FOCUS Day Twenty-Two | Luke 9:23-27
DAY TWENTY-TWO | Luke 9:23-27
Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost? For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels. But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the kingdom of God.”
Come and See
From the day that Jesus spoke the words to John’s disciples, Come and see, He walked through this life in a genuine spirit of invitation. It seems that each time He would look into the eyes of His disciples, or others who are drawn to Him and speak words that invited them into some specific facet of His love, He was calling them to go progressively deeper in their knowing of Him. It is with this in mind that we look at this passage from Luke 9 as Jesus speaks of the cost of following Him.
I have always found the honesty of Jesus both frightening and refreshing. While it would be pleasant to focus on the fact that salvation is truly a gift from God that we cannot earn, Jesus did not leave out the other part. In these verses He very clearly speaks of the cost of being one of His disciples. The truth is that while the gospel is free to anyone who will receive it, following Jesus will cost us everything.
Far from any version of the gospel that says if you follow Jesus, then everything will always be OK and easy, Jesus said that if we were to go after Him, it would mean denying ourselves and daily taking up our cross. I think it’s important to remember that Jesus had not gone to Calvary yet, and so this message of the cross was not one of Christian sentiment. No, in the days of Jesus, the cross represented an instrument of death and execution.
As if this was not enough, Jesus then went on to say that if anyone wanted to save his life it would require him losing it. I don’t think these words were easy for those who were hearing it to receive, but for those who witnessed the life of Christ walking the earth, there was something about this invitation that did not drive them away. Even though the cost was high, there was something worthy about this man, Jesus.
Do you remember the time that Jesus was preaching about how those who follow Him would eat His flesh and drink His blood? The Scriptures tell us that many turned and left because of this hard saying. Then, Jesus looks up at his 12 and ask them, “Are you going to leave also?”
Although it doesn’t say so in the Scriptures, I can just imagine Peter looking at James, John and the others, wondering if there was any other option. But seeing that there were no other options, he simply replied, “Where else can we go? You alone have the words of life.”
I remember a season in my life where it felt like everything that I had thought my life would look like, Jesus was asking me to lay down. I was in my late 20’s and had a clear plan for how my life was going to go. At the time, Adriane and I lived in a house just a few miles from the beach in North Carolina, and I was co-pastoring a church that was in a fast growing neighborhood, in a fast growing city.
My plan was to grow that church into something that was successful and spend my entire life and ministry there. I remember praying for the families in the church, and mapping out what the youth group would look like when the kids in our nursery grew up. I felt like I had a vision that was clear for how we could make a real impact in our city and in our region.
Then, all at once and in a short amount of time, both Adriane and I felt like the Lord was leading us to move far away from the sunny beach into a tiny little town in western Pennsylvania. I could barely believe it. My hometown in North Carolina was one of the fastest growing cities on the East Coast. The little borough that we felt called to move to have been in decline for years.
We prayed about what we were sensing for several months. This just did not make much sense to my mind. Why would God move us from this place where I had clear vision, into a place where no one wanted to go.
When we read the words to these verses from Luke nine, it is worth noting that many have laid down their lives for Jesus in a very literal sense. From the disciples that were standing there when he spoke those words that lost their earthly lives, to the thousands upon thousands who have been martyred since, there are those throughout history who have been willing to lose their lives for the One who is worthy. Could it really be that bad to have to leave the beach and move to a small town in western Pennsylvania?
Of course not. But that’s not the point. The point is that often times following Jesus requires laying down our ideas of what we think things should look like.
Adriane and I fell quite in love with Westra Pennsylvania, and were surprised how quickly we felt like we were home. But our time in Ellwood City really did center a lot around the theme of dying to what we thought we knew. I was humbled as Jesus stripped me of so many of my ideas about what church and ministry were supposed to look like.
But it was in that dying that He led us to discover Him as the Pearl of Great Price. In many ways, Jesus was inviting us to lay down our religious constructs so that we could walk in a simpler version of the gospel. We encountered Jesus looking into the eyes of the pearls of great price that He had given His own life for. We spent our time with street kids, addicts and prostitutes, and saw the gospel work in ways that are still hard to fully understand.
It is unlikely that many of us will lose our lives as martyrs for the gospel, but Jesus invites all of us to lose our lives for His sake. I think that this is a lot of what it means to “Come and die”. We let go of our ideas of what following Him means, and relinquish control of our lives, yielding to Him. His ways are so much higher than ours, that we can’t even imagine what He can do with an unrestrained YES from our hearts to His.
As you focus your eyes on Jesus, I pray that you would find Him worthy of all of your ideas and dreams about what the future should look like. I pray that you would be able to sense His leading and have courage to let go of your life so you can be truly united in His. He is faithful and able to do exceedingly above and beyond what you are able to imagine.
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Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic The Cost of Discipleship that meant a lot to me as we were walking through the season of moving to Pennsylvania. It still resonates with me today, and so I wanted to share it with you.
“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”
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