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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the text comes from the Gospel reading. You may be seated. In the Old Testament reading, it started out with some pretty black and white, yes or no, for or against kind of proclamation. Here is kind of the summary: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you Life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him, for he is your life and your length of days.” That same concept is what Jesus proclaimed in this morning’s gospel reading.
Kind of a full disclosure, nothing hidden, no surprises, no fine print—this is the life of the baptized child of God. Both promises for being able to strengthen you and enable you to finish the course, but also warnings about what’s within your bosom and between your ears, not to mention this world and Satan. This struggle… that he has placed you in, and about which we just sang in that hymn, this struggle is a very real struggle. You’ve experienced the struggle as a baptized child of God.
But the struggle that you experience, you don’t really ever experience unless you’re coming up against your own flesh and blood, your own heart and mind, or against this world or against Satan. And you have to suffer for being God’s child. Otherwise, you don’t struggle in this life, do you? There is no struggle for the unbeliever. Oh, they have struggles, mind you, but nothing like your struggles as a baptized child of God. You struggle differently. You struggle with your own flesh. An unbeliever does not.
And this life into which you and I have been called and which Jesus is very open about in this morning’s Gospel reading is a life that is not about good intentions. It is about good intentions. For St. Bernard of Clairvaux said very clearly, “hell is paved with good intention, the road to hell.” He is speaking some very serious words about discipleship, but he’s speaking serious words about your discipleship and my discipleship, not about the world, but about you and me. Jesus speaks about three entailments that cause you and I the most struggle in this life.
The first, family. Jesus said, “Now Jesus is not breaking the fourth commandment in saying this, because the fourth commandment still stands.” What Jesus is referring to is loving our family more than we love God. Is that even possible? Yes, it is, because there’s a lot of people who don’t go to church because of their family, meaning they would rather make their family happy by staying behind rather than leaving their family and attending. There are many people who do not stand up for Christ because they don’t want to offend their husband or wife or their daughter or son or their mother or father. That’s the first entailment.
The second one is kind of a summary of the first and the third, and that is, “whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Take for a moment that statement, carry your own cross. You don’t carry your own cross unless you’re going toward what end? Dying to yourself. The only reason Jesus bore a cross was because he bore it to die on it. The only reason you bear a cross is to die to yourself daily and to live as a baptized child of God, not as one who does not have father or mother, but as one who has been adopted by the Father in heaven.
The third entailment is summarized in one verse, although he talks about it in several verses prior to that: “So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Loving possessions, loving comfort, loving something in this world or this world itself more than him and our inheritance. That’s why he said about the king, “count the cost.” That’s also why St. Bernard of Clairvaux said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But good intentions do not save your soul. Christ saves your soul. And he saves the souls of those who know they cannot be saved by anything other than his obedience and his perfect death for them.
Your and my discipleship in Christ Jesus, having been baptized into him, is not just today. It’s a lifelong journey. It is a lifelong learning and listening to the words of our Master. And we are torn in this world to have many masters, but there is only one Master that we need to listen to, and that is the master who sacrificed himself for the servants.
These three things that I just mentioned are lifelong impediments. Lifelong entailments. Think about the things in your family. Some of you have had no struggle. Your parents brought you to church. You’ve never had to deal with that. But there are a lot of people who have. Talk with them and find out what it’s like because it’s a totally different world than the world isolated that you may have grown up in. Talk with someone whose wife is not a believer or whose husband is not a believer and find out the struggle that they go through. But probably the one that you know affects you if you have children is your children and their relationship with the Lord.
Then all of a sudden we begin to realize this comes close to home, doesn’t it? You see, it’s interesting. Family does not really enter in until it’s blood. And when it’s blood, boy, does it enter into our world with our Lord Jesus. And though we may have grown up in a family that went to church, and though we may have married a spouse who believes, we may not always have that gift with children.
There are more than enough of you who have shared your stories with me. Thank you for your faithfulness, because it’s hard to be faithful even when children are faithless. And you begin to wonder. Satan picks that scab, doesn’t he? He causes us to question whether we did something wrong, whether we shouldn’t have done this or that. This happened in our life. This tragedy befell us. In all of that, God promises you and ensures that you can expect from him lifelong being upheld. He will uphold you with his holy word preached and planted in your ears. And he will uphold you with distributing himself and forgiveness in the Lord’s Supper.
But he wants you to expect that as a baptized child of God, you will suffer for your faith. And if you have not, either you’re blind or you have been blessed beyond anyone else that I know of. You can expect these struggles in your life. And if they haven’t come, they will come. And having come, don’t submit to it.
The same thing was talked about in the seed and the sower, the carving in the front of the pulpit. Many times the Lord’s word comes into your ears and it falls like on hard soil. The birds scoop it up and take it away. It’s like it goes in one ear and out the other, and we don’t get it. Expect that to happen, but don’t submit to it. Sometimes you’re sitting in the pew and the word of God comes to you and you receive it with great joy, but it’s on shallow soil, and when the trials and tribulations of this life begin to come upon you for these things, we don’t want to suffer.
Expect that to happen, but don’t submit to it. Sometimes the Word of God will come to you, and it will grow mightily in your life, but it’s among weeds and thorns, or the cares and concerns of this life, worries about possessions and family, and we will walk away from it because we don’t want to suffer. Expect that to happen, Jesus is telling us in this text, but don’t submit to it.
It is the same with the good soil. At times, God does, by God’s grace, make that seed stick in your heart and grow and produce a crop. Jesus is also telling you, expect it and submit to it. Submit to it.
Do you remember when Jesus was preaching and teaching, and there were so many people gathered around him that his own mother, Mary, and his brothers could not reach him? And one of the apostles says to Jesus, “Jesus, your mother and brothers are here.” Do you remember what Jesus said? He said, “My mothers and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” He is not disrespecting his own flesh and blood mother. But he is setting a difference. That same difference that you and I either have already experienced or will experience at some point in our life. This is the life of a baptized believer. And Jesus talks about counting the cost so that we finish it.
Not so that we can find all these glorious things about which we can pat ourselves on the back, but just to finish the life of faith. That we hear the words, “well done, good and faithful servant.” Not “good and successful servant.” Not “good and had everything in your back pocket taken care of servant,” but just “good and faithful servant.” We have to lose the world. And that is not enjoyable.
Being one of the followers of Christ, because every part of your life is honed in on making a name for yourself in this life or in your little world. It even comes upon us as pastors and church workers to make our mark, just like it is for you, to make your mark in the company or what have you. We have to let go of this world and its accolades. That’s what Jesus is saying.
In doing so, in this struggle in which he’s placed us, he does not leave us without help. We have been given the resources to finish this course of faith. We’ve been given the very things to enable us to complete the race because the one who sacrificed himself said, “It is complete, it is finished for you.” That’s sustaining you and enabling you to have his completion be your completion. His finish be your finish.
Now, not everybody has ears to hear, Jesus makes very clear. Not everybody has eyes to see, as Jesus says, these words that he speaks to us this morning. But you have ears to hear, and you have eyes to see, for you are God’s baptized little girl or little boy. You are his child. And he’s calling you to daily be hearers of the word, to daily follow him to the cross and follow him to the empty tomb. Amen.
For the way to heaven is through the cross and through the empty tomb for you. In the name of Jesus, who said it is finished for you. Amen. The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
