First Things First - Count the Cost

Well, we have spent the last month in this series we call first things first.

We're looking at all these moments in Scripture where Jesus tells us what to do first.

Where he says, focus on this first.

Anytime we do something in life, it's important to get the first steps right.

What we do first is really important, right?

So if we're building a house, and keep in mind, I've never built a house, I haven't even come close to building a house, I would struggle to build a dollhouse.

I'm just not good at that kind of thing.

But I've seen houses in the process of being built, so I can imagine that if you're building a home, it would be much better for you to miss an important step when putting the roof on the house than to miss an important step when laying the foundation.

Much, much less would need to be undone to fix the roof than to fix the foundation.

And in our lives, it's the same way.

What we do first is really, really important.

We need to keep the first things first, and Jesus, he helps us with that.

Today, we're gonna look at one more first things first moment in Scripture.

But before we do that, I want to ask you to engage in a short mental exercise with me.

I don't think it will be that difficult.

Some of us will have to dig deep into our memory banks, some of us not so deep, but I want you, if you can, to just remember the moment you came face to face with how expensive life really is.

The moment in life when you realized how much life really costs.

Can anyone remember that moment specifically?

I'll tell you mine as you keep thinking about it.

It's okay.

If you've forgotten it because of trauma, that's fine, right?

For me, it was 12 years ago.

I had just finished my freshman year in college, and that summer I worked as much as I could.

I picked up every shift possible.

I had one goal.

I wanted to make as much money as I possibly could because I needed to buy an engagement ring for this beautiful woman that I'm married to now.

And so I did that.

I bought an engagement ring, I paid it off, and for the first time ever, with what I had left after that engagement ring, I was a thousand there.

And in fact, just hold on to your hats, because I was a multi-thousandaire that summer.

I had over$2,000 in my checking account, and as a 20-year-old guy, I thought I was living large, right?

I was dreaming of all the all the things I could buy with my money, and you can you can deck out a dorm room with two grand, right?

You can get some nice stuff at Target for two grand.

So I was excited.

But right before I went back to college, my car broke down.

And it was a pretty extensive repair, and it cost me almost everything I had in my account.

And that was so deflating for me, it was like a punch in the stomach or a slap in the face because what I thought was a lot of money turned out just to be the cost of an extensive car repair.

And it was so discouraging.

I think I could have handled it better if I had loved that car.

Some of you may have a vehicle that you love, and if it costs money to keep it going, so be it.

You love that car.

I did not love this car.

I hated this car.

Right?

I should not have hated it.

I should have been thankful for it.

But see, the thing is, I went to college with a Ford Mustang.

It was not a classic Mustang, it wasn't really even a really nice Mustang.

It wasn't a GT or a V8 or anything like that.

It was a teal blue 1995 Ford Mustang, V6, stock, air conditioning, all the good stuff, right?

But it was a Mustang.

And I was 20.

That's all I cared about.

So when this tornado hit my campus, my freshman year of college, and threw a tree at my car, I was a little upset.

Totaled my car, and while I was stranded in Kansas City, Missouri, because I had no way to drive back home, I was waiting on my dad to have time and his schedule to come get me.

The insurance check for that car came to my parents, and rightfully so.

I said it was my car.

I thought it was my car.

But, and students, this is a great lesson for you.

If it's the month of your birthday and you don't have to drive to a tag office, that is not your car.

Okay, just know that.

It's not your car.

All right.

You can say it's your car, you can treat it like it's your car, but that's not your car.

So I learned that lesson.

My parents got the insurance check, rightfully so, and they decided to surprise me and to buy my replacement car before I came back home.

I kind of envisioned being a part of that process.

They had other ideas, that's fine.

So when I pulled up in the driveway with my dad, I saw it.

The replacement for my Mustang.

It was an early 90s Buickless Sabre.

Okay.

And please know if you drive a Buickle Saber this morning, I would love to have one in my life now.

It's just that when you're 20, it's not that high on your must-drive list, right?

To go from Mustang to La Sabre just doesn't have the same ring to it.

And and I didn't show it with my parents.

I was grateful.

I was very thankful to have a car, and there were a lot of positives about the La Saber.

It was roomy.

It was very roomy, right?

No one's gonna pull you over because cops love to pull over 20-year-olds, but what 20-year-olds driving a la saber?

They think you're 70 years old, right?

People would just, people just pass me on the road because they assumed I was going slow, because I was in a la saber.

That was the assumption, so that was that was nice.

Had one of those giant steering wheels, right?

That you're like, who is this for?

Huge, thin steering wheels.

It had some nice features.

But I I hated that car.

I hated it so much.

And I think I could have grown to love it if not for a few interesting quirks.

The main one was that if you were turning left, it had about a 10% chance of dying.

And I know that sounds crazy.

I know that sounds strange, and there might be some mechanics in the room that are like, no, that's not how it works.

No, no, no.

I'm being serious.

My parents did not believe me.

I let my dad drive this car for a week and he called me.

One of the only times in my life I've ever heard my dad say, You're right.

I didn't know what I was talking about.

I don't think I've heard it since, actually.

But but he said, the car died and it was when I was turning left.

And I said, I know it never dies turning right, it never dies going straight, it only dies when you turn left.

And I want you to think for a second about what it would feel like to drive a car and know that if you turn left, it could die.

Just imagine that for a second.

That made for some some very interesting moments on the road and even more interesting ways to get where I needed to go and only make right turns.

Because that's what I did.

I have people in the car, our destination's on the left, I turn right, they're like, Where are you going?

I'm like, don't worry, three rights makes a left, and we're gonna get there.

Okay, we're gonna do this.

So the thing is, the fact that it was that car that wiped my bank account clean.

Oh.

And even when we fixed it, it still tied when we turned left.

It didn't solve that problem.

That wasn't what we got fixed.

It was hard.

It was hard, but I needed that experience because we don't live in a world that really tells us upfront how much things cost.

Our parents might tell us, but but we have an amazing ability to tune them out when we're young.

But this world, it tells us the opposite.

This world tells us that we can afford anything, right?

For just four easy payments.

And what does that even mean?

What is an easy payment?

I still don't understand what an easy payment is.

I mean, you never see a commercial that says for one painful payment, you can have this thing you don't need, right?

You don't hear that.

But it's for four easy payments, and that's the world we live in.

A lot of money is spent on very well-crafted statements and lies to market to us, to sell to us, to get us to think that the things in life that really do cost a lot don't cost a lot.

And so it's not until we have an experience like that or we read the fine print that we find out the real cost of things.

That is one of the reasons that I appreciate Jesus so much.

Because with Jesus, there is no fine print.

There is no marketing, there's no selling, there's no well-crafted message.

With Jesus, you get someone that is more upfront and honest than anyone you will ever, ever meet.

And that is so refreshing in a world full of lies.

And so if you're you're here today and you're just seeking, maybe you're curious about Jesus, maybe you're skeptical, that's okay.

I hope at the very least that you will appreciate the fact that no one will ever be as honest with you as Jesus is with you.

And if that's where you start with him, great.

See, I say all this because today we're gonna read the statement that Jesus makes about the cost of things.

And he is very upfront and very honest with his followers, but it's a it's a place in scripture that can be very confusing, it can catch you off guard, and it can be really perplexing.

You almost think Jesus is contradicting other things he said, but we're gonna explore this and unpack this and really get to the heart of what he's communicating, and it's amazing.

It's gonna seem like he's asking too much from us, but in the end, we're gonna realize that he is offering something priceless to every single one of us.

So it's in Luke chapter 14.

Luke 14 · chapter mention

You can turn there in a Bible if you have it, or pull it up on your phone, we'll put it up on the screen.

It's Luke 14.

I'm gonna start in verse 25.

It says, Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Now, just last week we looked at this scripture where Jesus said that the most important thing to God is that we love God with everything we have.

And equal to that, that we love our neighbor, we love the people around us just as much as we we love ourselves.

And now we have Jesus saying, Yeah, hate your mom, hate your dad.

That's hard for everyone, right?

That takes a lot of effort when we're young, and hate your brothers and sisters, and oh yeah, hate your wife or your husband and hate your children, and hate your own life if you want to be my follower.

And you look at that and say, What is Jesus, what is he thinking?

What is he saying?

Is this a is this a contradiction?

Is Jesus losing it?

Is he crazy?

What's going on?

Anytime you read something in scripture where Jesus seems to take a radical departure from other things he's taught, stop and ask yourself a question.

Who is he talking to and why is he saying what he's saying?

It's very important.

And the key for it for this is really in those first few words.

Now, great crowds accompanied Jesus.

Jesus had this amazing ability to amass thousands of followers quickly.

Thousands of people would follow Jesus everywhere he went, sometimes five to ten thousand people.

Just imagine that.

I mean, in this room right now, we probably have a little over a thousand people.

So multiply that by ten, and that's just people following Jesus as he's walking around everywhere he goes.

But then Jesus would do this crazy thing at the peak of his popularity.

Probably the moment that the disciples were like, We've never seen this many people following you, Jesus.

This is awesome.

He would say, Oh wow, there are a lot of people, and he would turn and say something crazy to make them all go away.

He would say something so strange that this huge crowd would thin out very quickly.

So for example, once Jesus fed over 5,000 people miraculously, he multiplied fish and bread to feed over 5,000 people, and those 5,000 people got free food, so they followed Jesus, right?

That makes sense.

And then, shortly after that, Jesus turned to these people.

He said, Hey, if you want to be my follower, you have to eat my flesh and drink my blood.

And most of those people said, All right, we're good.

We're good.

We're we're good.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks for the fish, thanks for the bread, but we'll see you around.

And if you had been Jesus' publicist, he didn't have a PR team, and I'm really glad about that.

But had you been the publicist of Jesus, if one of the disciples had that task, that person would have gone nuts.

That would have been the worst person to be because Jesus would have driven you crazy.

Why would you say something like that at the peak of your popularity, Jesus?

And we know he wasn't being literal, he wasn't holding out his arm, saying, hey, everyone, line up and take a bite, right?

He was he was talking about the fact that one day we would need to identify ourselves by his sacrifice.

That one day we would need to identify our very existence and who we are by the fact that Jesus gave up his flesh and shed his blood on the cross, that we were going to need to accept that into our lives.

That's why every Sunday when we take Lord's Supper, we we do exactly what Jesus asked.

He said, Eat this bread and remember that it represents my flesh, my body that was broken for you.

And drink this wine, that's what he said.

We we use juice because to card all of you at the tables would be really a nightmare.

So we use juice just to be safe.

So he said, Wine, drink it to remember my blood.

Now, had Jesus turned to these 5,000 people who already had bread and fish, and he said, Hey, if you want to be my follower, you need to be ready to eat a lot of bread and drink a lot of wine, I doubt they would have all left, right?

They already got the fish, they got the bread, now there's alcohol involved.

It just seems like this is getting better and better every day for these people, but no, that's not what Jesus says.

He says, Eat my flesh and drink my blood.

And that just sounds crazy.

This was not a poor choice of words.

Jesus is the best communicator that has ever lived or will ever live.

Jesus, he's amazing.

He's not a politician going, yeah, that came out wrong.

I'm really sorry.

Jesus was being purposeful when he said that.

See, it would have been a poor choice of words if Jesus wanted a popular following.

But if Jesus did not want a popular following, it was the perfect choice of words.

See, in those early days, Jesus didn't care about the number of people following him because he knew what was ahead.

He knew about the cross, he knew about the persecution that those early followers would face, a persecution most of us could not even imagine.

And he knew that if people were following him just because it was the popular thing to do, they would not last.

He needed to know who was really in, who was committed to following him, even if they didn't understand everything he said and who was just there for the free food.

And that's exactly what's going on when Jesus says, hate your father, hate your mother.

He's not advocating hate.

No one has ever loved like Jesus.

You cannot look at anything Jesus ever did and see a shred of hatred in him.

Jesus is saying that our love for God should be so great, our love for him should be so great that everything else is a distant second.

So distant that we could say, yeah, it might as well be hatred in comparison.

And that's that's a challenge.

But that sounds a lot different than, hey, hate your family.

Jesus was saying it in a way purposefully designed to thin out those people who were just following him for no other reason than it was the popular thing to do.

He needed committed followers.

And then he goes on, and we get to this first thing's first moment.

He said, Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it.

Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish.

Or what king going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand.

And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and he asks for terms of peace.

So therefore, if any one of you does not renounce all that he has, you cannot be my disciple.

So Jesus says first, before you follow me, and if you're already following me, before you follow me any farther, count the cost.

I love how upfront and honest Jesus is.

He's saying something that we don't hear very much.

He's saying, hey, this is a costly thing.

There's a price.

Consider it.

Think about it.

Before you walk with me, think about the cost because there will be a change in your life.

Things will not stay the same.

That's challenging.

And it can be confusing because we might have grown up thinking that salvation is a free gift, and the truth is it is a free gift.

Having Jesus in your life, it's free.

But it's also costly.

How's that possible, right?

Who has kids in the room?

Just out of curiosity.

Awesome.

Who has been a child at some point in time?

Okay, I just want to make sure everyone's engaged.

So having children is free at first.

Right?

Like, you don't have to pay any money to have a kid.

It costs nothing.

Until you have the child.

And then it's really, really expensive.

Like, unbelievably expensive.

You find out you're pregnant, that's free, right?

We're pregnant, that costs nothing.

The baby comes, that costs everything.

The truth is, there are things in this world that are both free and costly at the same time.

And that's how Jesus is.

Knowing Jesus, having him in your life, it costs you nothing.

Inviting him into your life, it costs you nothing.

It's free.

But once he's there, once he is in your life, having him in your life is a costly thing.

And sometimes that produces a fear.

I grew up in a church culture that was all about what are you going to give up for God?

That was the fear that I had, that if I gave everything to God, I was going to end up having some lame job like being a pastor or something like that, right?

Because I was not going to be a pastor when I was 11 years old.

I was going to be a professional baseball player.

My mom's 5'4, my dad's 5'7.

So obviously in the genes, I had all that I needed to play professional sports.

But I heard the phrase give it up for the Lord so much growing up that I had some friends and we would, we would joke, it was kind of disrespectful, but we we all we were all about Jesus.

We just liked to poke fun at the church culture we were part of.

We would start to say that we were giving things up for the Lord that we hated.

So we would say, like, yeah, man, I I gave up salad for for Jesus this week.

You know, I just I love him and just want to give it up.

I just want to give all give it all to the Lord, right?

So I'm not I'm not doing vegetables anymore for Jesus.

I just want to give it, I want to give it to God.

And we would say that, and and the truth is it was ridiculous, but at the same time, that was part of the culture we grow up, we grew up in.

What are you gonna give to God?

And so I saw God as a taker.

I had a fear that, a real fear that if I gave everything to God, he was gonna ask for everything I loved and take it away.

I know that's not the case now.

I know that God is a He's a giver.

I mean, there's verses in the Bible that say he gives and he takes away, and that is true because everything belongs to him.

But in his nature, God is a giver.

I've learned now that if he ever asks for anything from me, it's just to make room for more of what he wants for me, and that is good.

But it's hard sometimes, right, as people, even if we know in our minds and in our hearts that that anything God might ask us to let go of, he has something greater to replace that hole in our lives with.

Even if we know that, there's still a part of us that just says, No, Jesus, no.

I like this.

I'm comfortable with this.

I want to keep this, right?

Dave Ramsey is an amazing teacher.

He does Financial Peace University.

A lot of us were in that class on Wednesday night.

And he talked about this part of human nature that causes us to hold on to things that we know might not even be good, or at the very least, they're they're not the best thing we could have, but we're just comfortable with them.

And he used an analogy I can really relate to as a father of an infant.

He said that, hey, look, a lot of us we're like we're like babies in dirty diapers.

Okay, very graphic.

He said that we we say to other people, hey, I know this stinks, but it's warm and it's mine, so I'm gonna stay right here, right?

I'm comfortable with this.

I have a little girl and and she'll get mad at me when I change her diaper.

I'm like, you're you're getting a good deal here.

This is good.

Why are you upset with me?

It's just how kids are.

But we can be like that too.

Sometimes I have this need in my mind to like guard things in my life from God.

I have things in my life that I'm almost afraid to give to God as if I give it to him, and and he's gonna take it and and remove it from my life and leave me with either nothing or something that I enjoy and that I love much less.

And I know where that thought comes from.

It's just religion.

It's just religion and all the joy and all the life that it robs from us when we see God, not through the eyes of children with a loving father, but when we see it through the eyes of religion, where he's just some big being we have to appease.

That is not God.

But it's still hard for us to get our minds wrapped around this.

I mean, what Jesus is teaching us here, it's powerful, it's it's very practical.

I love how practical Jesus is.

You can take anything he teaches and apply it to your life now, and you'll see great results.

Do that today.

Start to count the cost, right?

Really know what things cost before you buy them.

I mean, who would buy a car without first asking how much it costs?

Who would get married without really investigating and finding out everything you're getting yourself into, right?

Who would do that?

No one.

Right?

There's nervous laughter in the room right now.

Of course, but see, when you're in love, you don't matter what the costs are, right?

You don't care.

I'm in love, it doesn't matter how much it costs, I'll do it, I'll die for this person.

And then strangely, you're like, I could kill this person at another point in time.

It changes.

And and I'll say this, I know that I'm I'm I might have made a little bit of a joke about a very serious issue in some of our lives.

Ken Kington, who's an amazing part of our teaching team, if you don't know Ken, you're gonna love him.

He's he's incredible.

He is gonna be here in March for three straight weeks, and he's talking about relationships and marriage, and that's the whole point of it.

As a church, we believe in coming alongside one another, helping one another succeed.

And so if your marriage needs some work, if you just need more joy, more lightheartedness, more life, or maybe you feel like your marriage is just barely hanging on and you need it to change completely, those are three weeks that you cannot miss because it can change.

God will change it.

Even if you're single, be here because you want to be prepared to have amazing relationships and marriages in life.

Well, one marriage, that's what we're hoping for.

Sometimes things change.

So Jesus, I wasn't making a joke about divorce there.

Don't want anyone to feel guilty for that because we all make mistakes and we move on.

God's good, right?

He gives us second chances and third chances and sometimes tenth chances.

That's how it, that's how he is.

He's a good God.

So count the cost, right?

Count it.

Count the cost.

Really see what things cost before you commit.

Do that.

You'll be blessed.

But but if we leave here today and the only thing we get is this practical count the cost, do that in my life, really, really do my due diligence before I make a decision.

We'll have great blessings, but we will miss what Jesus is really communicating here because it is powerful.

It is life-changing.

It is something that if we could get our eyes on it, it would change our complete perspective on life.

And I don't want us to leave here today without seeing this.

This dynamic of what am I gonna have to give up for God and count the cost and what is it gonna take to have all of God in my life?

It's a challenging one.

Jesus speaks to it though in Matthew chapter 13.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

He uses two very, very quick illustrations.

He says, the kingdom of heaven, which really just means living a life connected to God where what he desires is what you desire in your life as well, recognizing his reign, his rule.

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field.

In his excitement, he hid it again, which sounds strange, and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant on the lookout for choice pearls.

When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and he bought it.

These might seem like strange illustrations to us.

They would not have seemed strange to Jesus' original audience, right?

So pearls were the most valuable possession you could have in that time.

Cleopatra, who lived just a little bit before Jesus, owned a pearl that would be estimated at$2 billion today.

The safest way to protect your money in those times was to dig a hole in the ground and bury it.

People would put silver coins in jars, bury it in their fields.

Occasionally, they would pass away and would forget to tell people where their money was.

Or they would forget it themselves.

And so sometimes people would dig and they would find jars full of treasure, full of coins.

And it happened often enough that there were rules and laws about what you had to do if it happened.

If you found in the field, in the ground, a bunch of money, it did not belong to you, it belonged to whoever owned the field.

But if you owned the field, it was yours.

That's why this man buries it and then he goes and he buys the field.

See these illustrations, they're really about Jesus and us.

They're about Jesus and you.

Because in these illustrations, both of these men, when they realize the treasure that is available to them, they, with excitement and enthusiasm and a sense of urgency, they run out and they sell everything they have because they understand that everything they own is nothing in comparison to the value of the treasure that they seek.

And if we could just get our eyes on Jesus and keep our eyes on Jesus and realize the treasure that he is, when he says count the cost, we would say anything.

I'll give anything for you, Jesus, to have the God of this universe in my life, the author of life itself in my heart, working in me, working through me, giving me everything he has, to have that in my life, what's the cost?

If the cost is everything, then my response is is that all?

All I have to do to have God in my life, to have the treasure of Jesus is to give him everything.

I don't have to find more than my everything.

If my everything, which is a bunch of brokenness and failure and mistakes and problems and insecurity, if my everything is what it takes to have his everything in my life, that is robbery, that is how one-sided it is.

That's what he's asking for.

It's a trade, it's an exchange.

He's saying, Hey, if you give me your everything, I will give you my everything.

So which everything do we want to live out of?

Which everything do we want to face the trials and the problems of this life with?

Do I want to go at those problems in my life with my everything, with my strength, my knowledge, my passion, my energy?

Or do I want to go at those things with God's everything, with his knowledge, his power, his passion?

Which everything do we want to live with?

And if we could get our eyes on the treasure of everything that Jesus is, there is no cost.

There is no cost that we would not pay.

Because Jesus, he is everything.

He's a treasure.

I mentioned children just a little bit ago.

This is a picture of my two children.

I show this to emotionally manipulate you right now.

Because I am just upfront and honest, like Jesus, I guess.

So that's Liam.

He's my boy.

I'm getting like choked up.

Hold on.

He's my boy.

And I love him.

I'll say this about Megan and I.

We we do not know yet whether or not we can produce cute teenagers.

That remains to be seen.

But so far, as far as the kids go, we're doing pretty well, right?

These are cute kids.

Objectively, you can agree that they're cute.

Thank you.

So my son, like you look at him and you say, Yeah, that's a cute kid.

Most kids are cute.

But see, I see that, and I think about him putting his head on my chest and saying, I love you, Dad, in the mornings.

I think about him coming at me with nerf swords like he wants to kill me.

And being slightly afraid.

I see that little girl, guys, she turns one this week.

And I'm uh, oh man, I'm in so much trouble, guys.

Because she has me.

Yesterday, or a few days ago, actually, for the very first time ever, I was holding her.

And she leaned forward, and for the first time, she went, mmm, and just planted one right on my lips.

And then she did it five more times, and I was, I was just beaming, right?

And one day some other jerk little boy is gonna want to plant one on her, right?

I have this one thing I say to her almost every night when I hold her, I just say, Daddy gets all the kisses.

Daddy gets all the kisses.

Because I know it won't last.

I know.

I have friends that uh that have been married for a while and they've contemplated having kids, and I hear something said pretty often by those friends.

They'll say, uh, well, we're just gonna wait to have kids until we can afford to have kids.

And your response right now is exactly what I would imagine, right?

Because anyone that has kids goes, Okay, yeah, tell me how that works out.

Like, what day are you gonna wake up with just enough money extra in your account to afford children?

Right?

Children.

The amount of money, you might as well just take money and throw it away.

That's how children are.

You buy clothes, and then a day later they don't fit.

The amount of food we have bought that just gets thrown away.

We take Liam out to restaurants, and you can't not order him food because you just look like a horrible human being.

But I know every time we do, he's not gonna eat that.

He's gonna take one bite, he's gonna throw it on the floor, something's gonna happen, he's gonna spill something on it.

And I'll ask him, Do you want a you want a cheeseburger or do you want you want chicken fingers?

And he'll say, cheeseburger, and I'll say, Are you sure?

And he'll get it one bite later, he's like, Chicken fingers, please.

That's that's children.

And I'm not even at the level of cars and and sports and school events and college, so don't even don't even tell me, right?

Don't even tell me.

You can't afford to have children, it costs too much.

But at the same time, you can totally afford to have children.

Because the moment you look at them, the moment you see the treasure that they are, you'll give up anything for them.

You'll reorganize your whole life.

You'll give up anything.

The cost, it doesn't matter.

Before we had kids, Megan and I would eat at cool restaurants.

And now a cool restaurant is any place where kids eat free.

And and I'll say this, I don't, I don't ask you guys for much.

We don't we don't push giving and stuff like that here, hardcore.

I mean, we need it, God uses it, it's great.

Thank you for that.

But but if there's one thing you could do, can we just please, as a church in this community, make sure that Matthew's pizza on 92 never goes out of business?

Because on Tuesday nights, kids eat free, and that that place is like, oh my goodness, it's like an oasis to my family.

Please help me.

If I if I pull up to that that place one day and it's out of business, I'm like, I'm bringing it the next Sunday.

I'm gonna be mad, okay?

So please help me.

Before we had kids, we had cool clothes, like current clothes.

And now our goal is just not to gain any more weight so we can keep the clothes we have.

That's all we, that's all we want, right?

And our our our kids are still young enough that the clothes we had when they were born are somewhat in style, like it's close enough that we don't look ridiculous.

We've got at least five more years before people start looking at us and going, what are they wearing, right?

So we're just holding out.

But we don't care how much it costs.

I know you know what this means, those of you that have children, because they're a treasure.

Because you give up everything you have for them, because you recognize that they are more valuable than yourself.

And if we could realize that with Jesus, it's like that, but but to a whole other level, we would say, What cost?

How much does it take, Jesus?

Because I'll give it to you.

You want my life, it's yours.

I'm tired of doing it myself.

You want all of me?

I don't even want all of me.

And you want all of me, and and for all of me, you're gonna give me all of you?

That's the cost, that's the deal, I'll take it.

Anytime you read Jesus and he seems like he's asking for something huge from you, ask yourself this question: Has he already done for me what he is asking me to do for him?

See, when it comes to you, Jesus counted the cost.

He knew exactly what it would cost him to know you.

And he looked at you and he said, You are worth it.

You are worth my life.

I count the cost and I give it all just to know you.

Jesus said, a wise builder would never begin a project he couldn't finish.

Jesus is never gonna be finished with you.

There will never be a day where Jesus is over it, where he's tired of you.

And if you've begun a relationship with Jesus and you feel discouraged because you feel like you are so far from where he must want you to be, he is not done with you yet.

He counted the cost, he will finish what he has started in your life, he will finish what he started in your children's lives, he will finish what he has started in this church, in this community, in this world, because he counted the cost and he will finish it.

Jesus said that a good king does not go to war, does not pick a fight that he cannot win.

Jesus came and he picked a fight.

He picked a fight with Satan himself, who had claim over us because of the sin in our lives, but he picked a fight he could win, and he won that fight, and he defeated sin and he defeated death on the cross.

And that victory belongs to you now because Jesus counted the cost and he said it's worth it for you.

That is our Jesus, that is our God.

And so when he looks at me and he says, Count the cost, and I look at my life and I ask myself, is there anything I'm holding on to tighter than Jesus?

It's that thing that costs me everything.

Jesus is everything.

There's great practical wisdom in counting the cost.

But if we live our lives every day, every day that we're discouraged, every day that we face troubles and trials and problems and worries, and every day if we just look at ourselves and we remind ourselves, my everything for his everything.

That is what I have.

You have the everything of the God of this universe in your life.

It may not feel like it all the time, but God is so much more than a feeling.

We have his everything.

We're about to worship with one more song.

I encourage you, I encourage you today to surrender.

But not surrender because you're about to get defeated.

But to surrender because his love and his power is so great for you that there is no reason to fight it.

I believe that today is an important day for some of us, for all of us, really.

For some of us, I believe that today is the day where you will first look at the treasure that is Jesus and say, okay, Jesus, I'll give you my everything.

I'll count the cost, and it's yours.

And if that's you today, we have an amazing group of people in the prayer room.

When everyone stands up to worship, just go into that room and they'll take it from there.

Give everything to Jesus because what is our everything compared to Him?

It's nothing.

I love you guys so much.

Thank you so much for being His hands church.

Because I believe that we're a church that is going to experience the everything of God.

And it starts with us counting the cost and saying, yes.

Yes, God, you can have all of me.

If that's what you want, you can have it.

My everything, for your everything.

Pray with me, please.

Jesus, thank you so much.

You counted the cost.

You did not hold back.

Everything that you ask from us is simply so that we can have room for everything you want for us, Lord Jesus, and we want all of you.

We don't want some of you, we don't want one third of you, we don't want half of you, Jesus.

We want all of you.

We won't settle till we have all of you, because we know you won't settle till you have all of us.

Lord Jesus, we are your people, we are your church, you are our God.