I was your Lord and Savior?

This is what it means to follow Jesus.

I share that because I once didn't know it.

Some of you have heard my testimony before.

I grew up going to church.

I was a good kid.

I got baptized when I was nine, said a prayer.

I played handbells.

That's the holiest kid you ever met.

I wasn't a Christian.

I knew how to profess the truth and confess the truth, but I didn't follow the Lord.

Until one day God brought a person into my life to ask me those questions.

Friend, don't leave today without knowing the answer.

Let's pray.

Almighty God, we do love you.

We thank you and we trust you.

Your son is the great physician who heals the sick.

He's the good shepherd who comes to bring the wayward sheep back to himself.

He is the great lover of our souls.

Who in mercy brings us to him.

I pray, God, that no one would leave this room today without knowing if they're following you.

I trust you.

And it's in your son's name that we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.