Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2004 : July 7, 2004
Do You Really Want to Follow Jesus?
Pentecost 6
Why do you buy seeds? Do you buy them to admire their beauty? Do you proudly put your seed on display in your house for all to see? Of course not. You want them to grow into some sort of plant -- and those you want to display.
Why do you start a church? Do you want it to start off with 25 members and in 25 years still have 25 members? Of course not. You want a church to grow as well -- not to be put on display, but to bring glory to God and his message of salvation to as many as you can. You want it to grow.
I recently read about a wise, elderly pastor who encouraged a younger pastor with the words: "Try to keep your congregation as small as you can." He wasn't saying you shouldn't reach out with the gospel, but that you should be so clear about God's grace in Christ Jesus as well as clear about what Christ demands of you as his follower, that only those who have counted the cost and are ready to give up all for Christ will join themselves to you.
So I now ask you a very pointed question: Do You Really Want to Follow Jesus? Jesus basically asked that question of three men in this section of the Bible that we'll be looking at: "Do you really want to follow me?"
Let's read verse 57. "As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, 'I will follow you wherever you go.' " This man was willing to follow Jesus -- and not just a little, but wherever it took him and whatever it took to do it. But Jesus could see that the man wasn't ready to do that -- at least not yet. So Jesus replied in verse 58, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." This man didn't want to give up the comforts and security of the things that this world had to offer. He needed to focus on the spiritual side of life, not the physical. A baby growing up might like the security that a security blanket gives him, but you eventually want to wean him away from that needless security. In the same way, Jesus was telling this man that he had to leave the security of the world behind and trust completely in Christ and his promises. In other words, the follower of Jesus trusts no earthly security.
You can see the eagerness the man had, but what would happen when the going got tough. It is very similar to a new recruit going off to Iraq. He or she would be very optimistic, bold, confident and seemingly invincible. Talk to a soldier who has been there for a year after they've seen and experienced fear and chaos and vulnerability and death and innocent victims. Being ten feet from an explosion on TV and being 10 feet from the actual thing are two very different things. If some soldiers knew beforehand what war was really like, you wonder how many of them would never have gone in the first place.
The same is true with following Jesus. It's not going to be a cake walk. Do you really want to follow Jesus? You'll have to give up all of your earthly security. Can you be like Job in the Old Testament, who lost everything he had -- wealth, power, even all ten of his children -- all in a matter of minutes? After such tragedy, could you say, like he said, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; the name of the LORD be praised"? Can you be like the widow in the New Testament who had lost her husband and with him all earthly support, but was willing to give her last funds, worth less than a penny, into the offering plate to further the Lord's work?
Why should you be willing to give up all earthly security in order to follow Jesus? For this simple yet profound reason -- Jesus was not only willing to give up all for you and me, but he did give up all for you and me and a world full of other sinners. As God, Jesus had everything -- all glory and honor and authority. He exchanged it for poverty -- he had no place to lay his head during his earthly ministry. He exchanged his throne for a smelly stable filled with smelly animals and smellier humans because they lacked the righteousness they should have had. He exchanged being everything to being nothing, a servant, a wrongly-accused criminal. He exchanged praises for jeers, and honor for mockery. He exchanged heaven for hell so you would never have to go there. As Paul said, "He made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant…he became obedient to death -- even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:7-8)
Why should you be willing to give up all of your earthly security to follow Jesus? Because Jesus has already washed away all your sins by his blood and given you heaven as a gift which is yours simply through believing that he did what he said -- for you.
It seems that wanting to follow Jesus would be obvious after we know what Jesus has done for us, but many things get in the way. The first man's problem was with the things of this world. The second man's problem was with something else.
Look at verses 59 and 60.
He said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."
There are some places in the Bible where Jesus says things that seem very uncharacteristic of him. Here is one of those instances. Is Jesus being cruel to this man who just lost his father? Knowing Jewish burial customs might shed some light on the situation. A body was buried soon after the person died. But then one year later, after the first burial, the son would return to re-bury the bones in a special box. The reason was to make room for another body if another person in the family died, because space was at a premium. If that's the situation here, then this man who has been called by Jesus could be asking for up to a year's delay before following Jesus! Jesus says, "Others can take care of that, my friend -- the demands of the Kingdom are more urgent -- my call cannot wait! So let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead. You have more important work to do -- tell others about me."
Why would proclaiming the kingdom of God be more important than even the most important of earthly customs and earthly ties to friends and family? Because only those who trust in Jesus as their Savior when they die will go to heaven. Otherwise when they die physically, they will also die eternally. So Jesus says that the tie of faith that binds you to him is more important than any earthly tie, even that of family.
Jesus here following him is urgent and is you priority. Young people often have the attitude, "I'll follow Jesus later on. I've other more important things to attend to right now. My career, my education, my girlfriend, my boyfriend. I've got to provide a nest egg for my family first." If following some earthly tie is more important now, who knows if that will change? Jesus said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." What's your priority?
So Jesus tells us that if we really want to follow him, we can trust no earthly security and be bound by no earthly ties that get in the way of our spiritual tie to him. Jesus backs it up in his conversation with a third man.
Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family." Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."
Here Jesus focuses our attention on the goal we have as his followers. We feel that we are marching along in life, and all these voices are calling to us to listen to them. It's distracting. It diverts our attention. We start looking this way and that way and wonder which way we should go. We zig, and we zag. So Jesus is here warning about earthly distractions. We can think of a number of people in the Bible who fell prey to distractions that kept them from the goal of heaven. One was Lot's wife who turned back to look at the burning city of Sodom as it was being turned into ruin by God's wrath. She was not fit for service in the kingdom. Judas was another, who let greed divert him from his Savior.
Jesus used an illustration to describe it. "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." Have you ever wondered how farmers can plow their fields so straight? I always wondered that as a kid. I thought they must have had some big, complicated machine that keeps them going in the right direction. Obviously, I didn't grow up on a farm. Any farmer knows how it's done. The first furrow is the important one. You look to the end of the field and pick out a tree and sight the front of the tractor on that tree. If you keep your eye on that tree, by the time you get to end of the field, the furrow will be straight, which would make the rest of the furrows straight as well. But if you looked back to see how well you were doing, the furrow would be a zig-zag.
There will be many things and many people who try to get you to stop looking to Jesus in your life. They'll show you how fun the life of this world can be, but they don't tell you that it's only temporary. They'll show you all the things you can accumulate in this world, but they don't tell you that the whole world is worth nothing compared to your soul. They'll try to convince you how much more important this and that thing is right now, or how much more important this or that person is right now, but they won't tell you that if you continue to follow them, you will be condemned for eternity. Only Jesus tells you: "I am the way and the truth and life. No one can come to the Father (and enjoy the heaven I won for all) except through me." Jesus wants us to keep looking ahead -- to him and toward heaven.
Robert Frost once wrote a famous poem called "The Road Not Taken." In it, a man was walking in the woods and came to a fork in the road. The poem ends:
Two roads diverge in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
As a Christian, you will have that fork in the road everyday of your lives, many times each day. You will have to choose to follow either, on the one hand, earthly securities, earthly ties and earthly distractions, or, on the other, Jesus. It won't be easy following Jesus. It's the way less traveled. When you are posed the question everyday, "Do you really want to be a follower of Jesus?" think of how Jesus counted the dreadful cost of being sacrificed for your sins and suffering hell in your place so you could have heaven. Think of Jesus when you come to those forks in the road, and may the Holy Spirit guide you to say, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Amen.
