Road to Reality - Discipleship-an All-Out Commitment — K.P. Yohannan

And all our commitment to the Lord is what God wants from us, but are you there yet? Coming up next, some much-needed encouragement to get on the road to reality. See if these commonly repeated phrases of our day sound familiar.

It's my life. I can do what I want with it. I just want to be happy. I'm living for the weekend. So many today are carrying that mentality through life, and it shows. Today on the road to reality, we see a much different way to go, one that God calls us to.

It's an all-out commitment to Christ and a denial to self. The reality is we're not our own. We've been bought with a price. Therefore, we are to honor God through our lives and love Him supremely. K .P. O 'Hannon talks to us now, here out of Luke 14, to emphasize what discipleship is all about.

I want to share with you in a few minutes the gospel of Luke chapter 14. And in some ways, you know, I remind myself that I'm speaking to my brothers and sisters. I'm not a traveling evangelist trying to get you to do something big or money, give me this and that.

And I just want to share some thoughts with you, knowing that you, as a church, you are experiencing a new life in the Lord, and there is such hunger and thirst, and God is working here. So whatever I say to you, please receive it as an encouragement, inviting you to continue the journey.

Luke chapter 14, beginning with verse 25. Large crowds were traveling with Jesus and turning to them, he said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Verse 33, in the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. They are strong words, strong words of Christ.

And listen to these statements in front of mine that our mayor wrote these. The American church is experiencing a crisis. For years, we have preached a cheap gospel and peddled a soft savior. We have taught salvation without self-denial and crown without the cross.

We have created a world that is so confusing and chaotic that the unsaved, they have no clue what this is all about. Our instant salvation message has dishonored God and confused men. Our faulty seeds have produced a flaky harvest.

What a pitiful crop we are reaping. As American believers, we spend hours watching television but minutes watching in prayer, are hungry for the sports page but have little taste for the word, spend more money on pet food than on four missions, love to feast but hate to fast.

Welcome God's message but are weary of his burdens. Is this what Jesus died for? Is this our new life in him? Stop for a moment and think. Anyone who spends more time playing video games than seeking God in prayer has no right to call Jesus Lord.

Anyone who takes delight in today's perverted soap operas is serving another God. Anyone who cannot die to sports for a season is worshiping idols. Anyone loves the world, the word says, will not experience, will not understand the love of the father, 1 John 2 .15.

It is time for some serious soul searching. What kind of born again experience have we had if it calls for almost no personal sacrifice, produce virtually no suppression from the world and breeds practically no hatred for sin?

How can we claim to be born from above? So, where is the evidence of our new life and new nature? We say, just confess Jesus as Lord and you are in. He says, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter in the kingdom of heaven but only he who does the will of my father in heaven.

Those are convicting words. I remember first reading, I said, my goodness, they are strong words and they are. My brothers and sisters, as long as Christian life remains your life and my life, we will not understand Christ of the New Testament.

Christian life is not my life, it is his life. Blood was the price the Lord paid to purchase you and therefore we are told, reckon, make sure, accept it, that you are not your own any longer. You have no right to run your life the way you want it.

Your body, your soul, your spirit, it's no more yours. And only that kind of recognition that makes us to come to the place of total abandonment on a perpetual basis that allows us to get to know him fully and be the kind of people that he wants us to be in our generation.

I was reading a quotation from H .A. Ewan Hopkins, it's quite interesting. Listen to this. He looks today as he has ever looked, not for crowds drifting aimlessly in his track but for individual men and women whose undying allegiance will spring from having recognized that he wants those who are prepared to follow the path of self-renunciation which he took before them.

You know the chorus, my Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine. For thee all the follies of sin I resign. My precious redeemer, my savior art thou. If ever I loved thee, my Jesus, it is now. And I think the call the Lord gives to us continually is a higher call to come up higher and understand him so we can be those people in our earthen vessels that he can live out his life in our generation.

Whole bunch of people, they were following Christ, a crowd, a multitude, and he turned to them and simply said, wow, what a big crowd. But then he said this statement, if you want to be mine, if you want to follow me, then the cost is you must love me more than your own life.

You know, I understand this, loving more than father, mother, son, daughter, and all the other things, but finally he says, even your own very life, you must love me, supreme love for Christ. And I think unless we come to the place that nothing and nobody matters other than him, we will not enter into his life in the fullness.

Growing up in my home back in southern part of India as a small boy, I used to hear my mother quote this Bible verse a thousand times. I didn't know what she was talking about. Psalm 73 verse 25, whom have I in heaven but you and on earth I deserve no one and nothing beside you.

I thought something wrong with her head because I did not know what she was talking about until I grew up a little older, I realized this was a Bible verse. And I remember almost every morning she would be up two or three in the morning and spend next two, three hours on her knees praying.

And she never sat on a chair, she sat actually on a mat on the floor and she had this, you know, she would lay and put it on her head and she would be praying. And after those hours, she would wake up the whole family for what we call the family prayer.

And by the way, it's my mother that led me to the Lord when I was eight years old. And prayed for three and a half years every Friday fasting that one of her sons would go and serve God and happened to be the least and the last in my family, the Lord called me to serve him.

But you know, the thing about her, I always remember what intense devotion and love she had for the Lord. And she never disclosed so much of her private walk, only after she left us and died in 1990 at the age of 84, her sons, we recognize, my goodness, how deep her walk was with the Lord.

And this is what she said, when I'm dead and gone, the only thing I'm going to leave behind is my wedding ring and the earring and the gold chain my husband gave me when he married me at the age of 19.

I want you to sell these items and give the money to preach the gospel among people that never heard my Jesus name, I want to meet them also in heaven. Someday I hope to write a little booklet on her life, but I'm telling you, a life that is so devout to Christ, there was no dichotomy in it.

There's no Sunday one day and Monday a different day and Tuesday, no, it was total, absolute abandonment. And it came out of her love for Christ more than anything on earth or anybody. And my brothers and sisters, I pray that you will continue to grow in the love of the Lord and love Him more than anything and anyone.

Loving Christ supremely, that's the place we need to get to. And it's becoming increasingly difficult in a world that is urging us in the opposite direction. Today on The Road to Reality, Brother K .P. Ohanian has encouraged us to let go of self-centered living and be more eternally minded.

That's also a central theme of a book he's written called No Longer a Slumdog. And if your desire is to make a difference for the Lord, help the suffering children of Asia, this is a must read. I think you'll find it hard to put down as K .P. shares stories of children's lives radically transformed by God.

It's our free gift to you. Go to winasia .org for your free copy of No Longer a Slumdog. It's waiting for you now at winasia .org. Our friends in Canada are encouraged to stop by gospelforasia .ca.

Here's K .P. once again. One of our staff members in Dallas was visiting one of our Bible colleges on the mission field and ran into this young man and talked to him about his life story and found out while he was studying in college, he gave his life to Christ and his parents threw him out of his house.

He had one sister, he lost everything he had, lost his family, all alone, had to leave his home because he loved Jesus. And he ended up at our Bible college. So this staff person from U .S. talking to this young man asked him, are you not sad that you lost your family and your wealth and your education and all these things?

And this young man responded, yeah, I am kind of sad, but if I'm given the opportunity to do it again, I'd rather have my Jesus than anything and all things. And my only dream is that someday they too will come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.

And he said, I love him more than anyone, anything in the world. And the disciples, Jesus said, unless you love me more than anyone, anything in the world, you cannot be my disciple. Are we able to reckon with that?

It was 1973, Gisela, that's my wife's name. She was leaving India for Afghanistan and then on to Iran and back to Europe. And we talked about getting married and, you know, when you fall in love, the whole world is mystical.

A $300 telephone bill a month, all of a sudden becomes $3 ,000, $30 ,000. And I remember as she was leaving India for Pakistan, Afghanistan, we had this brief conversation. It was one of the most painful conversations I ever had with anyone in my life.

I said, Gisela, I need to tell you something. She said, what? As hard and difficult it is for me to say this, I want you to know, as you leave me and as I go on my way, if we ever come to realize that this is not what the Lord wants from us, please understand, with pain we will embrace the decision.

And for you, if you ever find out during this absence, this is not God's will for us to marry, please let me know. We made that agreement. And she left. I went into my room, I said, what a fool you are.

This is the most irrational, stupid thing you can say to someone. And I had to talk to myself. I was 23 years old at that time. But later when we get married, and it's been a long journey, and we continue to affirm to each other that our love for Christ is more sacred than for each other.

And when my kids were growing up, my life was not easy. They were in Dallas, Danny and Sarah, and I had to travel sometimes three, four weeks nonstop from place to place speaking. And when I leave, one of the saddest things was sometimes my daughter would say, I want my daddy, I want my daddy.

And she would be crying. And they all three come to the airport and see me off and I'm gone again. And later I found out, Gisela will never cry at the airport, but she'll go home in the room, she will cry.

And she will tell the kids, you know, daddy is able to do this only because we let him do it. And you know what daddy's doing? He's telling people about Jesus and the missionaries, and so many people need to come to know Jesus.

And because of that, and we should thank God and pray for him. And those kids grew up year after year, never, never once hearing my wife say, what am I going to do? I don't know what to do. He's going to get all the problems, this and that.

No, no wonder when they finished their studies, they both said, we want to be missionaries serving God. And somebody asked my son when he was in Nepal, what made you do this thing? You could be living in Germany, in America, anywhere and all those things.

And one of his answer was, oh, we just grew up seeing how much our parents followed the Lord. They never told us to do one thing. It just so happened. Your children, your brothers and sisters, your family members, they are looking to see something worth living for and dying for.

And that, what they will see in you, your love, like I saw in my mother, is going to impact them more than you can imagine. You know about Jacob in the Old Testament, when you hear his name, you think what a crook he was.

I think he was too, until God changed him. But you know, he fell in love with a girl. Her name was, remember, Rachel. But the problem was, Laban, who was his father-in-law, said, yeah, you can marry Rachel, but the dowry, seven years you have to work.

Seven years working for a girl, and he did. But then he gets married, and wake up to find out it was a wrong girl, that only worked over there, not here. And then he gets mad at Laban, saying, what on earth have you done to me, you creep?

What other words he used. He said, son, don't get so excited. No problem. I think Laban was an Indian. No problem. What do you mean, no problem? What do you want? I want Rachel. All right, son, no problem.

Seven years more. All those years he worked like a slave. But the Bible says it looked like just one day, because he loved Rachel. So let me ask you a couple of questions, not to put you on a guilt trip or condemn you or anything like that.

How hard it is for you to give up watching those television programs that you shouldn't? How difficult it is for you to say, this is it, I will not listen to those music anymore? How difficult it is for you to say, this friendship is not something I will maintain any longer?

How difficult it is for you to take that day, two or three, to fast before the Lord? How difficult it is for you to say, I'm not going to look at this catalog anymore, because it entices me to spend money, to buy things that I don't need, to impress people who don't care anyway.

How difficult it is for you to say not to sin that you grapple with, that nobody knows about? I tell you, the answer is not legalism. The answer is not fear. The answer is not saying that if somebody ever find out, what will happen to me?

No. I keep falling in love with him over and over and over again. He gets sweeter each day as the days go by, all the love between my Lord and I, I keep falling in love with him over and over and over again.

You say, it sounds mystical, but all spirituality is mystical. I encourage you to start spending 10, 15, 20 minutes with the Lord alone, and talk to him, and he will talk back to you. Increase that half hour.

I encourage you to get an alarm clock to wake you up, maybe two in the morning, or whenever. Oh, your flesh will hate it. I destroyed half a dozen alarm clocks in my life, and I found out my flesh is not my friend.

And I get up and wash my face in cold water, and I found myself years ago, I still like to lay on my bed and pray, but I drag my body to the living room or somewhere I can kneel, and open the scripture, and say, Lord, I embrace suffering in the flesh.

I'm not going to be a friend of my flesh. I want to buffet my body. I want to know you.

Well, that's Brother K .P. Yohannan encouraging us to get alone with the Lord, seek him through prayer, and allow him to speak to us through his word. And this is The Road to Reality, a ministry of gospel for Asia.

In India alone, there are over 150 million child laborers. For millions of children in Asia, a toothbrush is considered a luxury, clean clothes a distant dream, and malnourishment in India is among the highest in the world.

Today, we'd like to tell you about a wonderful opportunity that we have to help. Think of it. For less than a dollar a day, you can sponsor one of these dear children and impact a family and even a community for Christ.

It's called Bridge of Hope, and we would invite you to stop by winasia .org to learn about the children through their stories. And if the Lord leads you to even sponsor one of them, that's at winasia .org or call 866-WIN-ASIA.

That's 866-WIN-ASIA. For those in Canada, please visit us at gospelforasia .ca or call 888 -946 -2742. We would also invite you to get live updates from us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook too, and look for the links on our website.

That'll do it for this week. We'll see you back here next time when K .P. Ohana will have more biblical encouragement here on The Road to Reality.