Sermon Tone Analysis
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FAN OR FOLLOWER LUKE 14:25-35
In 28 days, college football will be kicking off another season.
For those of us who live in the south, football is talked about 365 days out of the year, especially here in the state of Alabama.
In fact, if you are born here your parents will encourage you to pull for the team that they root for and by the time you are of a certain age, then you must declare your allegiance to either Auburn or Alabama.
If you move here, you are amazed at the enthusiasm that this state has for football and if you have no loyalty to a team then you declare either Auburn or Alabama as your team.
Football fans are fanatics about their team.
They wear hats, shirts, sleepwear and other paraphernalia to show support for their team.
People will spend hours getting everything done before sitting down and watching a three hour game.
If you go to the game, you must get there early enough to grill out and see the pre-game activities.
For some fans, they drive to the campus of their school and watch the game on television outside the stadium.
Fans go crazy about their teams.
But fans are also finicky about their teams as well.
Fans will yell at the T.V. as if the players could hear them and criticize the coach as if he would take their advice.
When the team is bad, fans believe that they have every right to bad mouth the players and coach.
It is funny to listen to sports radio after the game and hear how they would have done things different if they coached the team.
If things are good, then the stands are full and the fans are happy.
The sad reality is that many so-called Christians are like these football fans.
As long as there is excitement and activities for them and their family they keep coming, but when things go awry they have a tendency to criticize everything that is done and plus never come to help.
Jesus understood this phenomenon.
Over the past three weeks, we have studied the Great Commission in Matthew 28.
Jesus, just before he left, gathered His disciples one final time to give them their mission, their purpose, their goal for existing.
The reason the Lord leaves us here after we are saved is to make disciples.
This is reason the church exists.
This is our mission.
If our mission is to make disciples, then we need to know what a disciple looks like.
A disciple is a follower, a learner.
He is more than just a fan of Christ; he is a follower, learner of Christ.
One scholar said, “The disciple is one who at Jesus’ call follows after Him.
He must observe the will of God and even binding upon himself unreservedly to the person of Jesus; go as far as death and the gift of his life out of love.”
In other words, discipleship is a call to follow, a call to submission, and a call to obedience.
Yet, there are some in Christianity who make a distinction between a believer and a disciple.
A believer is one who comes to Christ for forgiveness and eternal life, but lives a life of indifference to the salvation they received.
A disciple is a person who moves from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity.
In other words, you can be a believer without being a disciple.
I don’t think this is so.
In fact, I confident enough in the Word to know this is not so.
There is no second-level Christianity that Jesus is calling believers to.
If this were so, then you would change the entire dynamic of Jesus ministry from calling sinners to salvation to calling first-level Christians to become second-level Christians.
Jesus command was clear in Matthew 28 in that we are to make disciples.
If you will take your Bibles and open to Luke 14 beginning in verse 25 through 35 to see what a true disciple looks like.
In order for us to understand this passage, we must get a little background to what is taking place.
As you read the gospel of Luke, Luke tells us that Jesus had twelve who were constantly with Him; but He had other disciples as well.
In fact, He had all kinds of disciples.
Some are nominally committed, some are truly committed, some are barely committed at all and some are not even committed; they’re just there out of curiosity.
And as Jesus, through His ministry, raises the bar, raises the standard, makes the demands more absolute, more exclusive and more extreme, the superficial disciples begin to drop off.
In chapter 14, Jesus begins to explain to the crowd that was following Him that He wanted them to know who could be My disciple.
He was not generally addressing disciples or talking about disciples, but He wanted a specific type of disciple.
So three times in eleven verses, Jesus described what being His disciple entailed.
He was not out to deceive the public in order to get great crowds to follow Him.
He was not going to manipulate anyone who was not willing to be committed to be His disciple.
He was here explaining that those who come to salvation must understand what is involved.
You see we come to eternal life of Christ’s terms, not our own terms.
This is what Jesus was saying in the parable of the dinner.
God through the prophets of the Old Testament was inviting Israel and its leaders to come to the Messiah.
And yet when the Messiah showed up, they refused, they rejected Him.
Why?
They were trusting in their ancestry, heritage and genealogy of being a Jew to get them to heaven.
They were trusting in their traditions, ceremonies and rituals to provide them with eternal life.
In other words, it was who they were and what they did that was going to get them to God.
But Jesus said it is none of those things that provide salvation.
It is a personal relationship with the living God, who provided the way through His Son, Jesus Christ that gets us to heaven.
Therefore, in the parable of the dinner, the time came for the banquet and Jesus went out to receive the King’s guests; but they refused to come giving one excuse after another.
So Jesus turned to the crowd that was following Him that day and made sure they understood the demands of being Jesus’ disciple.
He wanted know misconceptions or misunderstandings about following Him.
This is Jesus the evangelist giving a call for salvation.
Yet, tragically there are many today who offer a different gospel than the one given by Jesus.
There are some people who are very confused about this and they have left a huge trail of confusion through evangelical Christianity.
The idea that somehow there is a possibility of being saved without ever really following Christ.
There is the possibility of acknowledging Jesus as Savior, without acknowledging Him as Lord.
There is the possibility of praying a prayer and being given a gift of salvation with absolutely no commitment, even without repentance.
What Jesus issues here is extreme, but it is a call to salvation.
This is a message that rescues one from hell and gives them heaven.
Jesus wants us to know the tares from the wheat, the chaff from the grain, and the sheep from the goats.
What Jesus creates the enemy tries to recreate, what Jesus calls real the enemy provides a counterfeit, and who Jesus gives life to the enemy tries to destroy.
So Jesus does not want any false impressions of who might or might not be His disciple.
Therefore, He spells it out in clear terms this is what a disciple looks like.
This is who we are to be in Christ and the type of people we are to make, according to the Great Commission.
In these verses, Jesus is calling those who would like to be His disciples.
So He provides three truths about a disciple.
A disciple understands the priority in following Christ, the price for following Christ, and the peril of not following Christ.
A DISCIPLE UNDERSTANDS THE PRIORITY IN FOLLOWING CHRIST
What Jesus is saying in the verses to follow is that this call to be a disciple is not about an extreme makeover, but is a total takeover.
In other words, there are many who can make dramatic changes in their lives without ever consulting with God or following Christ.
There are many who have the will power to overcome addictions and other bad habits if they want to bad enough.
But Jesus wants His disciples to follow Him at all cost.
He calls His disciples to allow Him now to be in charge of their lives.
He wants our mind, heart and will.
In verses 26, 27, and 33, Jesus tells us that our priorities must change.
Prior to coming to Christ our number one priority was ourselves, second was family and third was our possessions.
We made sure our needs were met, our family was taken care of, and our possessions were secure.
But here Jesus says disciples are to have a dramatic change in heart.
First, let us look at verse 26.
*If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters. .
.he cannot be My disciple.
*Wow!
What a statement?
If were are going to come after Christ, which means we are the initial act of faith.
Jesus said *anyone *who *comes to Me* for salvation, for eternal life must understand that priorities must change.
This all inclusive term *anyone* means all.
There are no exceptions to the rule.
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