Take Up Your Cross? (Not what you think it means) | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we're going to ask you a very important question. What does it mean to take up your cross?

Many people hear this and they think, oh, it's utter dedication to God. If you want to be his disciple, you must sacrifice everything, including your family, and if you're not willing to do that, you can't truly be saved.

Is that what Jesus meant when he said that? We're going to look at Luke chapter 14 and exegete that passage and try to look at it from a biblical, historical context and find the answer of what does it mean to pick up your cross.

We hope you enjoy. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon through the

Amazon Smile program. When you make a purchase through Amazon Smile, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to our ministry.

To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are

Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, which is just south of Nashville.

Justin, we've got another giveaway for our listeners today. It's a good one, I think. What are we giving away today, my friend?

Justin Perdue Good morning, John. Good to be with you. I feel like we are not only battling the corruption of our flesh, we're also battling technology this morning.

But here we are. Justin Perdue For those of you that ask, we do not record together. We use technology, and technology often wins and we lose.

Justin Perdue It does, and we are trying to improve our technological platforms to make the quality better and everything else, and it has been a labor of love.

I don't know if we can call it a labor of love today or not. I don't know if that's exactly how we felt about it, but anyway. Back to the matter at hand, we are giving away swag because we love our listeners and we want to give you stuff.

So today we are giving away, for anybody watching on the YouTubes, you can see what

I'm holding in my hand. John's also holding one in his hand. Very cool. Theocast coffee mug.

We use a software platform to randomly select from our membership.

I think the platform is called Wheel of Names or something like that. I think it's appropriate to say that God is sovereign and Wheel of Names is responsible.

Our brother, Brandon Reyes, has won a coffee mug. As far as what

Brandon needs to do, John, to claim said coffee mug, does he need to send an email or something? Yeah. Just shoot us an email.

Yeah. Let us know. Shoot us an email, Brandon. That's the technical vernacular that John is using and you can claim your coffee mug.

Make sure we got the right address. I don't want to send this to the wrong address. That's right. That's right. So again, Brandon Reyes has won the coffee mug.

Email us, man, and we'll get you hooked up with that. And we will be giving away a second coffee mug via social media because,

I mean, we do everything on social media these days. Amen. Yeah. Right. So basically what that's going to look like today is

Wednesday as this podcast is being released. Go to our social media handles, any one of them.

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And then we will announce the winner of the other giveaway mug tomorrow, which is Thursday.

Fun times. There it is. So stay tuned. Every week we're going to give something away. Books, merch, whatever.

Hey, send us something. If you want us to give it away. There you go. We'll give it away. All right.

So, John, we're going to have a conversation about the Bible today and about some stuff theological in nature and the

Christian life and a phrase that is used often in the church.

It's thrown around and our contention this morning is going to be that it's often misused and misapplied.

And I know that the listener is on the edge of his or her respective seat, even though they've already read the title of the episode.

So why don't you help us and tee this up? This is a good conversation that we're going to have.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I confuse passage of the Bible. Yep. So I've been preaching through John and looking through the

Gospels and this conversation came up recently in my own context at my church about what does it mean to bear your cross?

What does it mean to pick up your cross? And man, I've had so many applications.

I've read so many books. I've had so many sermons. And there are times, Justin, I'm sure you've experienced this as a pastor where you come across a passage and you go,

I know how this has been explained to me in the past. And it doesn't make sense to me that that's the explanation.

And so it took more time to unfold and dig this out and really look at the context and try and figure out what in the world does

Jesus mean when he says this? Because everything that's been handed to me just doesn't feel quite right.

It's close, but it's not quite right. It either contradicts other very clear teachings of Scripture and in that sense doesn't fit, or sometimes in addition to that or alongside that, it doesn't fit with the immediate context in which it's found either.

And yeah, you've heard teaching, you've read stuff, and it's sort of common

Christian vernacular. People just talk in certain terms and it's almost just assumed that this is true.

But then yeah, you're really wrestling with it and trying to fit it in the passage and then within the framework of the

Bible wholesale and even trying to square it with what we understand about the nature of the gospel and the nature of salvation and the like, and it's confusing.

I've had that experience a lot of times as a pastor. My wife and I have regular conversations like this where she's just like, yeah, that never made sense to me and that never made sense to me and that never made sense to me.

And now this is starting to make sense and I'm thankful. Justin Perdue So that's what we're doing today.

Jon Moffitt Yeah. So that's been my experience with this particular subject matter of take up your cross and follow me.

Justin's preached through it in the past in Mark 8. Yeah, I preached through it in Luke and we're going to compare those two and talk about it.

But first of all, the confusion of what's been handed to us in the past is there's one way it's been used, which is, well, you know, whatever

I'm suffering at this moment that God hasn't answered my prayer about, it becomes the cross

I have to bear. You know, my mother -in -law is the cross that I have to bear or this job that I hate is the cross that I have to bear.

And you'll hear people say that. And I go, uh, no,

I don't think that's what Jesus meant when you're talking about bearing your cross, which is a weird application to me.

Or another way that this is often abused is a similar way in which the rich young ruler passage is abused, where many will be familiar with that text where Jesus is telling that young man who thinks he's kept

God's law, he's asking him to prove his love for God and neighbor and says, well, there's one thing you lack and you need to do that if you're going to be perfect.

That means that you need to sell everything that you own, give it to the poor, and follow me. And people will take that passage wrongly and say that what

Jesus is communicating is that we need to be willing. Now, again, I don't know where the word willing is in the passage because Jesus just says do it, but you need to be willing to surrender all to Christ if you're going to be saved.

Justin Perdue That's right. Justin Perdue Well, a similar thing happens with this take up your cross, or in Mark 8, Jesus will say, deny yourself and take up your cross.

While those words are very instructive for us in terms of what our lives are going to look like as followers of Jesus, we're going to get there in a minute, people will preach this and communicate this as well.

You need to be willing to suffer anything for Christ. You need to be willing to do anything or give up anything that might ever be required of you in order to follow

Jesus if you're going to legitimately be his disciple. And you hear this, and this is the tension.

This is where I was feeling. Jesus says, I must hate my mother, hate my father, hate everything.

Justin Perdue In the context of Luke 14, right. Justin Perdue Right, and in the same context, he says, pick up your cross and follow me.

Unless you do that, you can't be my disciple. Justin Perdue That might be a good note to the listener. We are looking at Luke chapter 14 more pointedly versus 25 and following all the way down into verse one and two of chapter 15.

So if you want to follow us, open up to Luke 14, 25. We're going to walk through this passage here. But what really didn't sit well with me was the inconsistency between what

Jesus is saying. Love your enemies. You will know that you're my disciple by the love that you have for one another.

Justin Perdue But hate your parents. Justin Perdue Yeah, but hate your parents. Love each other. Hate your parents. So, you know, the way

Justin Perdue What if my parents are also believers? I mean, am I to hate them too? I mean, what do I do with it? Justin Perdue Right. So to the person who's already struggling with their assurance, who already feels like they're not dedicated enough.

Maybe I haven't fully left everything and followed Jesus. Maybe I haven't picked up my cross.

So they are under this weight of what I would say the law, and they look at their relationship to Christ, and it's crushed because they assume everyone else must be doing this.

If this is the stated absolute requirement of Jesus in order to be his disciple, maybe

I'm not. Justin, I send you almost all the emails that we get to you and Jimmy, and it's almost deafening the amount of volume we get of people struggling.

And you go into our Facebook group and just people who struggle with this constant fear of, am

I saved? Like, I don't know. I got a someone Facebook messaged me from Nepal, and he was talking about how he's been listening to us on YouTube, and now he's been listening to some of these other

Calvinistic preachers, and he's like, I can't find assurance. It helped me out.

So when I read these kind of passages and I hear people make those kind of applications, which I think is you're not being careful with the text, it breaks my heart.

So I'm going to say up front, by the time we're done, I think Luke 14 is going to be a passage that you run to for encouragement, not one that you are afraid of or discouraged by because you aren't meeting the requirements.

The whole point is no one's meeting the requirements. That's why Jesus is saying this. So go ahead.

Justin Perdue No, a couple of thoughts. I agree certainly with the number of emails and all that we get from people struggling with assurance, and I think that some people might react to that and say, well, you're just struggling with assurance because you're not legit enough, or you're struggling with assurance because you're not doing enough, or there's some hidden sin in your life, or you're not fruitful enough, or you're not dedicated enough, or whatever.

I would push back against that and say, well, there was a man in the history of the church who was used mightily of the

Lord, who also wrestled with the same crisis all the time. His name is Martin Luther. I mean, that crisis of the soul is something that the

Lord used mightily in him to drive him to the

Scriptures and to Christ and the gospel ultimately. I think for many people that struggle with that tenderness of conscience, we ought not see that as a bad thing.

We ought to allow that and let that drive us to Christ as our only hope for salvation and righteousness.

Justin Perdue Just very quick before we jump into Luke 14, and again, just trying to be a good podcast host here, we are going to be looking at Luke 14 .25

-15 .2 today and considering parallel passages like Mark 8, but mainly in Luke's gospel.

Three big things that we're going to see in this text that come up out of it, and we need to have in our theological backpack before we get to it.

You need to have the law gospel distinction in mind, for sure. You need to definitely have what we would call a theology of the cross in view, which we're going to unpack.

But then you also have to have an understanding of who the audience even is.

Who is Jesus speaking to? He's not speaking to people who know that they're wretched and have no confidence in themselves.

He's speaking to people who are confident in themselves that they are righteous or that they can achieve righteousness.

So we've got to just say those things from the jump. If you don't have those categories in your mind, then

Luke 14 is going to knock you here, there, and everywhere. Jon Moffitt Yeah, and I'd like to add to that. In the context of the gospels, you have the

Jews. That's who this crowd is. So Luke says there's this crowd that comes to them, and they're Jews.

These Jews have a history of making it well known that they want Jesus to sit on David's throne and get him out from underneath Roman oppression.

I've been walking through John, and as you walk through Luke, Mark, you can see this constant.

I mean, this is why they crucified Jesus. They crucified Jesus, and they chose Barabbas, who is named

Bar, Abbas, son of the Father. And in Matthew, it's actually Yeshua. They chose Barabbas, who was a known insurrectionist who was going to be crucified because he was fighting back against Rome.

And Matthew even says he was famous for this, and the Jews loved him for it. They chose that hero over Jesus because Jesus wouldn't be the insurrectionist.

He wouldn't fight back against Rome, and they decided to crucify him for it. He never said anything that they wanted to hear.

He claimed to be God, and yet he was not accomplishing this triumphant victory that they thought

Messiah would accomplish. The triumphal entry was like, yeah, this is it. He's going to go sit on the throne, and then he goes to the cross.

And so you're like, what happened here? So you have to understand these Jews don't see

Jesus. There are three crowds going on. You have the Jews who want him to be on the King of David.

You have the Sanhedrin who want to be done with them because they're afraid that if he keeps rising in power,

Rome is going to come in and squash their leadership. So the Sanhedrin were these 30, 31 men that were chosen by the

Romans to basically govern Israel. They're worried about losing their power. So you have this battle that's going on.

That's the context of Luke 14. Jesus has been stating from Luke 5,

I have come not for the righteous, but the unrighteous. He goes, the healthy don't need a physician.

The sick do. He keeps using these illustrations, and they're thinking, no, no, no. We need a king. We need a hero.

We don't need a physician. We don't need righteousness. We have that. We need to be out from underneath Rome, and we need to be this powerhouse again.

So that's what takes us up into Luke. So go ahead. Well, I mean, even the immediate context of Luke 14,

I mean, the beginning of the chapter, you have Jesus blowing up Jewish notions of the Sabbath in particular, like the hedges that had been put around the law.

So he blows that to pieces. He talks about in the parable of the wedding feast, he is saying, if you exalt yourself, you're going to be humbled.

So don't exalt yourself. But then the parable of the great banquet, you have a very clear presentation of how

Israel by and large would reject the Christ, and now he's the master of the banquet saying, go out into the highways and byways and call everybody, which is a depiction of the gospel going to the

Gentiles. Now it's always God's plan, but that's the context here.

And so clearly he is unsettling his audience. I mean, he is doing all kinds of things to blow up all of the notions that they hold dear, and that's never popular.

Right. I mean, it just isn't. Anyway, all right. No, it's good. So that brings us into Luke 14, 25.

It says, Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and he 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.

So a couple of things we need to talk about. One, the reason I mentioned Jewish tradition is that multiple times the

Jews would come to him and say that we are of the children of Abraham, and they use this heritage of saying, no, we are right with God and God is good with us and we are a part of his kingdom because of our heritage of who we are.

And the moment you claim heritage as being what makes you right with God, Jesus is going to flat out put a kibosh on that, and he does.

Go ahead. Justin Perdue John chapter eight. There's some epic stuff along these lines there where the

Jewish audience continues to appeal to Abraham in Jesus's presence. And he's saying that if you believe in the son, talking about himself, you will be free.

You will be free indeed. And they're like, hey, bro, we're children of Abraham. We've never been enslaved to anybody.

And he says, I know that you're children of Abraham, but you're not believing what I'm saying. And then he goes on to say, two verses later, if you were

Abraham's children, you would believe me. So in the mind of Christ, obviously, there's two ways you can be children of Abraham physically and spiritually.

That's not the point of this conversation. But even later on in John chapter eight, they keep appealing to Abraham and asking

Jesus, hey man, Abraham died, and are you greater than Abraham?

And Jesus then responds to them that Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.

In other words, you guys are geeked up about Abraham, and Abraham was geeked up about me. And it's just this complete inversion of the whole thing to where your allegiance and your excitement and all this stuff and your confidence is in Abraham, when the irony of that is that Abraham's confidence and excitement is oriented around me and is in me.

So yeah, you're exactly right. The idea of heritage and lineage and progeny was a big deal in this context in which

Jesus is speaking. We're going to prove this later on in the context because it becomes extremely clear in Luke when he brings this all down.

We're kind of holding some stuff back, but the hammer's about to drop, and it's going to be amazing to see it. So when he talks about the cross, this is where you have to step back and say you are projecting on Luke what cross means.

So we immediately think affectionately about a cross. Jesus bore our sins on a cross.

We sing about the cross. Paul talks about the power of the cross, but that is post -resurrection.

Christ hasn't gone to the cross yet, not in this context and not in this narrative. So to the

Romans, the cross was used to put their thumb down on the

Jews and say, you want to try and do anything to get out from underneath us, and we will torture you to death for days.

And we're going to let you hang on a cross for days until you suffocate to death. And so the Jews hated the cross.

They saw them all over the place. They were in Jerusalem. They were in Rome. The Jews couldn't kill people, so only the

Romans could underneath the Roman rule. This is why the Sanhedrin had to pull Jesus into Pilate's court. So when the

Jews saw a cross, there was nothing about it other than pure hatred and disdain.

I used this illustration recently when I was talking about how the Jews might understand the cross, which this is close, but it's not an exact parallel.

But if you were to walk in my office and on my desk, you saw this little statue of an electric chair and a dead man in it.

And then around my neck, I had a gold electric chair. And then back behind my desk on the wall, you saw this painting, and it was this gruesome old electric chair with a guy slumped over a bloody dead.

You would think probably two things. One, this guy likes history, or two, he has a serious problem.

And then if I were to say, hey, would you want to come down to my basement and see what I have down there? You're like, I'm gone. I'm out. If Jesus were to change the phrase and say, take up your electric chair and follow me, the only people who go to electric chairs are gross, disturbingly messed up people.

What he's saying in saying, take up your cross, it's like, take up an instrument of defilement.

Take up an instrument of shame. It's what it is. It's not the way that we might euphemize it or something.

It's interesting what we do with it, given the context, as you've observed already. I want to make a comment about the gospel at some point, but I don't want to derail your train too much.

So you need to think about it in that context. What is Jesus communicating to them when he says, again, these are

Jews who want Jesus to give them victory, to sit on his throne, and Jesus says, you need to abandon your entire heritage and then pick up a cross.

You have to understand, he doesn't say the cross, his cross, a cross. He says, your cross.

He's talking about their absolute, utter shame and defeat.

The whole section, what we're about to read, is that Jesus wants them to admit to utter defeat of life.

Their life is an epic failure, and it is so much so that not only does he call them away from the victory of Israel, but he's saying, oh, you're going to be defeated.

Listen, crosses were Roman things, and they were used against the Jews for insurrection.

So when Jesus says that, you have to think in your mind. Jesus is saying this for a reason.

No one knows that Jesus is going to die on a cross. Nobody knows that yet. Nobody knows that. So why is he saying it?

Go ahead. Justin Perdue Yeah, two thoughts. One on law and gospel, and another one on just what you're picking up on, what we would call a theology of the cross.

And these themes are going to keep coming up. So immediate reaction to the whole hate your father and mother piece, hate your wife and kids piece, and also the take up your cross.

From a law gospel paradigm perspective, what Jesus is requiring of people in saying this, in saying, you've got to be so committed to me, in one sense, that it's as though you hate everything else.

Well, nobody can meet that standard. Or if it's, you know, you've got to be willing to suffer anything for my sake.

Again, nobody can do that. Like, if we're honest, it's just like we always talk about, you know, love the Lord your

God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Well, who has ever done that for one moment? No one. And so, you know, like you were talking earlier about people struggling, feeling like they're not dedicated enough, or they're not doing enough.

And my word on the one hand is like, well, you most certainly are not dedicated enough. And if our salvation is based upon, exactly.

And you never will be, frankly. And that's not to be, I don't know, dismissive or flippant or be a broker for Satan's doubt.

I'm not trying to do that, but we're just trying to be honest about the Saint -centered reality. None of us will ever be dedicated enough.

So if our salvation is predicated upon or based upon our dedication, our zeal, our willingness to do

X, Y, or Z, then God help us. We are wasting our time and need to pursue something else, frankly.

That's right. But then the second piece, John, I think what Jesus is very clearly communicating here in Luke, and especially is communicating in Mark 8, is if you follow me, if you're going to be mine and united to me, you need to expect a life of weakness and suffering and even shame, not a life of triumph and glory.

And in Mark 8, it's very pointed to context because Peter has just confessed that Jesus is the

Christ, and then Jesus immediately begins to talk about the fact that he's going to suffer and die.

Peter effectively comes to him and says, you shouldn't talk like that. You should not be talking about suffering and death.

You're the Messiah. You should be talking about glory. That's right. And so then Jesus says many of these same words.

He doesn't talk about hating your father and mother, but he does talk about calling people to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him.

What he's doing is pronouncing upon people what their lives will look like if they're united to him.

And he even says in that context too, whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

That's not altogether different than what Luke's going to say. Renounce everything. That's right. Renounce everything about you and your life, not just the bad stuff, but even the things that you consider to be valuable and good.

You need to renounce those things in order to be in Christ Jesus. So as Jesus always does, he gives us illustrations to help us understand what he means by what he just said.

He dropped two massive bombs, two big bombs. So there's a step back and he goes, okay, in case you don't understand what

I just said, let's keep reading in the context. He says, for which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, pay attention to that word cost, whether he has enough to complete it.

Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and it 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 has able with 10 ,000 to meet him who has him who against him who has 20 ,000.

And if not, will the other is yet a great way off, send a delegation and ask for terms of peace.

So he's using things in their culture he's going to understand saying you need to evaluate your life and determine do you have what it takes.

This is what he's saying. You need to evaluate your life. This is how I know for a fact that the application that he's about to make is that he is talking about their attempts at self -righteousness, gaining this relationship.

So look at their attempts to, in that sense, earn or merit salvation. Or even if they would chalk it up to the work of God in their lives, a la the

Pharisee in Luke 18, I thank you God that I'm not like other men. They still are trusting in something that is inherent to them.

Even if it is the working of God's grace, they're trusting in their own righteousness in some way or what they bring to the table in some way.

And what Jesus is saying is, yeah, you need to consider your own life and do you meet the test?

And he is not saying, do you meet the test of being willing to give anything away from you? Do you meet the test of being willing to suffer for me?

No. He is saying, do you meet the test of God's holy requirements as revealed in his holy law? That's right.

So how do we make this application? How do we know this? Keep reading because he says, so therefore, anyone of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

Again, if you think this is talking about wealth or comfortability or life, you've missed it because look at what he says next.

Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?

Okay, you can't restore it. It can't be restored, right? So it is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile.

It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

This is so powerful. Now you have to understand when Luke wrote this, he didn't write it with chapter divisions. So the story continues and it says this, now tax collectors and sinners were drawing near to hear him.

That is there on purpose because the people who evaluated their life and said, yeah, pretty much no saltiness in my life.

There's nothing of value here. Tax collectors were hated by the Jews because they partnered with Rome and they were the enemy.

And of course, sinners, they use that for all kinds of people like prostitutes and drunkards and all this kind of stuff.

And what happens next? It says, and the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them because they are the ones who get it.

They're not basing their righteousness on their heritage. They're not basing it on their right actions because they have none.

Those are the ones who heard what Jesus said and went, okay, I'll pick up my cross and follow you. Tell me more about that.

So paraphrase of like verses 33 to 35 is Jesus saying, you need to evaluate your life and your life, meaning anything that you bring to the table is useless.

That's right. Get rid of it. Not even good for a manure pile. Right. Exactly. It's not even good enough for the dung heap, basically.

Yeah. And like, so get rid of it. And then you're right. He, tax collectors and sinners are gathering around him and he begins to teach.

And what does he teach? What does he say in Luke 15? Three parables of the lost sheep, where again, the premise there is there's a sheep that's lost.

The shepherd goes and finds the sheep, brings it home and says, let's celebrate because the lost sheep is found.

Then there's a lost coin. A woman's turning her house inside out and upside down. She finds the coin that she's lost. She calls her friends and says, let's have a party.

Let's celebrate because I've found the coin. Then he tells the parable of a son who we could talk for a long time about the prodigal son, but he goes off into a far country, comes to his senses.

He's convinced he's going to return to his father as a slave. He's got the pitch. He's ready to present the whole pitch.

He's got it nailed. He gets close to his household. His father runs out to meet him, which is a scandalous thought in that context in that day.

And before the son begins to give his pitch and before he can even finish, his father interrupts him and says, put a robe on him, put rings on his hands and shoes on his feet and let's have a party because my son is home.

That's right. It's just like, holy smokes. The whole context of all of this, it does,

John. It absolutely explodes any notion of merit and worthiness. Jesus makes very clear his posture and the posture of his heavenly father, our heavenly father, to seek and save that which is lost.

That's right. Let's compare this really quick to how Paul describes himself.

Come on now. And you need to listen. Almost it's like he's taking

Luke and giving Luke's application to his own life. So it says, though I myself have reason to confidence in the flesh.

This is Philippians three. Three verse four. If anyone else thinks he has a reason for confidence in the flesh,

I am more. Listen to the confidence. Circumcision on the eighth day of the people of Israel of the tribe of Benjamin a

Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, Pharisee, as to zeal, persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

So he is describing the very thing that Jesus is attacking in Luke. Okay.

What's the next thing he says? He says, but whatever gain

I had, I count it as a loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing

Christ Jesus. That is what Luke is recording. Jesus is saying all of this to come know me to be my disciple.

All of this is a loss to you. Like you need to start counting it up and looking at the value you have and realize you shouldn't go to war.

You shouldn't build this. As a matter of fact, you should toss it aside. And they didn't get it.

They didn't hear him. Paul eventually on the road to, you know, on the road figured it out because the spirit came and opened his eyes.

But so when someone says to you and they put this burden on you about carrying the cross, they missed the point of what

Jesus was trying to communicate here. He was saying, oh, no, no, this isn't something you do.

It's the evaluation of complete loss and utter disdain for yourself. And there's nothing you bring into this relationship.

And then once you come into this relationship, it's not a relationship of victory. It's not like all of a sudden life's going to get better.

There was nothing enticing about Jesus from a physical standpoint, from a earthly standpoint.

But once you understood who Jesus was, the son of God, and he was offering you his kingdom, which he was saying over and over and over,

I'm your physician. I am your savior. I am your righteousness. Those people came flocking to him like the sinners and the tax collectors because they got what

Jesus was offering. The righteous and those who wanted victory, they hated him.

They ended up crucifying him. Justin Perdue No, that's right. Philippians 3 is incredible in helping us understand

Luke 14. It's incredible on its own merit in helping us understand the nature of the gospel. And I think you've already pointed this out.

I just want to say this in a very maybe pointed and particular way. Paul in Philippians chapter 3 is not renouncing his vice.

He is renouncing his virtue. That is a scandalous thought for many people in the modern church context because we talk so much in the

American church about virtue. We talk so much about our own lives and what our own lives should look like.

Paul, to your point, has outlined how he was impeccable. He was an absolute rock star who was crushing the game of life, and he was doing everything right.

He checks all the boxes. Then he says, I count that loss and I renounce that in order that I may be found in Christ Jesus, counted with the righteousness of Christ that is mine by faith.

When he uses that language of, for his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain

Christ, I think the all things that he's talking about losing is the stuff he's listed. He's talking about losing and giving away all of these virtuous things about himself.

I don't think he's just talking about his life circumstance, like, well, I had a lot of stuff and I've lost it, but I don't count that of any value.

I think what he's saying is, no, all of these things that I gloried in, that I had confidence in,

I count those as rubbish, as trash, as worthy of the dung pile themselves in order that I may be found in Christ Jesus and have his righteousness.

Justin Perdue That's right. I think that's the application to be made, and that's what Jesus is going after when he talks to people.

Like the rich young ruler, we always talk about his wealth, but I want to compare it to Paul. It's like, no, no, he was going after that man's righteousness.

Justin Perdue Because the man thought he'd kept the law. Justin Perdue That's right. Like, how can you miss that? People always say he turned around because he had much wealth.

I was like, no, this could be Paul. Jesus could have been talking to Paul.

He turned around because he had much wealth and he didn't want to give it away. True, but what did that point out?

Jesus basically says to that man who thinks he's kept the law, okay, you think you've kept the law, prove it.

Prove that you have kept the law by now demonstrating your love for God and neighbor by selling all your stuff and giving it away and following me, and the man can't do it.

In other words, the man can't keep the law. The man can't meet the standard.

Jesus is his salvation who's standing right in front of him. That's the great irony in that whole situation.

But yeah, that parable or that encounter, I should say, just like many of the things we've been considering from Luke 14 today, is not a passage of just straight up gospel.

Like, here's how you'll be saved. It's actually law to crush us, to drive us to Christ, so that we would renounce anything and everything about us and only trust in Christ.

So let me put it to you, when Paul says the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. So Justin, if I said, hey,

I want to introduce you to, let's pretend we're not Christians or whatever, but I want to introduce you to this faith that I have.

And dude, this guy, I got to tell you about him. Well, he died in an electric chair, but his teachings are amazing.

You're going to go, wait, what? I know why people die in electric chairs. There's a reason why people die in electric chairs.

You want me to follow that? We miss so much of the irony of the scripture because we have

Christianized it to the point where we miss the actual context. So when you hear all of this, and then

Jesus says, take up your cross and follow me, Jesus is just ripping the floor from under people and giving them absolutely nothing to stand on.

And he is making it so impossibly hard. No one can follow him then.

This is the most impossible explanation of following Jesus. You should hear this and go, well, no wonder why there weren't that many disciples following Jesus.

No one could do that. Two thoughts. One, we talk a lot about law and gospel and how a lot of the things that Jesus says are not gospel, they're in fact law.

I think we've got to remember that even when it comes to his language about what it means to follow him.

Some of the language he uses about following him is law language because he's making it clear what it would take if you're going to do this in your own strength, and you cannot do that.

Then the language that he uses that is more saturated in gospel about following him would be like Matthew 11.

Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I'll give you rest. Come take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I'm gentle and lowly in heart.

My yoke is easy and my burden is light. That's good news there. Take up your cross and follow me.

Deny yourself and follow me. Functionally, it's law, but then it's not gospel because nobody can do this well enough.

But then the second thought is, picking back up on something we've already said, and I want to unpack it just very briefly. Jesus is telling us what our lives will look like if we do follow him.

If you are united to Christ, Jesus is saying, if you're united to me, do not expect a life of glory and triumph.

Do not expect a life of ease in this world. You need to expect that just like me, you will live a life that looks weak, that looks shameful.

You will be despised and rejected, potentially, by your fellow man, and you will suffer just as I have suffered.

Why would you expect that if your Savior, your King, your leader, your shepherd, your hero, even to use that word, why would you expect that if I suffer and experience all these things, that your lot would be anything different in this life?

But then here's the deal. I think one of the reasons this is so offensive and hard for us, John, is because a lot of our theology in our current church context is very earthbound.

We talk all the time about heaven. We don't talk enough about it, honestly. We'll talk about heaven in these ethereal ways, and we use very religious, pious -sounding language about the life after this one and all this.

We try to say good things. We mean well when we encounter suffering and other people are hurting around us and whatever.

But I think a lot of times when the rubber meets the road, we have not embraced enough the fact that we will be weak now, we will suffer now, but that there is a glory that is beyond our imagination that awaits us.

It is incomparable. Our suffering now is serious, but the glory that awaits is so much better it can't even be compared.

I think Christ is giving people this kind of a view on their lives on earth. Don't hope in this life.

Don't look for strength. Don't look for ease. Don't look for comfort. Don't expect triumph. Expect suffering.

But friend, glory awaits you. How do we know that? We know that because Christ got up from the dead, and he was victorious.

He was vindicated. He ascended to the right hand of his heavenly Father, and he's seated there, and he's coming back for us, and we will be like him.

But we've got to think in these terms. Suffering and then glory is the pattern of the Christian life, and that is offensive to American Christians who have been told not to forget the wealth, health, and prosperity gospel stuff.

That's obvious and easy to attend. But many American Christians have been told that if they do the right stuff, and if they're disciplined enough, and they get themselves in line, then their lives will go well, and they're going to be strong.

They're going to be able to weather the storm, and that's not the promise of Christ. You won't be strong in yourself. You will be weak in yourself, but guess what?

My grace is sufficient, and my power is made perfect in your weakness. I've read that somewhere. Right. Man, it's been an amazing conversation.

I hate to cut it short here, but Justin and I only have so much time during our week, and we do a second podcast for those of you that would like to dive deeper into what we're talking about.

John, we only work one day a week. We're pastors, man. What are you talking about? Hey, man, come on now. Come on now. Don't let out the secret.

More people are going to want to become pastors if you let out the secret. We don't want that to happen. But yeah, we do a second podcast.

This podcast is really an unfiltered, deeper dive into what we're going to talk about.

We're going to probably pull back the theological hats a little more and speak a little bit more open about some stuff.

It's kind of our family time, family podcast. If you want to be a part of that, you can just go to our website, theocast .org and sign up for our membership, which is changing.

We have some amazing new features, things that I didn't think we could ever pull off.

I'm probably letting the cat out of the bag, but I probably shouldn't do that. But stay tuned. Control yourself, John. We are in the final stages of pulling this off.

We haven't raised all of our money quite yet to finish paying for it. So if you still want to help donate to pay for all of this update that we're going to be doing, go to our website, theocast .org.

Thank you for listening and be sure to go get that free coffee mug. We'll have some more stuff for you next week.

For our members, buckle up. We got some fun stuff coming for you in just a minute. We'll see you over there.