John 1:35-42 Part 1

Prayer for Weakness and the Holy Spirit’s Help

How about we pray before we get started? Lord Jesus, you know our weakness. You know that we are but dust. Lord God, as we handle such beautiful texts, you have preserved for us for thousands of years, your Holy Spirit laid upon the Apostle John to write so that we could be encouraged, so that we could know that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, and that these things were written so that we would have life.

Holy Spirit, I pray that we would experience that life from your word. Holy Spirit, I pray that as I've prepared and as I preach, that Lord, that you would make these words go far beyond my human voice that they wouldn't be ephemeral, that they wouldn't dissipate, but Lord, that you would take these words, that you would write them on our hearts, that Lord, as we study and learn together tonight what it means to be a witness and to be a follower of Christ that Lord, we would be encouraged and that we would be motivated not to performance but to the cross in what you did.

And out of that, Lord, I pray that we would follow you well. In Christ's name, amen. So, we're gonna start. I was telling someone earlier that I got to my eighth point in the outline and I decided to make this a two-part sermon because it would probably be a little overbearing once we got to point seven.

So, we're gonna take this text over two weeks, but let's read the whole text in full and then we only deal with half of it. Again, the next day, John was standing with two of his disciples and he looked at Jesus and he walked and said, behold, the Lamb of God.

The two disciples heard him speak and they followed Jesus and Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, what do you seek? And they said to him, Rabbi, which is translated, it means teacher, what are you saying or where are you staying?

And he said to them, come and you will see. So, they came and saw where he was staying and they stayed with him that day for it was about the 10th hour. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, and he found first his own brother Simon and said to him, we have found the Messiah, which translated means Christ.

He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, you are Simon, the son of John, you shall be called Cephas, which is translated Peter. John three times gives us translations for the things that he's saying.

It gives us an understanding that John is talking to a worldwide audience and not just a Jewish audience. This has nothing to do with the sermon, I just thought I would point that out because it's these little things in the text that are so good as we pay attention and as we watch.

John the Baptist’s Witness and the Transition to Jesus

Now, this text serves as a transition unit. This text is the text where we start to move away from John the Baptist. We will no longer see, really, John much more after this. This text is transitioning us away from John and his witness to Christ and his followers.

And we're gonna see over the next 20 chapters, it's gonna be primarily about Jesus and this group of 12 people who are called to follow him over the three years of ministry that Jesus does. And this text is the transition point away from John and to Christ.

So really, what we're seeing here is that this text, this week and next week, is gonna be our introduction to Jesus and it's gonna be our introduction to what it means, actually, to follow Jesus. So we're gonna look at it.

But before we do, we have to deal with the transition part of it. We have to deal with the middle part of it. What is it saying? And today, I want us to give one last look of John the Baptist, one last look at what it means that he was a witness for Christ and what it means that his witness actually grew.

Last week, we made the observation that the more John the Baptist understood about Jesus, the better his witness became. And that doesn't just mean his public witness, but that's where we saw that it started.

Last week, or two weeks ago, we saw that John was witnessing publicly and he was preaching, he was saying things like, I'm not the Messiah, I'm not the prophet, I'm not the Elijah, I'm just a voice. See, John was speaking about what he knew from the Bible.

John was speaking about what he had studied about Christ. But then last week, we saw after John met Jesus face to face, and after he saw him, it wasn't any longer what John read in a book. Although we know the Bible is true, he saw Jesus face to face.

And his witness actually got better. His witness was more clear, his witness was more precise. And remember, he said things like, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I myself have testified that this one is the Son of God.

How in the world did John say such an amazing, astounding claim, when it's not necessarily perfectly clear from the Old Testament, at least from the stories that most people were sharing around that time, they didn't have yet a concept for God coming in the flesh.

It says that the Spirit descended upon Christ, and when the Spirit descended upon Christ, that John the Baptist understood who he was. You see, as John met Jesus under the power of the Holy Spirit, John understood who Jesus was, and we made a point last week that as we as Christians, under the power of the Holy Spirit, see Christ, we see Christ for who he really is.

We cannot see Christ for who he really is unless we have the Spirit of God. So we see John, his witness is getting better. John admits, Jesus is higher than me, he existed before me, I'm so limited, I can't even untie his sandals.

John actually was the very first human to declare that Jesus was the Son of God. Not only in John's gospel, but chronologically, if you look at all the gospels and you line them up, John the Baptist is the first one to make that declaration that Jesus is the Son of God.

The more John interacts with Jesus, the clearer his understanding of Jesus is and the better his witness becomes. And the same is true for us today. If we desire to grow in our witness to Jesus Christ, then we spend time getting to know Jesus Christ.

We get to know him in scriptures, we hang on his words. We let his life, his words, and his gospel wash all over us so that as we get to understand who he is, our witness for him will improve. Our time in the word is not wasted.

The Bible says that the word of God will not return void and it will accomplish the purpose for which it's set forward and that's not just preaching. That's when you sit under the word of God and you allow the word of God to minister to you, it will do what it's intended to do and it will grow us deep in Christ and deepen our faith in Christ.

See, the point is that spending time with him makes us a better witness for him. That's the point. Now, again, we say this is a transition text. We get to see it in transition. Last week, we saw that our witness should grow over time and we covered that just a little bit right now but we didn't mention this.

Our witness should be better than John's because we have the Holy Spirit of God. Have you thought about that? John the Baptist saw Jesus face to face and I'm saying that our witness should be better than his because Jesus said there's no man born of woman who's better than John but what's the second half of that phrase?

There, John, as good as he is, is least in the kingdom of God. He's least in the kingdom of God because he died before the resurrection. He died before the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. You and I stand in a better position to be a witness for Jesus than John because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God.

Isn't that amazing? There's no Christian here who is actually less equipped than John the Baptist, one of the great men of the Bible and it's not because of you and it's not because of your talent, it's not because of your ability, it's not because of your pedigree, it's because of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit alone.

We stand in an amazing position because of what the Holy Spirit has done. I think sometimes we just need to understand it and accept it instead of having all of the thoughts that I'm not good, I'm not equipped, I'm not all of these things.

Of course we're not, he is. His work in us is. The third thing I want us to see in this is that all of us can have a witness. This is where we get to today's text. See, I think it's easy for us to get the wrong idea that a guy like John can be a witness because he's a public proclaimer.

He's speaking to large crowds. He's speaking sermons, as it were, and none of us or most of us, most Christians that exist in New Testament times are not gonna preach sermons. Most Christians who exist in New Testament times are not gonna stand behind a lectern or a pulpit and they're not gonna write out a five point or eight point or 15 point sermon.

Yeah, I don't know someone who might do that sort of thing. And if you get the understanding that being a witness for Christ is just about preaching sermons, then you'll think that being a witness for Christ is totally irrelevant to your life.

But praise God, John doesn't stop with verse 34. Praise God, today we're gonna look at verse 35 where he says, again, the next day John was standing with two of his disciples and he looked at Jesus as he walked up and he said, behold, the Lamb of God.

John comes out of the public proclaiming and into the private proclaiming where now he's just hanging out with two of his friends. He's hanging out with two people who are looking to him for leadership, but these are private relationships.

These are intimate and personal settings. John is demonstrating to us that the same man who could stand boldly and proclaim, behold, the Lamb of God in public is also the same man who consistently proclaims behold, the Lamb of God in private.

And that means, I think that all of us can have a private witness, that all of us can listen to the word of God proclaimed. All of us can listen to the word of God as we're reading it in our devotions and all of us can be armed with what it is content wise that we need to share as a witness of Christ.

All of us can have private conversations. All of us can talk with our brother, sister, mother, friend or someone else that we work with. All of us can share the hope that we have in Christ. It is not just limited to the public platform.

All of us are a witness for Jesus Christ. All of us can share the good news of what he's done. Again, the more we know of Christ, the more our witness will grow and it's not just a public witness. It can be done in smaller, intimate settings as well.

Now I say all of this and I repeat all of this, maybe often, I don't take a record of how often I say these types of things, but I say them a lot because the church culture in America today is dying. The church is shrinking.

And I'm not talking about the church having influence. I'm not talking about us having candidates in the White House. I don't care which, like both parties miss it. But evangelicalism as a movement has been dying for many decades.

And I think it's because Christians in general have forgotten that they are a witness for Christ. And somewhere along the way, the church has become convinced that it's the church that's the witness. That if you wanna participate in evangelism, then all you have to do is invite your friend to church.

And instead of the church repenting and discipling and training people to be witnesses for Jesus because that is what the church's mission is, to train missionaries to go and reach a dying culture. Instead of repenting of that, instead of going back to the biblical method, what churches have done is they've made churches increasingly more entertaining, increasingly more sensate, increasingly more emotional driven.

To attract worldly people, but be less like the word. I would even say it like this, the fastest way to offend the spirit of God as a church and the fastest way for a church to lose her witness in the world is to compromise on the gospel.

To compromise on the mission that God has called us to. Is it any wonder that so many people feel ill-equipped because the church is not invested in their development? And instead of admitting that error, so many churches today have doubled down on this philosophy of ministry that is not working and it is not producing disciples of Jesus Christ.

There's a horrifying example. I share this, not to make light of it, but just to illustrate the point. There was a mother in Pennsylvania a couple months back who malnourished her teenage child over a decade.

He was 15 years old and he was 26 pounds when they found him. My 16 month old is 26 pounds. And he was so malnourished that he couldn't speak and he was just a bag of bones when they found him. And of course we realize just how wicked and how awful that is.

Of course we realize that that should never happen. That every fiber of my being, it makes me angry that things like this can still even happen in the world. But this is exactly what the American church has been doing for decades.

We've watered down the gospel. We've watered down the only food that Christians are supposed to eat, the living word of God, and we've left people starving and we've left people mute and unable to share their faith and mute in their witness.

Why am I bringing this up? Because I think it's absolutely essential that every single Christian who's a part of the blood-bought bride of Christ would be able to share their faith in Christ. I think it's essential that the church in America owns its part in why this isn't happening.

If you feel ill-equipped to be a witness to Christ and you feel like that the church has never discipled you or prepared you, I just want to say that I'm sorry for that, that I'm sorry that you have not been poured into and that you've not been invested in and that you've not been developed and you've not been discipled.

I wasn't discipled either. When I went to, when I became a Christian, I started listening to R .C. Sproul because I didn't know even what discipleship meant. I was watching Renewing Your Mind on my computer.

I still feel like even though I've never met R .C. Sproul personally, he's the man who discipled me. No man jumped up and raised their hand and said, Kendall, I want to pour into you. It's because I think we have a church culture that is so busy throwing events that they're not identifying what's the next generation of people that we're going to pour into and love and care and disciple.

That's our mission. That should be our focus. I'm sorry if that's not happened to you. I know how it feels. But I want Shepherd's Church to be different than that. I want Shepherd's Church to be a place where people can be raised up and sent out.

This culture, this region is not gonna come to know Jesus Christ if it's just about one church service a week and that's it. We're the salt and we're the light. We're the salt that's sent out into the world to help preserve a dead and dying culture.

That's what salt is for. We're the light that's sent out into a dark world because without Christians in this world, no one will understand and see the gospel. That's what I want Shepherd's Church to be.

So I bring this up because it's really important and central to my heart that everyone here would feel equipped and would feel empowered to be able to be a witness for Jesus. We're all called to be witnesses.

And as we grow in Christ, I think it starts with the preaching of the word. I think it starts with diving into the gospel. I think that's where we begin. That's what I hope that we're gonna accomplish tonight.

But it also begins with having a culture of disciple making where people are hungry to be poured into and people are stepping up saying I'll do that. I'll take my time. I'll use a Saturday morning even though I've got other things to do and I'll pour into this particular person or that particular person.

I know for me, I prayed a prayer four years ago that God would show me who I'm supposed to spend my time with, who I'm supposed to pour into. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to disciple anyone.

I was hired as a discipleship pastor. I felt like, you guys ever heard the term imposter syndrome? Why are they paying me to do this? And out of desperation, I was trying to figure it out. And I just prayed and I said, Lord, who would you want me to spend time with?

And the very next day, someone came up to me and said, I've never been discipled. Would you disciple me? It was really easy. I didn't even have to work really hard. I guess my point is that this is what I want our culture to be here.

And if you have a desire to step in and do that for someone else, just pray. God will provide. Every year, God has provided someone in my life for me to pour into. Every year. And as we see that person start to grow in their faith and in their understanding of who Christ is, it is exciting to watch.

When you see them discipling someone and then the person they disciple discipling someone, you kind of feel like a spiritual grandfather, but it's really cool. You're seeing it multiply. So I bring all this up and I've gotten a little off topic or a little off script here, but I bring all this up because I'm passionate about this and I wanna see this for our church.

The fourth point about being a witness is that not everyone's gonna accept what you have to say. We look at John the Baptist. John the Baptist, it could be very easy to think that he had only two disciples and that both the two disciples just left and followed Jesus.

But all throughout the gospels, we see John had a lot of disciples. It was later on in the gospel of John, his disciples are arguing with Jesus' disciples. So apparently some of them didn't go with Jesus.

Some of them didn't think that it was important enough to leave John and follow the savior of the world. Not every time that you say or share the gospel, it's gonna be understood. Not every time you say or share the gospel, it's even gonna be welcome.

Jesus went throughout his life and he's preaching and teaching the word of God and many people rejected him. They put him on a cross. The apostles in the book of Acts, they go all throughout the non-Roman empire preaching and teaching the word of God and they weren't universally accepted either.

Most of them were killed. Most of them were murdered. You see, we have to have an expectation that it's not about success. It's about faithfulness. Sharing the gospel is not about success. I don't want you to get the idea that you have to go home and read a book on the 10-step plan on how you share your faith so that you can become more capable and have a better acumen.

No, it's just about faithfulness. It's just about willingness. It's just about will you share the truth of the gospel or not? When people reject the gospel, they're not rejecting you. When people reject the word of God, they're not rejecting you.

Our goal and our role in this is just to be faithful. We might share the gospel like Jeremiah our entire life and no one ever come to know Christ. Would Christ still be enough for you? Would you still be willing to do it if that were the case?

You know, it's kind of humbling when you think about it when we share the gospel, it should not be about us. It should not be just because we're a compelling speaker or that we're really good at wooing people to our point of view.

It should be, we should walk away and say, man, I really butchered that, but look at what God did. That should be what it's about. I mean, who are we boasting in? When we share our faith and we see God move, we boast in him.

It shouldn't be about performance. It shouldn't be about what we can do and all of that stuff. Again, we're not called to success. We're called to faithfulness. Just skipped a lot there. So again, I bring all of this up because I want all of us to grow in our ability to witness.

And I bring this up because this is a transition paragraph and we're fading away from John. Now we're gonna dive into the purpose for this text. And the purpose for this text is what does it mean to be a follower of Christ?

Leaving the Familiar to Follow Jesus

Now, this is a pretty interesting text because I would say if you could find one particular text that covers what it means to be a follower from start to finish, it would be this text. It's kind of like if you could have a systematic theology on what it means to be a follower of Jesus, I would pick this particular text because it explores what it means to be a follower of Jesus from beginning to end.

And it covers all of the vital aspects. And again, I had eight points tonight. We're only gonna cover three. Next week, we'll cover the other five. John says, and Jesus turned and saw them following. He said to them, what do you seek?

And they said to him, Rabbi, which is translated and it means teacher, where are you staying? And he said to them, come and you will see. The first point about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, the very first point is that we've got to be willing to leave the familiar in order to follow the Savior.

We've gotta be willing to leave everything that we know behind in order to follow Jesus where he wants to lead us. Now, when we look at these men, there's two of them here in this picture. There's four of them total.

There's John, who's the gospel writer. There's Andrew, there's Philip, and there's Peter in this text. All four of them are from the town of Bethsaida. And all four of them, most scholars agree that they are disciples of John.

Now, Bethsaida was a small little insignificant town, kind of like the town I grew up in. I grew up in a town of about 800 people. It's called Culumi. You've probably never heard of it. This town was about seven, 800 people.

It was a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee. And it just so happened to be very close to where John was baptizing in the Jordan River. Now, I don't think that you could have been from a more insignificant town in this region than Bethsaida.

It had no social influence whatsoever. The only thing that it had was that it was a fishing town where some of the better towns would come to buy their meat. Boys would grow up in this town and they would grow up to be adults.

And they had no aspirations whatsoever of moving out of their town and finding the big world and going to college and all of these things. They grew up to take over their dad's fishing business. That was what these men did.

Again, very much like the town I grew up in. When I moved and I said I was going to New England, people said, well, Kendall, I haven't lost anything there. That's what people would tell me. And I'm like, what does that even mean?

You haven't found anything there either because you're so closed-minded you won't leave this 800-person town. That's what I said. I shouldn't have said that. But no one would have ever thought of leaving the town.

They would have been totally insular and stuck in this place. They would have never thought of putting down their nets. They'd have never thought of chasing around a Jewish rabbi all across the country because there was bills to pay.

There was food to catch. Now I can imagine all of these guys' moms and dads being upset when they decided to follow John the Baptist. He was local. They would have to do their work. But when they got off of work, they would go and they would learn from John.

This is what you would do with a rabbi. You could have part-time rabbi hours where you would learn. And what's interesting about these men, we often think of the disciples as like 30-year-old guys because that's the way the movies portray them.

They were probably teenagers. At 13 years old, if you were not a bright student, you would become a fisherman. These guys are fishermen, so what does that tell you? They weren't the student type. So you can imagine their father or their mother saying, why are you going messing around with John the Baptist?

Why are you trying to further your education? You tried that already. You failed at that. You're a fisherman. Fair enough, okay, as long as you get your work done, I'll let this continue. But then imagine when they come home with the news that they're gonna be following this Messiah figure, this rabbi named Jesus, who was gonna take them all over the country, what meant they were gonna have to put down their nets.

Dad, you're gonna have to take care of the business on your own. Every single one of them, when they accepted the call to follow Jesus, left the fishing business and never went back, except for a few short periods where Peter, at the end of the gospel, goes back to fishing.

That's the only exception. Most of them completely leave the industry forever. You can imagine what dad is saying. What are we gonna do? How's the business gonna continue? Why do you wanna go and follow this rabbi?

Why do you wanna go and study? Only the bright students would go and follow rabbis. Only the brightest, most brilliant students would make it to that point. And then of that selection, only the smallest majority of people would actually become rabbis.

It would be like an MIT degree in South Dakota. You just don't see it very often. So these men, they would have been looked at as fools by their parents. They would have been looked at as fools by everyone around them even.

And while you and I are not leaving a fishing business to follow Jesus, there's many things that when we decide to follow Jesus that we're gonna have to leave that the world is gonna find us foolish. For instance, a relevant example around here is if you're Catholic and you decide to follow Christ, if you're a diehard Catholic, your grandma's gonna think you're going to hell.

That's what I've been told. Think about Islamic religion. If you leave that, you could be killed for your faith. You're gonna be considered utterly foolish. You think about entertainment. I remember when I first became a Christian, I had, this was back when we still had lots of CDs and I had notebooks and notebooks and notebooks of CDs and I went and drove past a dumpster behind a restaurant and I was just chucking all my CDs because they were CDs I didn't wanna listen to anymore as a Christian and my friends were like, why'd you throw them away?

Are you gonna give them to me? And I was like, oh no, I don't want you to send. And they were like, you're such a fool. You stop watching the same movies that you used to watch and people think you're crazy.

You start doing things that are different and they think, oh, you're so judgmental. You see, being a Christian means leaving what's comfortable and familiar in order to follow Christ where he's wanting to take us and that, to the world, looks pretty foolish at times.

When you have a passion and a conviction for Jesus, in this culture, you'll be looked at as obnoxious. Have you noticed that? Anyone who's filled with passion and conviction for Christ consistently gets told, be quiet, shut up, stop talking, put your head down, follow the status quo.

When I first became a Christian, I was so excited and at the time, someone who was really close to me said, well, Kendall, you should do all things in moderation. Settle down. And I was thinking to myself, how is it possible to have a moderate position with Jesus?

He's the only thing that you can't over abuse. Feed too much, you'll have a heart attack. If you do too many Tylenols, you'll have kidney problems. If you drink too much water, it'll kill you. If you breathe too fast, you'll hyperventilate.

Everything that you can do in excess is bad for you, except for Jesus. Why would you tell me to have a moderate position when it comes to the savior of the world? But that's what happens when you become a Christian, you become passionate about your faith, you become obnoxious to the world, you become foolish to the world.

See, being a Christian is about leaving what is familiar behind and following Jesus where he's called you to go. The world's not gonna understand that. They're spiritually incapable of understanding that.

Like we talked about last week when the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, and that was when John actually finally understood who Jesus was. If the world doesn't have the spirit of God, we shouldn't expect that they would understand what's going on inside of us when we do.

When the world doesn't have the spirit of God, we should not think that they're gonna get it. They are gonna think we're foolish. That's okay. We haven't lost anything. We've gained everything when we have Christ.

Being a follower of Jesus means leaving your former comforts to following him. It means stepping not into a better life right now. It means preparing for the eternal life that is to come. Jesus never promised us comfort.

He never did. But he did promise us there would be trouble in this world, and if we follow him, we will experience many pains, but we can have hope because he's overcome the world. Being a Christian is hard, and I think that there's an evangelical error in the way that we present the gospel.

Come to Jesus, and he will take away all of your problems until your life gets harder, until he starts sanctifying you and taking things from you. Come to Jesus, and he'll heal all of your wounds, okay, until he causes some of them because he wants to sanctify you and grow you into the image of Christ.

I told some friends this week that being a Christian is a lot like my brother, Chris, my brother-in-law, Chris. Chris was a healthy man. He had a family. He had everything. We would go over to their house, and they had family meals together.

They played the Wii back when that was popular, and we would play rock band in the house, and it felt like from the outside that they had everything going for them, and one day, Chris was outside mowing his yard, and he tripped, and he fell, and he broke his arm mowing the yard, and it wasn't even really a bad fall, and he went to the doctor, and they sent him immediately to the hospital, and they found out that he had stage four cancer, and he didn't even know it.

No one knew it. It was multiplying underneath the surface, and no one had any idea that it was there. Less than six weeks, my brother-in-law was gone. I would have never known. No one would have known.

Here's what I mean by this. Being a Christian is not waking up into victory. It's waking up on the operating table in the spirit of God with a scalpel ready to cut the things out of you that needs to be cut out of you.

It's realizing finally that you're sicker than you ever realized. All of your life, you thought that you were basically okay. You were basically good. You were basically well, and when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you realize finally, no, I'm sick.

If God doesn't help me, I'm inoperably sick, and I need his help in order to be healed from all of these things, but it's gonna hurt. Surgery is not comfortable. It might be the very best thing for you, but you're in pain from it.

You actually have to be cut open and things pulled out of you. It's wrong for us to tell people that come to Jesus, and he's gonna make your life better. That's not what my story was. When I came to Jesus, my life fell apart because there was things that were toxic in my life that needed to come out of my life, and the only way that they were gonna happen is through the sanctifying, loving hand of God.

He caused me pain because he loved me. We have to tell people and help them understand what it means to follow Jesus, and it is not that you're gonna have your best life now. It's just not. That wasn't Jesus's story.

That wasn't Paul's story. That wasn't most anyone in the whole Bible's story. Their story was a story of pain because our hope is not in this world. Our hope is in the next where we meet Christ face to face.

We have to have an understanding of what being a healthy follower of Christ with proper expectations is, like these first two disciples that we're talking about. Their life didn't get better when they left their homes.

Most of their families would have been estranged from them or frustrated at them. They left to follow a Jewish rabbi who didn't pay money for their services. They were living off of donations. They were sleeping without a bed.

These men's life did not improve whatsoever when they followed Jesus. The only reason that they followed Jesus is because they knew who he was and the surpassing value of having him. We have to have healthy expectations of what it means to follow Christ.

Seeking Christ for Christ Alone

That's the first point. The second point is we need to understand why we're actually following him. John says the two disciples heard him speak and they followed Jesus and they turned and they said, or he saw them following and he said to them, what do you seek?

I love, we're gonna see this all throughout the gospel of John. The questions that Jesus asked people are brilliant. He turns around and they've been following him for about five steps. And he says, huh, what are you doing here?

Why are you seeking me? What are you trying to get out of this? These are the types of questions that he's asking them. The point of his question is not to be curt or to be rude or anything like that.

The point of his question is to examine their motivations. Why are you following me? What are you seeking in this relationship? These are all vital questions that they need to wrestle with and understand.

Because if you're gonna follow Jesus, you have to understand that it's gonna cost you. Jesus said later that you have to count the cost in order to follow him because you have to pick up your cross and walk with him to the cross and lose your life in order to follow Jesus.

Everything that you thought you were hoping in is gone when you follow Jesus. Now you have a master when you follow Jesus. You are now a slave and he is Lord when you follow Jesus. You're not in control of your life anymore when you follow Jesus.

We have to understand why that we're actually following him. Because if you say things like, I'm following Jesus so that I can be more successful or I'm following Jesus so that I can have more comfort or I'm following Jesus so I can get out of hell because no one likes the idea of an eternal conscious hell or I'm following Jesus for X, Y, and Z, then you're not yet understanding of why we actually follow Jesus.