Luke 14:25-33 The Raising of the Bar

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Introduction and Ministry Background

Well, good morning. This is a unique situation because first service, everybody was much closer. And as the sun goes, everybody's getting further and further away. And the older I get, the worse my eyes are getting.

So if I'm straining, it's because I'm trying to see who's all here. My name is John McGinnis. And as was said, I was about six years on staff at Berean Baptist Church over in Portage from 2004 and following to about 2010.

2011, we moved to the country of Costa Rica where we've lived for the last almost nine years. I'll explain a little bit more about our ministry as we continue on. I will say, though, about the chairs and the sun, I've been nine years in Latin America.

So it takes an awful lot to distract me when I'm speaking. So if the sun comes out and you are in the sun, feel free to grab your stuff and to move to the shade. It does not bother me a bit. It won't be rude.

Just move around to where you can stay in the shade so you don't get too hot. I want to share, I'll talk a little bit about our ministry in the future, in the next few minutes here. But I will say for the moment, I work for a group called Tri-Am.

And what we do as Tri-Am is we do pastoral training. And I want to tell you a story about a pastor and a new follower of Christ that I personally came into contact with and talked to this past year. I call the young man, I call him Amir.

That is not really his name. He lives in a little more of a restricted access country. And because everything's online, I can't really use his real name. But Amir is a young man who came to Christ. I met him when he was only five days old as a believer, okay?

So he was a brand new believer when I met him. Two days before that, he was at the church with his pastor. They were doing a time of discipleship. And they were doing their time of discipleship and they're in a country that has about 80 million people in it and only 8 ,000 believers.

So that is 0 .01 of the country who are actually followers of Christ. This is a Middle Eastern type of a country. And they claim to have religious freedom. And yet daily and weekly, missionaries are being expelled from the countries and new followers of Christ are being persecuted and some are even being killed for their faith.

And as Amir and the pastor, as they were walking down, because the church was meeting on the third or fourth and fifth floors of the building, as they walked down, they walked out of the building, the police were waiting for them right at the front door.

And they stopped and they said, what are you doing? And the pastor, because this happens to him a lot, the pastor, you know, steps up and he just, he boldly says, well, I'm a pastor of a church right up there.

And we were meeting for a time of discipleship. And the police then asked the common question, which is a very dangerous question to ask. They said, were you born a Christian or did you convert and become a Christian?

And that's a hinge moment in a believer's life in that particular country when you have to say those type of things publicly. And at that point, Amir grabs the pastor's arm and says, let me take this.

He goes, I became a follower of Christ this past week. He steps right up and just says it. Later, I was talking to this pastor and he said in the capital city, which is what the city that we were in, in the capital city, they say there are 1000 believers.

In that city, but the reality of it is on any given Sunday, there's probably only 500 people that go to church. And he looks at me, he says, that means there's probably only 500 believers in this entire city.

To him, to be a follower of Christ meant that you were going to face persecution, meant that you were going to have to make a stand for your faith. And if you were not willing to do that, then you're probably not really a follower of Christ.

I use that illustration because we want to look at a passage this morning. In the book of Luke, and I gave my wife, my wife is here the first service, I gave her my glasses and she's not here anymore.

So I'm going to read off my paper. I apologize for that. Luke 14, 25 to 33. Let me read that for you. It says, now great crowds accompanied him and he turned to them and said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children, brother and sister, 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. For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it.

Otherwise, when he has laid the foundation, is not able to finish it, all who will see it will begin to mock him, saying this man began to build and was not able to finish it. Verse 31, or what king going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down and first deliberate whether he is able with 10 ,000 men to meet him who comes against him with 20 ,000.

And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who desires or any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

In a few minutes, we're going to tear that passage apart and walk through what does it mean to really be a follower of Christ? Well, I wanted to introduce my family to you. Unfortunately, they're not here right now.

They were here in the first service. I had the privilege of having my brother-in-law in town for the last three or three or four days, and they actually have to head home. So they were leaving right after the first service.

And my wife went back with them to kind of see them off on their way. But I want to share a little bit about I know many of you guys. I don't know all of you. Some of you know my family and know a little bit of our story, but I'd share with kind of catch everybody up on the same page here of what God's been doing in our lives.

As I said earlier, I was an associate pastor at Berean Baptist Church from 2004 until about 2010 in that area. And at that point, God directed our family to move to the country of Costa Rica to work with a ministry called Tactica, a ministry with the police and local authorities there.

For the first two years, we primarily focused on that. After our first two years on the field there, God redirected that ministry to move us to more where we were connecting with pastors and working within local churches there and how we can train and equip and help pastors.

That went from having a bunch of guys over to my house for a cup of coffee and talking theology to forming into more of an educational system to where we eventually got teamed up with a group called Tri-M.

Now, Tri-M stands for Mobile Modular Ministry. And those are the three M's in Tri-M. It is mobile in that we don't build a seminary and have students come to us. We actually go, we're mobile, we go to them.

I mentioned earlier, we serve in about, we serve in 21 countries around the world. In Western and Central Asia, we serve in several countries in and out of Africa, Eastern Europe, as well as Central America right now.

And what we do is we partner with existing ministries, whether that's a seminary or whether that is a church, where the pastors in that local region can meet and we provide and bring coursework to them.

As you can imagine, years ago, actually Tri-M began at the fall of the Iron Curtain around 1990. Our first module was held in 1992. As you can imagine, creative ways of doing education was a new thing at that time.

Of course, coronavirus has now forced us all to be creative in how we educate and all Zoom meetings and all these type of things. But the idea of establishing modular sites in a different location was a new idea.

So the first one was mobile. We go to them. The second M of Tri-M is module. So we do teach modular education. We teach courses that are three to five days long, usually cover at least two, many times three topics during that time.

We will do one class over a particular theology. We do another class, usually over more of an expository or an expositional book. We'll take the book of Romans and we'll tear it apart. Or we'll do the book of Acts or Isaiah and we'll tear a book apart during the course of a week or maybe a little broader, do Old and New Testament survey, something like that.

But we're focusing on the main themes of particular books of the Bible. And then the last class that we would teach is more of a practical hands-on ministry skills. We'll teach about how to preach and how to teach.

We would teach biblical counseling, those type of things to pastors. And the idea is we want to get tools into their hands, resources into their hands that they can use and immediately put into practice because the third M is ministry.

And our target audience is not a new believer necessarily, although that's not bad. And we encourage them to come. Our target audience are pastors who are already established in leadership positions in a church, but lack the education needed to actually effectively run that church.

So the majority of our modular sites have pastors who've been pastors for 10, 20 years, but have zero education. And some of the places they can't even read in some of the countries that we serve in. So you work here and how do we teach and train and equip these pastors, giving them tools to help them become better leaders and more effective pastors in their church?

Well, I focused primarily in the country of Costa Rica. That's where we were living at the time. And if you were to Google Costa Rica volcano, you would see a picture come up of Arenal, a volcano named Arenal.

And if I were to draw a volcano, you draw your little cone shaped. That's what Arenal looks like. It looks like a very traditional, stereotypical volcano. Our modules in Costa Rica are to the right and to the left of the volcano.

It's about three hours north of where I lived. It's about 45 minutes south of the Nicaraguan border. And for several years, three years, I taught modules in those two locations and trained and equipped pastors up in that area.

A year ago, this past November, the team, for whatever reason, decided to make me the director of the ministry. And as you can imagine, that is a pretty big change for us in that I'm now no longer just focusing on Costa Rica.

I still do that. We still teach there. But now I oversee and administer basically all of our missionaries that are in these 21 countries around the world. So last year, before the lockdown, last year, I traveled about 125 to 130 days out of the year last year to different continents and different countries to see the global church and to see our ministry partners and how they were all working.

This year, as of January, I was supposed to be gone in about 150 days. Now, by God's grace or his divine providence, I've been around here because we've all been locked down. This past February, we actually in November of last year, we made the decision that it was best for me, for our family to move back to the United States because every flight I took had to go from Costa Rica to the United States to an African country, from Costa Rica to the United States to wherever else.

There was no real direct flights from Costa Rica. It added two or three extra days of travel. It also added an extra plane ticket. And as you can imagine, when you're away from your family for almost a month, three days makes a big deal for me.

I want to get home as much as possible to be with them. So we decided for our family, for what was best for us and to administrate the ministry, it was best to move back. And we did. We moved back to the house that we have lived here since 2004 and it is right here in Matawan.

So if you drive down Main Street, Matawan, and you look at the house that has the brand new porch on the front, that's my porch. We built that porch. Thank you, coronavirus stimulus paid for that porch for us.

All right. So the idea is, you know, we were able to to be back. We moved back February 14th, actually on Valentine's Day. We moved back to the States just in time to be locked down. We were telling our kids how exciting it would be to be back in the States.

You know, you get to see your friends at church. We get to go to youth group. We get to do all these things. And if you got to understand Costa Rica, most Latin American countries, but Costa Rica has bars on doors and windows.

We're kind of our little little Alcatraz compound right there. And, you know, it's not safe to go out to the parks by themselves and so forth. So we're telling them how exciting it's going to be to to get out and see everybody.

And, you know, three weeks into it, we ended up getting locked down again. And that's frustrating. People ask us, how are your kids adjusting? They haven't yet. They haven't. I mean, we're still trying to get friends for our kids and for our sons especially.

And it's been an adjustment. But also God has uniquely equipped them for this ministry, for this time, in that that's pretty much what we've been doing for the last nine years. They understand online education.

They understand how to make friends when it's hard to make friends and how to meet your neighbors when everybody's kind of a little standoffish. At least we all speak the same language here for the most part.

And that's helpful. Okay. So it's been a good adjustment for us overall. And we have now been been going pretty strong here since the second, almost third week of February, living in the area. I shared a story about Emir and I want to share a few more.

Because as I mentioned, the uniqueness of our ministry. Thank you for the glasses. Don't let me steal these because I will. The uniqueness of the of the ministry is I get the opportunity to see the global church and see what the church looks like around the world.

And as you can imagine, the church, the church looks very different in Costa Rica than it does here in the United States. And it looks very different in Africa and in Eastern Europe and in Central Asia.

It looks very, very different. And you're able to see what that, how that, how that fleshes out. What does it mean to be a follower of Christ in a country that has incredible religious freedoms? We, I believe in Costa Rica, we have more religious freedoms than we actually have here in the States.

I can preach the gospel in any school. We can talk about Christ. You can stop anybody and talk to them about Christ and they will stop and listen and at least give you the time of day. Okay. It's incredible.

And then you go to other countries, a lot more restricted access where that's just not possible to do. And how does the church, how does that all play out and flesh out daily? What does it mean to be a follower of Christ?

We've had students in our class in, in, in some of the Central Asian countries. We had students in our class that four weeks later were killed for their faith. We, they, they were heavily involved in our class.

They were pastors in a church four years later or four, four weeks later, excuse me. They were in heaven because of their faith, taking a stand where I was able to go to Rwanda and I was teaching in Rwanda.

I was teaching on the Old Testament prophets and how neat it is. And I'm all about education. I'm continuing on in my education. We, I think education is very important. But these Rwandan pastors, the average pastor walked four hours to get to our class.

Now, I'm all about education, but I'm doing a lot of it online right now because it's very easy to do it online. I think, man, would I be willing to walk four hours to get to where I could receive this education?

One pastor in particular, between hitchhiking and walking, traveled 24 hours to get to our module site. It's absolutely incredible. So you have stories of that in Rwanda. You have guys opening doors right now in the country of Belarus.

And we're having the opportunity now where we can actually begin to open modules. Belarus is considered to be the last of the great dictatorships in Eastern Europe. And yet, up until a year or two ago, you had to have a visa and we were not able to get in there because of visas and so forth to do these modular education type classes.

A year and a half, two years ago, that actually was taken away and we can get in under a U .S. passport. So as soon as we are able to. We will be doing our first trial module and opening up that country to allow and to help educate these pastors in the country of Belarus.

In Costa Rica, my friend Edgardo, great friend of mine, my absolute best friend down there. I was teaching him discipling Edgardo and we were talking and he was preaching through the book of Ephesians.

He and I were studying the book of Acts and all of a sudden the lights turn on. It just hit him. Oh, my goodness. When Paul writes to this church in Ephesus, that's what we're talking about here in the book of Acts.

He had never tied the book of Acts with the rest of what the New Testament story is telling. And just to see how that transformed his thinking. It's been absolutely incredible to see the body of Christ in different cultures and in different contexts.

The Cost of Following Christ in Luke 14

I want to share briefly from this passage that we talked about in the book of Luke. And in Luke 14, I'm going to break it down to about four chunks here. We're gonna look at Luke 14, verse 25 and 26. It says, Now, I don't know about you, but I read that passage and I'm beginning to study through this and I'm thinking, how can this be?

How can it be that I need to hate my mother and father, my wife, my children, if I'm going to be a follower of Christ? How does this even work? And there's a thing in how we study the Bible, it's called hermeneutics.

There's a tool that we use within hermeneutics and it's you use scripture to clarify scripture, which means when I have a passage that I read that starts scratching my head, I'm not sure what it means, go to what you know and hopefully that will help clarify the issue that you are coming across.

So what do we know? We know that in Genesis 127, So we know that man was made in the image of God and therefore has value. We believe in the sanctity of life. We know that God is pro-human beings because we are created in his image.

So when he says that you need to even hate yourself, we do know that man is created in God's image. We also know in Psalm 127, 3 and 5, I really hope my quiver is full right now with kids, but we'll see.

I have four and you know, children are a blessing. They're not a hindrance. They're not a curse. They're not something to be put off. I mean, they're a great thing. We love kids. And yet this passage says you need to hate your children.

I'm like, again, that doesn't make any sense. And then in Ephesians 6, we read, That's a verse as a parent, I bring up a lot. All right. Honor your father and your mother. How am I to honor my dad, my father, if I'm to hate him?

So you sit there and you go, obviously what this is referring to cannot mean what I think it means because it's going to contradict what scripture clearly teaches us. A wise pastor and theologian looked at a different, a cross reference to this passage.

In Matthew 10, 37 through 39 says, Whoever loves his father and mother is not worthy of me. And whoever loves his son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Whoever finds his life will lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake will certainly find it. A wise pastor and theologian said, it was Pastor Don, by the way, in 2012, when he preached on this.

There is no familiar relationship that can be untouched by the sword. The context of the sword is referring to the commitment and the decisions of following Christ. All relationships that we experience in this life are eligible to be cut by the sword when one person is of faith and the other person is not.

He's simply saying here, and what Christ is saying here is, is not that you and I are to hate as we know hate. Another way to translate that is to not love more. And the idea is my relationship with Christ should be so on fire that to other people, it looks like I don't, like I hate these things because I'm so on fire for God.

For example, when your kids come to you and they say, I want to go to the mission field. And you're like, I don't want you to go anywhere. I don't want you to do that. And yet you say, no, I've got to do it.

I've got to, God's telling me to do this. And it looks like I'm rejecting what they are saying. And yet I'm doing what God wants me to do because my relationship is that important to Christ. And God's not saying that I need to hate my wife.

God's simply saying, or Christ is saying, I need to love him more than my wife. I need to love him more than my kids, than my mom and my dad. Everyone knows that knows that I love my wife more than anything on this earth.

And yet I do love God more. And I want my kids to know that. I want people to know that there is nothing more important to me than my relationship with Christ. Doesn't mean that I don't love my wife. I do.

I just love God more. And that's how it has to come across. You see, Christ takes, as he does throughout the entire, the Gospels, we think the bar is here and Christ takes the bar and raises it to here.

And he says, no, this is reality up here. I was, when I was in high school and college, I pole vaulted. You guys know what pole vaulting is? Big, long pole, jump over the bar. I have all the scars to prove it.

That's a pole vaulting injury. Put a pole through my face here, bit through my lip. All my major, I did, I did contact sports and all of my major injuries was in track. It was kind of weird. So I was pole vaulting and I wasn't, I mean, I'm a short guy, not much of a jumper, but I was okay.

I jumped in, I jumped 16 feet in college. I was fast enough to get at least decent height at that time. For me, I was very happy with that. And the school record was 16 .3, which by the way, I didn't, never got.

Makes me very sad. At 16 feet, I cleared that. And now I wanted to go up four inches because obviously I wanted to beat the record. So how do you train to go higher? You don't put the bar at 16 .4 and jump it and jump it and jump it and jump it.

Okay. What you do is you take a bungee cord. This is obviously in practice. You take a bungee cord and you put it up at 18 or 19 feet. All right. And what in pole vaulting, what that does is if you know anything about pole vaulting, when you, when you plant the pool and you drive in and you swing your legs up and you go upside down, when the bar is way up there, I mean, that much higher than what you want to get.

It forces you to really get upside down and it forces you when you're upside down to actually pull on that pole hard because my goal is not to not touch the bar. My goal is just to get the feet over that bar, over that bungee cord.

I just want to get my feet over it. And what it does is by raising the bar that much higher, it forces me to try to strain even higher, even harder to get over that bar. And then 16 .3, 16 .4 will be that much easier when it's actually dropped down.

That's what Christ does a lot of times. He says, we think the bar is here, but I'm telling you the bar is here. And he says it throughout this entire passage. You cannot be my disciple. You cannot be my disciple because he says the Christian life is more than just a quick prayer and going to church on Sunday.

He requires more out of you and I. We move on and verse 27 says, verse 27 says, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. He goes back in Luke 9 and says, and he said to all, if anyone would come after me and let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses life for my sake will save it. The pillar commentary says that this idea of bearing one's cross is following Jesus through the daily trials of life.

Now, this daily trials is not necessarily talking about whether I wear a mask into a restaurant or whether I don't. Right now, we're all facing a lot of trials. We're being locked down. We're being released.

We're being all these, you know, and there's a lot of trials in our life and I'm not negating that in any way, shape or form. It's very frustrating. But this is the idea of taking up your cross is the idea of, are you being persecuted for your faith?

I'm gonna read this real quick. Matthew 5, called Beatitudes, Matthew 5, 3 through 12. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall seek God.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. If we lived our life following these things, meek, merciful, peacemakers, we're gonna be very countercultural to what's going on in the world today.

If you're a peacemaker, your Facebook profile is gonna look very different. Than what you see every day. If you are meek, if you are merciful, you will be persecuted for your faith. Because this, what he is describing here in Matthew 5, is very counter cultural.

And he says in the passage, he says, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. That's scary when you think about it. He says, cannot be my disciple. When the scripture says that we cannot do something, you have to kind of ask yourself, am I doing that or not?

If you are not this type of person, if you are not daily taking up your cross and following him, are you really a true follower of Christ? It's a legitimate question to ask. Verse 28 through 30, for which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it.

Otherwise, he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, and all who see it will begin to mock, saying, this man built and was not able to finish it. I understand the idea of counting the cost.

I told you I built that front porch of my house. And as all of us, I'm sure, did a lot of building projects in the last several months in our homes. And I'll tell you, I remember sitting down with the budget.

Here's how many boards I need to get. Here's how we need to do this. We changed the roof line. We did a whole thing. And I was thinking, we really want to do composite decking on that porch. And as I did the numbers, and it's getting close, I'm like, I just don't know.

Okay, we decided not to do that. We decided to just put wood in. And I'm so glad, because like every project, we thought it was this, and it ended up being this. And we ended up being okay, because I sat down beforehand, ran a budget, and said, it's just too close.

I don't know. I don't want to get into a project and not be able to finish it. Sitting right there on Main Street, Mattawan, everybody drive by and point. Okay. I lived in Costa Rica, and you go to the beach in Costa Rica.

There's a beach called Jaco, if you don't speak Spanish, but Jaco. And in Jaco, as you drive in, there's a hotel. It's about 12, 13 stories high, and just huge. There are no doors. There are no windows.

And it is a shell of a building. It has been for the last 15 years or more. Someone started. I don't know why they stopped. They ran out of money, bankrupt. I don't know. Who knows? But every time we drive by, you're like, oh, what a waste of a building.

I mean, it's an amazing touristy area right on the beach, and it just sits there empty. Because you see the people who put the time and energy in it didn't finish it, because they, for whatever reason, didn't, they weren't able to count the cost of what it takes to finish it.

Christ then gives you the last example. He says, or what king goes out to war, what king goes out to encounter another king in war, will not first sit down and deliberate whether he's able to meet him with 10 ,000, the guy who has 20 ,000.

And if not, while the other was yet a great way off, sends a delegation for a terms of peace. Why do we have a joint chief of staff for our president? It's a group of advisors that we have that gives them all the information he could possibly have or need to make a wise decision on a particular event.

These are our resources. This is what happens if we do this and so forth. He, our president, surrounds himself with a group of counselors, advisors, before we go off into war and we do something. Because the last thing we want to do is go into something that we can't finish.

And we've seen the ramifications of how that looks. So even if, as a wise king, before he goes into battle, counts the cost before he does so, as a builder who builds something and yet counts the cost beforehand so he doesn't, so he's not mocked later, you and I, as followers of Christ, we need to count the cost as to what it means to be a true follower of Jesus Christ.

Renouncing All for Discipleship

The last section here, 33,. So therefore, because of everything we mentioned above, because everything that was mentioned above, therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

He cannot be my disciple. Again, Christ taking the bar and saying, you think it's here, I'm telling you the bar is way up here. This is what it means to be a follower of Christ. Okay, it doesn't mean that God's called everybody to do absolutely extreme things and to sell everything and to move and do, God's called you to be a follower of Christ in your job and your current location, but it still means to follow him at this level up here.

To deny yourself, to take up your cross, to face the persecution, to make changes in your family that helps direct your family into Christ likeness. How can you direct your children? How can you take proactive steps in your family with your wife?

When you have the choice on whether to go to church or not, watch it online or not, it's just more and more convenient to not do it. Are you stepping up? And I'm preaching to the choir because we're all here.

I realize that. Are you stepping up and making the stand that says, you know what? We need fellowship. We need community. We need to be the body of Christ. So we're going to do this for our family. I want to end it by asking you, what does it mean to be a follower of Christ?

What does it mean to actually follow Christ? Do you place the bar here or do you have the bar where Christ puts the bar? I want you to leave asking yourself this question. How do I compare to what is described in Luke 14?

How does my current walk with Christ compare to what we just read that Christ said Himself? Are you placing the bar at an easy level or are you realizing that to be a follower of Christ is that much more?

And guys, I'm saying all this to say, it's not that we work harder for our salvation. That's given to us. That's a free gift by God. I'm just saying that the commitment that it takes is a lot more than what many of us have thought through.

I look at my life and I think of all the times that I have fallen short, all the times that I have that I've tried to get over the bar and I realize that I'm just kind of playing a game. I want to be the follower of Christ who is sold out in my commitment for Him.

My challenge for all of us is to go home thinking about that. What changes need to be made in our lives so that we would be a better follower of Christ? How can I lead my family better? How can I personally, do I need to be in God's Word?

Do I need to be studying? Do I need to have a time where I'm growing personally? What do you need to do to be the type of Christian that is described in Luke chapter 14? I'm gonna pray for us and then we're gonna move on over into communion and I'll explain that in just a second here.

Let's have a word of prayer. Lord, I thank you for today. I thank you, Lord, for your Word, for what it teaches, Lord. I thank you for the challenges that we've read in it. I pray that we would be believers, followers of you who strive to look more like you, help us to be committed, help our love and passion to you, Lord, to be so intense that it is confusing to a world around us.