The Call of Discipleship

What do you say on a day like today where we look back and reflect on God's faithfulness for ten years? The reason we've done that, looking back at ten years, is that today, almost to the day, marks ten years since I was ordained as a part time minister in this congregation. And by God's amazing grace and His providence, next week will be my installation as the full time minister of this congregation, which is a wonderful moment of God's faithfulness being seen. And so what do we say on occasions like this? What can I say?

Well, perhaps disappointingly, I can't say anything very different to what I've been saying in the past ten years, because in a way, nothing has changed. We are the same church with the same heartbeat, with the same mission. The mission statement of our church as we drive through the gates here and as was on display again this morning is that we are a church striving to grow in and share the love of Christ. To grow in and share the love of Christ. And what more can we say today than thank you, God, for your love in Jesus Christ?

What does it mean for us to grow in and share the love of Christ? Well, at its most basic, it is a call to discipleship. It is a call of following Jesus Christ. To grow in the love of Christ is to grow in our following of Jesus. This life of discipleship is what stood at the heart of Jesus' call when He invited His disciples to give their lives to Him in order to follow Him.

And we're going to look at that moment this morning by looking at Luke chapter nine. Over the past few weeks, we have been in the Gospel of Luke, and you will have remembered, if you were here, how we followed along as Jesus' ministry grew and the following that He had grew in light of all the miracles and the teachings He had given. And then He comes to this moment in Luke chapter nine, verse 23, which becomes a turning point in His ministry, and this is what He said. Luke nine, verse 23. And Jesus said to all, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when He comes in His glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God. This is the word of the Lord.

We've seen over the past few weeks Jesus healing a leper, Jesus forgiving a prostitute, and Jesus driving out demons out of a man named Legion because of the amount of evil he had in his heart. And over the course of those early chapters in the Gospel of Luke, a repeating question as a result of these miracles is found on the lips of those witnessing it. And that question is along the lines of, who is this? Who is this man that can cleanse the leper, that can forgive the sins of a prostitute? Who is this man that demons tremble at his name?

Who will say, get away from us, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Who is this man who speaks to the wind and the waves, and they listen? Who is this man? And then here in Luke chapter nine, Jesus comes to the point where He turns to His disciples and He asks them, who do you say I am? And the turning point to the Gospel of Luke, as it is in the Gospel of Mark, as it is in the Gospel of Matthew, is this confession of Peter: You are the Christ.

It's a significant thing that in every gospel account we have, the story begins to accelerate towards the cross from this moment on in each account. This is the turning point. This is the moment when Jesus receives that confession. He sets His face towards Jerusalem and the cross. And so with this realisation having sunk in to the disciples, professed by their leader Peter, You are the Christ, Jesus, in turn, says these words.

If anyone wants to come after me, if anyone wants to pursue me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and then follow me. What does it mean for Jesus to say to people, remember, already following him. These are his disciples already. He says to those already following him, follow me. Well, this is what Jesus was teaching them and, through them, us.

Firstly, to be a disciple means to choose to follow Jesus as Lord. A rabbi's followers in those days went everywhere with their rabbis. Known as the Talmidim in Hebrew, a rabbi's disciples would not simply listen to the words spoken or taught by their rabbi. They would mimic everything He did. They didn't just want to know what He knew.

They wanted to do what He did. And so you can say the life of a disciple was much more like an apprenticeship than a sitting in a classroom learning from a teacher. Here is Jesus using language of discipleship when He talks about anyone who would pursue the life of Christianity. Christianity is discipleship. So where later in the New Testament we see the likes of Peter and Paul talking about Christianity summed up as a life of faith, of trust in Jesus.

Jesus Himself expresses the life of Christianity as a life of following, a life of intentional discipleship. You must follow me. But notice in verse 23, Jesus begins with the word if. If anyone would come after me, if anyone would pursue me, that if is acknowledging that there will be some people who choose not to follow. The gospels will tell us again and again of people who chose not to follow Jesus.

A rich man, you may remember the story of, who heard Jesus' call to discipleship, came to him and said, I would like to follow you. And Jesus said, sell all that you have and then come and follow me. And the man walked away sad, the scriptures say, because he had to give up too much to follow Jesus. When Jesus saw the man turn away, Jesus doesn't run after him. Jesus doesn't change the terms of discipleship for him.

In fact, when Jesus would later speak about discipleship again, He would say, disciples count the cost. Disciples count the cost of being disciples. In other words, when you come to me, Jesus says, you come to me with your eyes wide open. You weigh up what I'm offering to you. You weigh up what you'll give in order to receive it.

And then you decide who you will follow. At the heart of the command to follow Jesus as Open House Christian Reformed Church, we find the very basic premise that you can't follow two things at the same time. If you go on a tour somewhere, you go overseas now that the borders are open, and you go and hire a tour guide to go and show you the streets of Rome, you can't follow one tour guide and another tour guide through the streets of Rome at the same time. You can't follow two people at once.

When we follow Jesus, we commit to Him as being our leader. He is our boss. In biblical terms, that is when we profess that He is Lord. The apostle Paul in Colossians one tells us that since Jesus created us, since He made us, He is Lord because He is our Creator. Firstly, because He owns us.

Right? He owns us. Therefore, He is our Lord. But Paul then makes a case that He is doubly owned us. He's doubly owned Christians because at one point, He saved us, and we became His.

So once He made us, and then twice He remade us in salvation. That's why Paul says He is preeminent. He is above all. He is the Lord. And so to be a disciple of Jesus Christ means to follow Him as Lord.

But now in our passage, Jesus gives two conditions to what it means to follow Him as Lord. Two conditions. The first one is to deny yourself, and the second one is to take up your cross daily. What do these two conditions of Christian discipleship mean? Well, to be a disciple means to deny yourself as Lord.

This is probably one of the most misunderstood and misapplied commands of Jesus. The word used by Luke here refers to this idea of resisting or rejecting or refusing yourself. Resisting yourself when you profess Jesus as Lord. In short, it means to say no to yourself. It's the same word that Peter used when he denied Christ at the crucifixion.

When Peter said, I don't know him, he denied Him. It's the same word as denying yourself. I do not know that man. Today, when we think about denying ourselves, however, we think of denying things. We'll say no to that last bit of chocolate.

What is that? We'll say no to that third television in the house. But the denial of self is in view here in that you deny self worship. You deny self lordship. For a Christian to deny themselves and to follow Christ means to say no to the idea that you are your own God.

And that denial is a decisive no. No. I don't want to be Lord anymore. For a Christian who has chosen, therefore, to follow Jesus, it means we begin by interpreting our lives through a very specific framework. We find ourselves frustrated sometimes in life, frustrated by expectations for life that have not been met.

Christians experience those things from time to time, but a clear minded Christ follower evaluates those frustrations by asking, what is my Lord's intention with this situation? I am following the Lord and these things that have come up in my life. What is the Lord doing here? If you have faithfully followed Jesus, in other words, and then you find yourself in a situation that might be difficult, the solution isn't to think, I think He's made a mistake. The tour guide is leading me down the wrong path in Rome.

I'll take the tour into my own hands. Nor is it to say to ourselves, it's bad luck that I've ended up here. Let me take the reins of my life again and suspend following Jesus for a while while I try to fix what has happened in this situation. No. To deny yourself when following Christ is to say, I am not in charge here, Lord.

I am not in charge here, Lord. I trust that this hard thing or this good thing you've brought across my path. You've brought me into this situation, and you are teaching me something. If you are rabbi and I am disciple, you are teaching me something. You are forming me to be someone.

To be a disciple means you deny yourself as Lord, and you confirm in your heart that I will follow only one Lord at a time, and He is Jesus Christ. Then the second condition to this following of Jesus means you take up your cross. If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. To take up our cross is also a very misunderstood word. Even in secular Australia, you hear it all the time.

It's just the cross that I must bear, we might say. Now to the original listeners hearing Jesus say this, they would have been horrified at those words. It evoked in their minds the scenes that they often saw during the times of the Roman oppression, men and women literally carrying a crossbeam on their shoulders as they were being publicly executed. Quite literally, to take up your cross, you only did after you received a death sentence. When a criminal picked up their cross, carried it through the streets for all intents and purposes, that was a dead man walking.

And Jesus says, discipleship is that. In order to follow Jesus, it means we think of ourselves as already dead. There are things in our life that will die when you follow Christ. To bear your cross, to take up your cross doesn't mean simply that you suffer as a Christian. It means that you count yourself dead.

And yes, to be a disciple of Jesus may mean that you suffer, but that suffering is always, again, tied to the purpose of your Lord. And that can be to be stronger, to be more faithful, to know and to love your rabbi more, to be closer to your Lord. But ultimately, to carry that cross means something closer to this idea of denying yourself. You count yourself as a dead man, dead to the things that are useless so that He might resurrect in you the things that are for life, the things that are better. So Jesus is saying, here are the terms of following me.

Deny yourself. Take up your cross daily. Die daily. And then proactively pursue a life of following my teaching and my way of living. And so you can see right here, Jesus doesn't sell Christianity with, you know, very glitzy and glamorous lights and smoke machines and good worship music or anything like that.

He simply says, here are the terms. Will you accept them or not? And so our church should never be a church of hocus pocus religion. Our church can never persuade people with anything beautiful and shiny to the gospel. Our church follows simply this instruction of Jesus, follow Him as Lord.

Call Him Lord. And it will mean you must die to yourself. But I hope this type of clarity, this stark realisation encourages you and excites you rather than burdens you this morning. Because there is something wonderfully liberating and motivating to understanding the terms of agreement when you sign up as Jesus Christ being your Lord. The legendary Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton, who led expeditions to the South Pole three times, once put a classified ad in a London newspaper which read, Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful.

Then he finished, Honour and recognition in case of success. People of the time said, droves of men signed up and wanted to go to Antarctica under Ernest Shackleton. Why? Because the mission was clear. The cost and the potential loss both drew the right people and made sure the wrong people stayed away.

Jesus' mission, similarly, is not for the faint of heart. Becoming a Christian according to Jesus should be weighed carefully. Deny yourself. Take up your cross daily and then follow me. But it's the final phrase in Jesus' statement here in verses 24 to 26 that really sums up what He's been saying all along, and it points towards the mission that Christ now set His heart on.

He says, for whoever will save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. And so lastly, to be a disciple means you lose your life in order to save it. Here is the paradox of what it means to be a Christian. We finally find ourselves when we lose ourselves, and we lose ourselves only when we find Jesus. How can we hope to follow Jesus in the way that He's told us to follow Him?

Perhaps you read these words and you hear them this morning, and you feel like this is impossible to honour Jesus in this way, to daily die to self, to follow Him with everything you have like this. The late John Stott once wrote, It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a new play just like it. Shakespeare could do it. I can't. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life just like it.

Jesus could do it. I can't. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live inside me, I would then be able to write plays like he did. And if the spirit of Jesus could come and live inside me, I would then be able to live a life like He did. This is the open secret of how to live as a Christian.

It is not about us struggling in vain to become more like Jesus, but about allowing Him by the power of His spirit to come and change us from the inside. Once again, we see that to have Him as our example is not enough. We need Him as our saviour. Jesus is called to discipleship here in Luke 9 and Mark 8 and in Matthew is a call for us to receive Him as Lord, but it drives us, even as we hear that, to look for Him as a saviour because we know it is impossible to live by ourselves in our strength with Him as Lord. He needs to be our saviour first.

And so to lose our life for His sake becomes only possible because at one point, He gave up His life for my sake. And once we truly understand that, once we believe it, it becomes possible only then to take up your cross daily, to consider yourselves dead because at one time your Saviour died your death. The great hope we have, as Stott says, is that when Jesus rose back to life, when He ascended to heaven and He sent His spirit, the Spirit of the Son to the earth, He made His willpower available to us. His righteous life is now living in our earthly lives. And what it means for the next ten years of Open House Church is that we'll simply be doing the same things we've been doing in the last ten years, which is to follow Jesus and to proclaim to anyone who is willing to hear, Jesus is Lord.

And so this morning, I want to ask you a question that you've heard many, many times over the past ten years. Are you following Jesus as Lord? Does He live inside of you? Do you see the evidence of His righteous life in you? And if not, today is an important opportunity to be reminded that you must stop resisting Him and allow Him to do His work of changing you.

Let Him complete the work that He has started in you. And if you've never known Jesus in this sort of way, today is also an opportunity to make Him both the Lord and the Saviour of your life. So as we pray, I want to ask you to pray with me for both those things, to receive Him as your Lord if you've never done so, or to ask Him to remind you what it truly looks like for your life when He is that Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that through your Son, Jesus Christ, we have received eternal life.

And that through His atoning death, His substitution, the death that causes us to find our life when we lose it. Lord, that in that, there is great joy and peace. Help us, Lord, to be reminded of that, that if our lives have not aligned with that, if we realise that we have walked even as Christians very far from that life of discipleship, of following the way of our Lord, will cause us to turn around, come back to the tour guide, and to follow Him. For those of us listening both here and elsewhere, we pray that, if they don't know you, Lord, they may today receive you as both the Lord who owns them twice, having created them, therefore owning them, and then hearing today that they have been saved by Him and remade, recreated, and so He owns them twice. Lord, may they receive you as their Saviour.

And as they receive you as Saviour, they will also know that they have received you as Lord. We pray for them and pray that they will become true followers and disciples of you. In Jesus' name we ask all these things. Amen.