These verses come at the end of a series of uncompromising statements. He has talked about unconditional giving: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor” (Luke 12.33), about being spiritually alert: watching and waiting (Luke 12.40), about how he will bring division to families (Luke 12.51); In Luke 13 he warns, “Unless you repent you will perish” and he goes on to say that we need to enter through the narrow door (Luke 13.22ff), and that the best seat in the house is the lowest seat (Luke 14.10).

In Luke 14.25ff, it is as if Jesus puts all these things together: He turns up the heat. It reminds me of the T-shirt that one of our friend’s children wears: “When the going gets tough, I’m going to granny ..”

In Luke 14.25, large crowds are “travelling with” Jesus. Maybe they came along to see the show. Wherever Jesus went, things happened: in chapter 13 he has just healed a woman who has been crippled for 18 years; in chapter 14 he is confronting the religious and secular leaders. Maybe they came along because where there are a lot of people there is money to be made. He was the flower that attracted the bees – and they were going to get the honey. Maybe they came along because they had met him, and it made them feel important – superior – to the others: they were the stewards who organised the crowd.

There are times when it can be quite fashionable to call yourself a Christian. Some of us come to church because it makes us feel important: we have a status here: we are the vicar, church warden, sidesperson, welcomer. Some of us come to church or, at least, associate with church people, because we think we can make a fast buck; or because we think we can get something else out of it.

Jesus challenges us. You see he does not want people “travelling with” him. He wants people “following him”. He doesn’t simply want our company with him on the journey. He wants our discipleship. People travelling with him will continue as long as the journey is pleasant. But when it gets hard, they will choose to go the easy path. Jesus wants people who are willing to follow him even when it gets very hard, even when the road leads to poverty and disgrace and death. Jesus does not want ‘lite’ Christians in a ‘lite’ church. He wants Christians who are serious about obedience and serious about discipleship

That is why Jesus addresses the large crowds in verse 25 and turns up the heat:

1. If you want to be a follower of me, you have got to put me before your family (verse 26).

Jesus is not telling us to reject our families. He gave us families; he gave us our relatives – and we can thank God for them (most of the time!). And he tells us to love others as ourselves – and that includes our families. And when it is easy to love certain members of our family, we thank God. And when it is hard to love certain members of our family, we still seek to do it, and we still thank God.

And Jesus is not giving us an excuse to avoid proper or right family commitments: He challenges the Pharisees in Mark 7.11. He says that they were not supporting their parents because they said that “whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban (that is, a gift devoted to God)”. And other New Testament writers challenge us. They tell us that we are responsible for the members of our families, for children and parents”. So, for example, 1 Timothy 5:4, “But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God”.

We sometimes hear of those great men of God who, in the 1800’s left everything for Christ to go and serve him on the mission field. And we learn that they also left wives and children behind. I am not sure that that is really what Jesus is demanding in this passage. If you are married you have a responsibility to your husband or wife; if you are a parent you have a responsibility to your children. And it is very easy to say that you are leaving them to serve Christ in a particular place, when what you are actually doing is running away from your responsibilities as parent or child or husband/wife. And there is a danger that people use church commitment today as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for their family: I can’t do that because I’ve got to go the church meeting. I hope that as a church we try to avoid doing that.

I know of one vicar who stood up in his church and said, “I need to confess before you all that I have committed adultery!” The church went silent. And then he said: “I have committed adultery. I have put the church before my wife”.

Jesus is not calling us to opt out of our responsibilities to our family.
What he is saying is that our love of family must be as hatred in comparison with our love of him. If it comes to the crunch between deciding for him or deciding for our families, he has to come first.

Another man I know told his parents he had become a Christian. He came home from work that evening and found his suitcase packed by the front door. They told him: “It’s either God or us”. And at that point he had to choose God. For few of us it will be as stark as that. But we do all have choices to make: when what our family expects of us is not what God expects of us.

The family (parents, partners, relatives, children) expect that we should aspire to that well paid and prestigious job. We know that God is calling us to a very different kind of work.  The family expect that we will support them in their feud (a sort of Romeo and Juliet scenario). We know we are called by God to be peacemakers. The family expect that we will join in with their way of doing things. We know that some of their ways of doing things are not the right ways. The family expect that we will never move away. We know that God has called us to go to a particular place. The family expect that their things will always come before church things. We know that God has called us to a commitment to our Christian brothers and sisters.

Jesus knew the opposition of his family. On one occasion they came to take him away, because they thought he was mad. And Jesus had a choice: his family or his obedience to God. He made the choice. He was told, “Your mother and brothers are outside”. He replied, “Who are my mother, my brother and sisters? And he looked at those around him: “Those who do the will of God are my mother, brother and sister”.  In the end Jesus’ family came round to supporting him: some of them became his most committed followers. But before that happened, Jesus had to make the choice: mum or God; brothers and sisters or God.

Our love of Christ must come before our love of our family, of our partner, of our parents, of our nephews or nieces, of our grandchildren and children. And that is hard, because they are good gifts that God has given us. That is why it is so painful for Christians who are married to, or even living with, unbelievers. You are going in different directions; you are serving different gods. That is the reason that the bible says that Christians should not go out with or marry non-Christians: But it also gives very good advice (1 Corinthians 7), for Christians who are with non-Christians.

Our commitment to Christ must come before our commitment to family. That is why – even though family time together is vital – time spent with God is even more important.

I should add that sometimes commitment to Christ can means that we need to become more committed to supporting our families. Our choice would be to walk away: Jesus is telling us to love them and support them.

2.  Jesus turns up the heat and says, “if you want to follow me, you have to put me before your very self (verses 26f)

Again, Jesus is not telling us to hate ourselves, in the sense of seeking to destroy ourselves. Elsewhere he calls us to love others as we love ourselves. People who hate themselves do not find it easy to love others. What Jesus is saying is that in comparison to our love for him, our love for self should be as hatred. When it comes to the crunch, when I have to choose between what I want and what he wants, I choose what he wants.

All activity that really matters involves self denial. Part of me hates the Olympics – I love seeing the achievements, but it doesn’t half make me feel like an undisciplined slob. Matthew Pinsent, Kelly Holmes don’t win gold medals by eating what they want, getting up when they choose or by slobbing out in front of the telly. They have to be out there on the track, on the river: there are the years of training, hardship and self-denial. And if you wish to excel at anything: football, music, your career, your marriage, being a father or mother – it involves commitment and self denial

And it is no different with the Christian life. As Christians we don’t need to be out there killing our bodies – although most of us should be more disciplined and take more exercise than we do. But we are about something that is so much more important than winning a gold medal. The prize for us is eternal life, life with God.

Jesus says, (v27), “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple”. Everyone knew that if a person was carrying their cross, they were dead meat. The person who carries the cross is a dead man. And carrying our cross is about living as a dead person: dead to self, dead to what I want - and alive to what God wants, alive to love.

We read about Christian martyrs: people who have literally laid down their lives for their faith. In some parts of the world it costs people dearly to follow Christ. In other parts of the world that still happens today (people’s republic of Laos, believers in Iran or Pakistan (recently several churches were bombed), in Northern Nigeria, in Saudi Arabia. 

John Oros was a church leader in Romania during the Communist era: He said, “During communism, many of us preached … and people came at the end of a service, and they said, “I have decided to become a Christian.” We told them, “It is good that you want to become a Christian, but we would like to tell you that there is a price to be paid. Why don’t you reconsider what you want to do, because many things can happen to you. You can lose, and you can lose big.” A high percentage of these people chose to take part in a three-month catechism class. At the end of this period, many participants declared their desire to be baptized. Typically, I would respond, “It is really nice that you want to become a Christian, but when you give your testimony…there will be informers here who will jot down your name. Tomorrow the problems will start. Count the cost. Christianity is not easy. It’s not cheap. You can be demoted. You can lose your job. You can lose your friends. You can lose your neighbours. You can lose your kids who are climbing the social ladder. You can lose even your life.” Let me tell you my joy when we looked into their eyes, and their eyes were in tears, and they told us, “If I lose everything but my personal relationship with my Lord Jesus Christ, it is still worth it.”

For most of us there are not such immediate risks in following Christ: but it doesn’t take away from the challenge. 

• We are called to die to self, to die to what I want, and to come alive to what Christ wants.
• We are called to follow Jesus and to take up our cross: to be willing, for love of other people, to walk the road to crucifixion.

It is not easy. But it is worth it. Lite religion cannot do anything. It might make us feel OK for a while, but in the end it is nothing. Lite religion is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession. Lite religion is religion without discipleship, religion without the cross, religion without Jesus Christ. Lite religion cannot change you and, as someone said, if your religion does not change you, then you should change your religion.

If you aspire to be rich, if you aspire to be famous or recognised, if you aspire to live a comfortable life, if you aspire to be influential and powerful, then do not follow Jesus. Tony Campolo speaking at a prayer breakfast in the Whitehouse – for all the senior people, including the president, started off with the line, “If Jesus was in Washington today, this is the last place that he would be”.

But if you aspire to become like Jesus and to be filled with love for God and for others, if you aspire to eternal life with God – then say ‘yes’ to Jesus – even though it means saying ‘no’ to yourself.

So Jesus turns up the heat. But having turned up the heat, Jesus then asks people to count the cost of not following him (vv28ff). There are two ways of reading verses 28-30. The first is to see the tower that is to be built as the tower of our Christian life. You have to first count the cost of whether you can make it as a Christian.

The problem with that reading is that no one has the ability to follow Jesus; we can make great professions of faith - like Peter when he said to Jesus, “I will never deny you” - but when the crunch comes, we bottle out. No man or woman, girl or boy can build the tower of the Christian life. And on that reading, that means that no one should choose to follow Jesus. 

The second way of reading this verse is to see the tower as the things that we aspire to build. People dream or becoming famous or influential or rich or powerful or comfortable and secure. A well known politician is said to have written a timetable on a back of an envelope about how he would become prime-minister. It all went according to plan, until he had a heart attack. And his tower crumbled.

The world is littered with the half built towers of dreams. The problem is that if we aspire to that which is not of God, we will inevitably fail. If we are honest, we realise that we cannot complete the towers that we set out to build. And the consequence of failure is shame.

In the same way, we like to think that we are big. But when someone who is bigger comes towards us, we need to give way, to surrender (vv31-33). God is coming towards us, and he is bigger than us. He is the king with 20000 men. He is the adversary of Luke 12.58 who is taking us to the magistrate. We cannot afford to ignore him.

The only way to ensure that we build a tower that will last is to build God’s tower; the only way to find peace with God is, in the words of v33, “to give up everything that we have”. It means surrendering to God everything: our hopes, dreams, homes, clothes, possessions, money, time, family, work, strengths, weaknesses, failures, sense of inadequacy, our rages, our passions, our life. It means surrendering to him the plans that we have for our tower, and taking from him the plans that he has for his tower. We cannot afford not to do so.

People sometimes ask, “Why should I become a Christian?” We can talk about all the benefits – forgiveness, peace with God, fulfilment, the Holy Spirit, a new life, a new community, heaven – but the story that Jesus tells asks another question: “How can you afford not to become a Christian?” You are not going to build the tower of your dreams and you are not going to be able to match your opponent when he comes against you.

Many of us have started to travel with Jesus, but we have not yet given up the plans for our towers. We are people who travel with Jesus for a while, while it suits us.  I don’t know why you come to church. It is very easy to point the finger and say, “They’re here because they want that”. Hang on a minute. If people looked at my motives for coming to church, obedience to Christ is often pretty low on the list.

The good news is that, whatever our motives - and at times we ourselves don’t know what they are - Jesus, in his mercy doesn’t turn us away.  He welcomes us, but he also challenges us: he says to us: “I don’t want fellow travellers. I don’t want people who are going to give up when it gets hard. I want followers, people who are willing to go with me all the way to the cross”.