The Stories Jesus Told #9 - The Building of the Tower
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the "Stories Jesus Told" message series teaching out of the gospel of Luke sharing the parable of the man who does not count the cost of building a tower.
Message Transcript
Well, good morning. Welcome to Orchard Hill. It's great to be together in Wexford and the Chapel, Strip District, Butler, Beaver, Southpointe, and Online. Let's pray. Father, as we're gathered today, I pray you would speak into each of our lives. God, if I've prepared things that don't reflect your heart for who's gathered today, I pray that you would prompt me to move away from those things. And if there are things that would be beneficial that I haven't prepared, I pray you'd prompt me even in this moment, that I would speak those things, and we would be drawn to you today as a group. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, we've been working our way through several stories Jesus told, parables. And today we're going to look at what you just heard read, which is the story of a tower that wasn't completed, basically, and a king who wants to go to battle and didn't count the cost. The idea is pretty straightforward, simple, as is often the case with these stories, these parables that Jesus told. He was basically saying, if you don't consider the cost of something before you do it, you will easily get into something and then not be able to complete it.
And so, the question when you read this text is what is Jesus saying and how does this apply to you and to me today? Like, what does this have to do with my life? And if you've been around church or around the Bible, you know that there's a sense in which there's this open invitation. Meaning Christianity, faith, is not about you doing something; it's about what Jesus Christ has done. It's an open invitation to all. And yet, at the same time, there's a sense in which Jesus says some things that are incredibly challenging, incredibly demanding. And so here, you get into this little bit of juxtaposition between there's this open invitation, and yet Jesus says, but if you don't count the cost, you'll be like somebody who builds a tower and halfway through can't build it, and they'll be ridiculed because they weren't able to finish this.
So let me just ask you this question. What do you think is the most dominant word in the New Testament for somebody who is a follower of Jesus? I mean, I don't know what you would think, but initially what you might think is that the word is Christian. Do you know how many times the word Christian is used in the New Testament? Three. Do you know how many times the word disciple is used in the New Testament? 246. In other words, we often associate faith, Christianity, with being a Christian.
Part of the the downside of that way of thinking about it, not that it's a wrong way to think about it, but the downside is we tend to think of being a Christian as being somewhat transactional. What I mean is what we tend to think of is, oh, I believed in Jesus, I prayed a prayer somewhere, and I became a Christian. Therefore, I'm a Christian. End of story. And then when we throw in rightly some ideas about the perseverance of the Saints, or some people would say once saved, always saved, we say, if you prayed a prayer somewhere in the past, then you are a Christian, that's good, and nothing can ever happen to you.
But in the New Testament, the emphasis is on this idea of discipleship. It's on the idea of current faith, not a past transaction. It's on a on a lifestyle. In fact, Jesus invokes this image of disciple right here before he does these two stories. The idea was a common idea or motif in his culture that everyone would have understood when he says the phrase, you cannot be my disciple.
In fact, three times in this passage, he utters that very phrase, you cannot be my disciple if this is not true of you. And so, what Jesus does is he basically says, you are called to be a disciple. And a disciple was like an apprentice. It was somebody who attached themselves to a teacher, would learn their ways, and apply their ways to their life. They would say, I want to be what you are. This is the image that Jesus uses to be a disciple.
I don't know if any of you have ever become a member of AAA. It’s one of these things that's really easy to join. You have a little bit of money, join AAA, and it really doesn't matter how well you take care of your car, which I always think is kind of interesting. You can go on the road and if you have AAA, whether you take care of your car or not, and you need help, you call AAA, and they'll show up and help you. There's no agreement that you'll do certain things with your car to make it roadworthy. And sometimes we can get the idea that because faith is an open invitation based entirely on what Jesus does instead of what we do, that that is what faith is. Then on the other side, some of us will maybe think that it's more like being on an Olympic team that you have to do everything just right over and over. And so, what I want to do today is just unpack these three little phrases where Jesus says, you cannot be my disciple and talk about what this means.
In the last century, there was a man named Ernest Shackleton who led Polar Expeditions. Here was an ad that he placed at one point for people to come on his dangerous journeys. He said, “Men wanted for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition for those who return.” And you know what? Thousands and thousands of people applied.
Jesus has not held discipleship in the fine print of the New Testament. He said this is what it means to be my disciple. And so, there are three times here that Jesus says, you cannot be my disciple if this isn't true. First, he says this in verse 26. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” What he's saying here is you cannot be my disciple if you prioritize your relationships over being my disciple. Now, you may think that this is just something Jesus gave maybe to his immediate followers, but the verse right before this says that he was speaking to a large crowd.
So, this was the moment where he had a bunch of people gathered. He could have said well, let me just try to keep the crowd coming, but what he does instead is he says, listen, if you don't hate your mother and father, you cannot be my disciple. Certainly, you hear that and you say, well, hating your mother and father, that doesn't sound like a good option. Doesn't sound very biblical. Hating your brother and sister. And most people who comment on these things say that this is just a word of juxtaposition. It's not saying to literally hate your father and mother, but it's saying if you don't prefer Jesus over your close relationships, that what will happen is you will find yourself at odds with what it means to be a disciple.
Some of us who are gathered here know exactly what this means, whether it was literally our father and mother, whether it was friends, whether it was coworkers, maybe a spouse. But you will find that when you journey spiritually, that there are times you have to journey alone because there are people, even some of the people closest to you, who will say don't get all carried away with this faith thing. Don't let this faith thing drive everything in your life. Don't let this be the thing that drives you. And as a result, what some of us will do is we'll say, well, I'll be a Christian in name, but a disciple hurts a lot because that's going to put me at a little bit of odds with some key relationships. And again, Jesus’ words, not mine. If you don't prioritize your relationships, his words, if you don't hate your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, he says you cannot be my disciple.
Part of being a Christian at times will be being abandoned in some close relationships, being mistreated by people who we're close to. In fact, in First Peter, chapter two, we see that this was true for Jesus. Verse 23 and following it says, “When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. ‘He himself bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’ For ‘you were like sheep going astray,’ but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” And so, Jesus even found that his way of life was often opposed, and He was mistreated. He says, if you're going to be my follower, there's going to be some of that in your own life.
Then we see not only if we prioritize our relationships over being a disciple, we cannot be his disciple, but I would say our reputation. This is verse 27. It says this, “And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” So again, Jesus uses this phrase, cannot be my disciple. And a cross, certainly, is an image of sacrifice, but I would say reputation because when somebody had to carry their cross, the other thing that they would often do is have to carry it through the streets. And everybody would say, you are somebody who's been convicted of a crime, and there would be a sense of shame and their reputation being besmirched. And obviously their life was about to end as they were about to be crucified, but this cross language says something about a willingness to say, I am willing to give my reputation to be a follower of Jesus.
I believe there's been a shift in our culture in recent years. I've been in church ministry for a couple of decades now. When I started, what was generally true is if you were a Christian in the culture, people were like, well, that's fine if that works for you. What's happened now, and this is especially true those of you who are kind of coming out of high school, young adults, you know how aggressive this can be if you hold to Christian views, biblical views, you aren't just considered somebody who has a different take, but your views are often considered dangerous and antithetical to everything that's good in the world. And as a result, there's a sense in which Jesus’ words, unless you take up your cross and let your reputation be my reputation and you identify with the cross, you cannot be my disciple, are actually incredibly pointed to where we live today.
Then I would say this third instance where Jesus uses this phrase comes after he's now told the two stories in verse 33. It says this, “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” So, his third time using this phrase, you cannot be my disciples. Here he's talking about our resources. He's saying, if you don't prioritize or if you prioritize your own resources over being a disciple, you cannot be a disciple. And what he's doing here once again, is he's saying that if your life is all about what you can get, what you can do, then you are missing this idea of a call.
In 1976, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book How Should We Then Live? And it's considered one of those classic Christian books that a lot of people have read over time and probably most of us who are gathered here today weren't even born in 1976. But here's what he said. And he makes this argument at one point, he says that personal peace and affluence are two of the impoverished values that Christians had adopted. And he's talking about 1976. And he said basically that they keep us from being followers of Jesus.
Here's how he put it. He said, “Personal peace means just to be let alone. Not to be troubled by the troubles of other people whether across the world or across the city. But to live one's life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the results will be in the lifetimes of the people around me. Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity, a life made up of things, things and more things, and a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.”
The reason I found that striking just with this is that was written nearly 50 years ago, and he was saying here is the the state of what's going on in our world. He was saying that what keeps us from being disciples in some ways is our desire to be comfortable and our desire to say, I want more and more affluence. And Jesus’ words are just saying, if you don't use what you have for something greater than that, then you will miss.
There's another writer who wrote more recently who coined the phrase moral therapeutic deism. This is Christian Smith. And the idea was that for many people, what faith comes down to is this idea of simply saying, I want to have something that gives me some kind of a moral compass. I want therapeutic. I want to feel better about myself. And I want a God who's detached, deism, rather than a personal God who I'm a disciple of, apprenticed myself to, and live my life in conjunction with what God asked me to do.
And so, what does a disciple mean? Let me just give you three kind of ideas of what a disciple means from the Word from this passage. The first, being a disciple means that you learn the teachings of Jesus Christ, and this speaks about a kind of content that becomes true in our lives. And if you think about it, if you were to apprentice yourself to somebody in a field that you cared deeply about and you said, this is really important, what you would do is you would say, I want to learn everything that this person has to say about this issue. If you trusted them implicitly and said, wherever they've gone, I want to go. There's an element of saying, if I am a follower of Jesus, then I want to learn the teachings of Jesus in such a way that I understand everything that Jesus has taught. This is something where we say, I will not just kind of casually learn the teachings, but I will learn these in every area of my life.
I've had the privilege because of what I do vocationally, to spend a lot of time studying the Bible. One of the things that strikes me about studying the Bible is that as much as I feel like I know every time I study it, I feel like I learn something new, and I'm always learning and amazed at how little I know. And what happens for some of us is we think, well, I've already read the Bible, I've already got the teachings down. Now I need to move on to something else. The teachings of Jesus are so rich. The teachings of the Scripture are so filled that you can spend your lifetime studying them and never exhaust, never understand all of the nuances, all of the ideas, and all of the richness of what is here. And so, it's saying, I will have the teachings of the Scriptures on my mind all the time.
There's a song that Ray Charles recorded years ago that is by many called the official song of Georgia. I don't know if it's actually the official song, but Georgia on My Mind was saying that Georgia was always on his mind. Well, being a disciple means that the teachings of Jesus are always on your mind. So, learning the teachings about content.
Secondly, following the ways of Jesus in this speaks about our character. This is really the idea of saying, if we're going to be a disciple and apprentice to Jesus, it means that what we do is we say, now my life will start to look like Jesus in the very places that I live and move. So, if you're in education, if you're in medicine, if you're in construction, if you're in entertainment, what would it look like to live like Jesus in this space?
There was a phrase that was used to kind of talk about this, some people have uncovered, tried to uncover, saying follow in the dust of your rabbi. The idea was that as your rabbi, your teacher, the one you were apprenticing too, discipling too, would walk, and you'd be so close behind the rabbi that the dust would be gathering on you because you were trying to emulate the life that this person lived. And what this simply means is that if you or I are going to be a disciple, we say, what does it look like to live and embody who Jesus is, what Jesus is about in the places that I live and move today.
Sometimes people will have this idea that living a life of faith is not that exciting. And what I have said many times to people who have that kind of mindset is that it's not that it's unexciting, it's that it's untried. Try to actually say, what would it look like for me to embody who Jesus is, where I live, and you will not find faith boring. You will find faith incredibly challenging and incredibly fulfilling.
Then the third part of this idea of being a disciple, a follower of Jesus, is this idea of investing all in the cause. And this speaks about contribution. And this is just simply saying this idea isn’t as much embedded in the word disciple as it is in verse 33, where he says this. “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.” You may hear this and initially say, okay, well, this is just about my money. And as long as I give a little money, then I've done that. But I don't think that's ultimately what Jesus was talking about here when he says give up everything. What he's talking about is that you have a reorientation of your life from simply saying, I do life and I tip God a little bit with my time, my money, or whatever to saying my life is about helping more and more people find and follow Jesus Christ. And that's a restatement of the Great Commission Matthew 28. Go into all the world make disciples, evangelizing them, baptizing them, and teaching them to observe all. Help them find, evangelize, and teach them all, follow Jesus Christ.
I love one of the stories we looked at several weeks ago. It's in Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats. And one reason I love the story is that it's talking about the end of time, the judgment, and that there's sheep and goats. And in some ways, it's a foreboding image. But what I love is that when it talks about the people who are the sheep, the people who were part of the kingdom, the disciples, the statement from the people was, well, when did we help you, serve you? And he said, as much as you have given a cup of cold water in my name.
The reason I love that so much is sometimes when we hear things like leave everything, and follow and serve Jesus, we turn this into this idea that says, I have to do everything. But Jesus’ standard for this at least, was give a cup of cold water. The reason I like that image so much is it's simple, and it's what's right in front of you. It isn't asking you necessarily to do something that you aren't capable of in the moment. In other words, he didn't say as much as you have created an irrigation system that will give water to everyone in the world, or as much as you haven't been able to figure out how to solve world hunger. But he says, you fed me. You gave me a cup of water. That was you acting out your faith. In other words, it's saying, what can I do that's right in front of me that that serves the world and helps people come toward faith in Jesus Christ. That is what it is to invest all in the kingdom of God.
Now, I would imagine, just as I've kind of talked through this a little, that this creates a little dissonance for some of us. And the reason this can create dissonance is because there's a little piece of us that says, well, how much of a disciple do I need to be to know that I'm right with God? And Jesus creates a little tension when He teaches this because again, these are His words, not my words. You cannot be my disciple if you don't do these things, basically. And yet the consistent teaching in the Bible over and over again, Ephesians, chapter two, verse eight, it's not your works, but it's by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ and what He's done.
And so, the tension becomes how do I live in the reality that it isn't about me, and yet Jesus says, but if you don't follow me, if you're not my disciple in these ways, then you aren't my disciple. I think that the tension lives in thinking about direction, not perfection. In other words, being able to say, what direction am I walking and living today? Am I concerned to say I want to be Jesus’ disciple, because that's evidence that you've actually said, I want Jesus to be my Lord and my Savior.
And Jesus’ stories, don't be like the person basically who starts a tower and says, I'm going to do this, but doesn't understand that following Jesus will cost you something relationally, reputationally, and with your resources. Don't be that person. Don't be like the king who starts a battle and hasn't figured out the cost of it all. But he says, understand that there is something that is asked of you if you're going to be my disciple. But you know what else Jesus says in Luke 18? There's no one who's left homes and fathers and mothers and everything for me who hasn't received back many times as much. In other words, the unblemished promise of God is that what you give to him, he not only gives back, but he multiplies in your life. So, it may sound daunting. And yet what Jesus has said is, when you trust me, I will work in your life in ways that you can't even account for and don't even understand, but you will end up in a better place for having followed me than you would be if you don't.
Now again, I understand that some of us would say, well, wait, how did that work? I've still had this trial, this difficulty, this hardship along the way. But his point is this. He says, if you want to be my disciple, you're going to give up some things but I'm going to work in your life because in following Jesus, what happens is God transforms our lives in ways that align us with the principles of the one who created the world. And it puts us in a place where we experience the goodness of God.
I'm going to just ask you to bow your head and pray with me for a moment. And as you do that, let me just ask you this question, and that is, have you been holding out in an area of what it means to be a disciple? And if so, what do you do with Jesus’ simple words, you cannot be my disciple. Maybe today is just a day for you to acknowledge that to God and to give it to Him. Maybe this is just a moment for you to say, God, I know that I've wanted to be a Christian culturally, but maybe not a follower or an apprentice. Maybe this is just a moment to say, God, I will trust you with my one and only life.
God, I pray today that you would help each one of us to not just identify what it means to be a person of faith, but to know that being a disciple is something that is a call and that a faith that is merely convenient is not the same as being a disciple. And yet, at the same time, we would be motivated to say that what you offer is good and beautiful and right. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.