The Tower of Conviction - The Cost of Discipleship
I was going to apologize for the length of this podcast but I think I'll refrain. I've already listened to it twice and I think it is one I will come back to many times.
Yes! I listen over and over to my own podcasts. You see, I started this journey to learn, not to teach. I hope you're riding this journey right along beside me. I'm not your pastor, I'm your brother.
Our church has adopted the practice of teaching new Christians about the journey they are embarking on. It is the opposite of the altar call approach. A Christian in our church is baptized in the full knowledge of what that journey entails and part of that teaching covers the cost of discipleship. I went through that teaching, but I can't say I understood it completely. I still don't honestly. But the fog is lifting and I hope this podcast helps you with that same level of clarity.
The last few parables in this podcast have walked through Matthew 18 and now Luke 14. Instead of parsing the parables out of the chapters, we let the context drive the message. Doing that, I see Luke 14 in a whole new light. I think typically we tend to lift scripture from its context and often our pastors and teachers will then preach around the part that was lifted. I've learned a valuable lesson of not doing that. Today's podcast is long because it walks you through the context of the entire chapter to get to the message. I don't know if all chapters in scripture warrant that level of context but I'm certainly reading with more attentiveness,
You think the hard part is getting people to follow Jesus. Luke 14 shows Jesus with a great multitude behind Him — and He turns around and tries to send most of them home.
Look at who He is talking to. Not pagans. Not skeptics. Jews raised on the Law and the Prophets. Men and women taught in the synagogues by the same kind of Pharisees and lawyers He had just left at a dinner table - the men who watched Him, took the best seats, and never once came to Him. This crowd did come. They are following the Messiah they were taught to expect. And He turns and tells them what that will cost.
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
The list ends with you. Then the cross - and nobody on that road had seen Calvary. To them a cross was a condemned man carrying the beam to where Rome would kill him. That was the road He said they were on.
Then two stories. A builder who lays a foundation and can’t finish, and the whole town laughs. A king with ten thousand men facing a king with twenty thousand, who had better send an embassy asking for terms of peace while the other is still far off. The word Luke uses for that embassy appears one other time in the Bible - when citizens send word after their king: We will not have this man to reign over us. Two messages. Everyone sends one.
And the terms? Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. All of it. Including the Messiah they had built in their heads - the conqueror who would fight their enemies for them. The prophets had already said the King would come lowly and speak peace. The war they should have feared was with the One they were waiting for.
Then He ends with salt. Salt that has lost its savor still looks exactly like salt. It just does nothing. Faith goes flat the same way - it keeps its shape and loses its substance. And men throw it out.
Here is the stake, stripped to nothing. You probably didn’t count the whole cost when you started. Neither did Peter. But you can know the sum: all. And you can ask whether your convictions are still salt, or just the shape of it.
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