These past several weeks we have been reading from a section of the gospel of Luke that lays out before us the great principles and challenges of the spiritual life, of what it means to follow Jesus. This is so important, because there are a lot of people today who say they are Christian, they may even go to church on Sunday. But they are Christian in name, and not in action. There are many more people who find Christianity interesting, maybe they think Jesus was a prophet, or a holy man. Well, the beginning of our gospel today addresses this group of people from Jesus’ time. “Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned to address them.” Great crowds, great masses of people, thousands were following Jesus, because he was attractive, he was charismatic, he was saying interesting things, and he was healing people of illness and disease. He was being treated kind of like a celebrity. And he knew this, Jesus understood that only some of the people following him were truly disciples, the rest were just there for the show. So what does he do? He turns around to address them.
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple…In the same way, anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.” This teaching will be intolerable for many who call themselves Christians. But Jesus is not giving us any room to compromise. He is not allowing there to be two levels of Christianity. Those who will and those who will not, for the sake of Christ, renounce and give up and say no to absolutely everything, even the nearest and dearest things. Not only all their possessions, but also their very selves, the people they love, and their families. Those who are not willing will say, “What is this, who is he to demand so much of us?” And that’s it, that’s the question, who is He to demand so much, and why would he do so?
Christianity is unique from every other religion. The founders of every faith, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Joseph Smith, and on and on, they all claim to either be a prophet of God, or to have some insider knowledge of God. But that’s not what Jesus claimed. Jesus claimed to be God. He is claiming to be the ultimate good. God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Therefore, he must be the absolute center of our lives. There have been many spiritual teachers throughout the centuries, many gurus, and prophets, but none of them make such a demand as Jesus, because only He has the authority to do so. You are either with me or against me, you gather with me or you scatter. There is an either or proposition when it comes to faith in Christ. In the Gospel Jesus is saying this to his fair-weather friends, those people who are following him around because he is a charismatic, interesting, person. And he is saying it to us, “Do you realize what following me involves? Do you understand what will be demanded of you?” We need only look at the cross.
This challenging Gospel begs the question why? Why would Jesus demand so much from his followers, why would he require those who follow him to hate their fathers and mothers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, and possessions? It’s because lukewarm faith is dangerous. Lukewarm faith, puts your soul in danger of hell. Jesus wants us to dedicate ourselves entirely to him not because he is a tyrant, but because he knows the secret of happiness and of misery, of freedom and slavery. He is the ultimate good and if we put any lesser good before Him it will lead to our ruin. Anything and everything that is worshiped as God, instead of God, will break and destroy itself. If you put second things first, you will lose not only the first thing, which is God, but also the second thing that became your God. Think about it. A mad dash to pleasure through drugs destroys your ability to experience pleasure, alcoholism destroys your enjoyment of alcohol, greed destroys the small enjoyments that money can buy, selfish lust destroys unselfish love, and idolizing any person, even your family, makes their death the death of God, the death of all hope and meaning and happiness.
Jesus is not a tyrant. He desires for us to give him everything, to dedicate ourselves entirety to Him, for our own good. He asks us to practice what we preach, and if we say we are Christians, that’s the deal. Give him everything. Trust Him with everything. Your life, your death, your sanity, your happiness, your home life, your recreational life, your sex life, your body, your mind, your soul, your feelings, your freedom, your rights, your time, your past, your future, your present. Give it all to Him, now, with no conditions, no strings attached, no footnotes or fine print. Say it and mean it, “Thy will be done.” Do it now. I dare you. He dares you.