What Must I Love to Be Saved?
TranscriptioN
Well, good morning again, my friends. It is good to see you this morning. Thanks for being here. In today's gospel passage, we're coming off the heels of where we were last week in Luke chapter 14.
Now Jesus moves from addressing the Pharisees to addressing the crowds, and here he's sharing how one is to follow him to enter the life that's present in the kingdom of God, but there's also some warnings for those who are going to follow Jesus about the costliness of following him and the risk that's involved. Think of him like a pioneer. Jesus is somebody who's blazing a path forward, and he's calling them into this journey, into new creation, into the kingdom of God, into all that God has made them to be, but he's also warning them that it's going to be a hard, hard road, and even though it's going to be a hard road, it's going to be worth it.
Remember that for the Jew listening to Jesus in the first century, salvation is a very temporal and earthly matter. It is not somewhere above the earth or out there in the future, another reality than what we have right now, but for them listening, salvation or deliverance is this entrance into this new age that they're expecting where God reigns over his people, and they are living in his kingdom, and while there is a future component to the kingdom of God, it is here and now. It is broken into our reality through the life in the ministry of Jesus, and so even though we can talk in some ways about the future of the kingdom of God, the good news of it is that it is right now.
It is currently happening, and so following Jesus becomes this lifetime of salvation work. It is not just saved for some future reality, it is delivered from a present reality and into a present reality. Following Jesus is a lifetime of salvation.
It's the hard work of daily deliverance from worldly attachments in order to rightly align our loves and rightly order them, and I know somewhere in the Gospels it says somebody comes to Jesus and they ask him, what must I do to be saved? And that it's almost like in this passage Jesus is functionally telling them the better question is, what must I love to be saved? How do I arrange my loves would be the sort of question behind this discussion, and that is a lot harder for the northern Virginian, because we are good at making checklists, knocking things out. There's a predisposition to a type of workaholism that is ingrained in this culture, but instead of what must I do to be saved, which in some ways is easier, what must I love to be saved? What do I have to love? How do I arrange my loves to be delivered from the present evil age? So what Jesus is calling us to in this passage is to follow him along this lifetime journey of rightly ordering our loves and to become attached to the things of the kingdom of God and not the things of this world.
The Call To Discipleship
Jesus starts with a really hard saying. He says, whoever comes to him and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and his children, brothers and sisters, yes even his own life, cannot be my disciple. And that's one of those ones where you hear someone say, the word of the Lord? I think? You know, it's a tough one. So but he's telling then he tells them to carry their cross and to follow him.
What does this mean? Then in verse 33 says, you can't be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions. What we don't want to do is read this as, go live naked in the wilderness and then you can be Jesus's disciple. This would not be the right application to understanding what Jesus is calling us to.
In fact, that would be a contradiction to some of the other things that Jesus told us to do, which is to love our neighbors as ourselves. And so these two things are not in contradiction, but they are juxtaposed in a helpful way. So this is a call to allegiance to Jesus as our Lord and King.
And when we live in the allegiance to Jesus's Lord, it rightly arranges our loves in this taxonomy of affection for for who we love and what we love within this larger frame of loving Jesus first and all things being arranged in order around that, as he takes us along this lifetime journey of following him. It makes me think of my own story. So when I was 14, that's when I really started walking with the Lord, and I was awakened to the grace of God at that time.
And I was in a tradition that had a great divide between secular and Christian. Probably not a helpful thing to bifurcate as far as they did, but when I started following Jesus and taking that seriously, I knew that I needed something. I came to understand my need for Jesus, and to rightly understand the world around me, to rightly order my life around following him.
And that dictated how I responded to that need, which, as the 14-year-old boy in the context that I was in, was to sell off all my secular CDs. Kids, do you know what CDs are? Anybody know what a CD is? No? They're these cool little discs that look like mirrors. They have music on them.
Sometimes they hold data. It's back in the olden days. So, you know, if I look charitably on my little 14-year-old self, I bless that little 14-year-old's desires to unlearn the grammar of worldly attachment and disordered love.
That was a good desire in order to learn what the church has taught about the grammar of love and attachment when you're following Jesus. Now, if I were to look back, I actually really enjoyed those bands that I threw away, and it's kind of a bummer that I got rid of those CDs for a time, but, you know, but I did. In doing that, I got some time to rightly order my life around following Jesus, learned to put him first in key areas, and then, you know, I could reintroduce those things later once they didn't have the same pull or framing around my life that they once did, right? This is how we rightly order our affections in our lives around following Jesus.
So, as we rid ourselves and reframe our worldly attachments and reprioritize our loves, what's at stake is virtue. Life in the New Age, the ability to bless the goodness of creation and to name accurately what's broken around us and in ourselves, and it's so much more than just behavior modification. God doesn't want us just to, you know, be well-behaved humans.
There's so much more that we were made for. He wants us to be his image bearers fully, to experience his deeply personal, life-transforming, healing work that he is doing. It's called, the Church Fathers often call it, union with God.
This word fellowship, union with God's life. This is what God's made us for. You can think again, back to the garden, this is the life we were made for.
To be a disciple is to experience salvation now, deliverance in these different areas of our life, in marriage, in our singleness, in our friendships, in our parenting, in our work and vocation, in the ways that we're generous, in our forgiveness, in our love of other people, in welcoming the stranger. All of these areas are contexts for salvation, where the Holy Spirit rightly orders our loves and attachments. So how do all the stations and vocations of our lives become part of the journey of following Jesus, in living a life of virtue, and becoming people that are fully alive? That's the question, and that is a more holistic view of discipleship than just being more religious, doing a little bit better.
It is costly, and it is hard, and it's not something easily accomplished. This takes a lifetime of following Jesus. It's a lifetime of reprioritizing the things that we love.
When we feel like we've figured it out, something changes, and we start fresh. It's like raising children. When we think we've got it, they turn six, and then you're learning how to parent all over again, right? And so, as we follow Jesus, you know, we think we figured out, but it takes this constant dependence on the Lord to ask what he's teaching us in these various situations that we run into each day.
Counting the Cost
So Jesus tells the crowd about discipleship, and he's going to use a couple analogies. He talks about somebody who's intending to build a tower, and that person should figure out how much it's going to cost to complete a task. Otherwise, after laying a beautiful foundation, they're going to run out of money, and it's going to be this continual public joke that everybody drives by on their camel and looks at, and they say, oh, there's that lovely foundation where that builder couldn't finish what they started because they ran out of money.
And everyone in the town knows who that builder is, right? So what he's teaching us in this analogy is, it is so good for us to regularly take stock of what it's going to cost to be in allegiance, to live in allegiance to Jesus as Lord. If we're going to follow Jesus, and if we're going to go on this journey with him of putting away the things that we depend on, it's going to cost us putting away things that are broken and that are familiar. And he's going to bring us to places where we're going to have to trust him for what we don't really yet understand.
And I like this image of starting a building project, because I can imagine somebody sitting down, they've got this image of what they want to build in their mind, and they're asking the question, what do I need to get there? I'm going to create this budget, look at the different construction categories, the different phases of the project, how much cash do we have on hand, how much is coming in, and then we can consider whether this product is feasible. And this is compared to discipleship. So we need to regularly do some accounting work in discipleship, not QuickBooks, but like in our souls.
So think about what it looks like for you if you were a healthy follower of Jesus at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, at the end of your life. What does it look like if you were a healthy follower of Jesus? Notice what habits have started to calcify, what's formed that's keeping us from being honest with ourselves and other people? Are there grudges that we're holding on to, places of self- contempt that we haven't explored, or things that have developed that we need to talk with somebody about? Are there places of immaturity that we're starting to become aware of for the first time if we've hurt other people and then we figured that out? Are we ready to do the hard work of attempting to ask for forgiveness and aiming for repair in those relationships? What's it going to cost us to be a fully mature disciple of Jesus? What does it look like and what does it cost? Those are the spiritual accounting that we need to take stock of. And our New Testament reading was from the book of Philemon, and it is a really interesting and helpful example of this.
So he's this well-off individual in the church, and he has this slave who's run away, Onesimus, and Onesimus has become a Christian because of St. Paul's ministry, and tradition has it that eventually Onesimus actually becomes the Bishop of Ephesus, and he was the first one to collect St. Paul's letters. He's a really interesting person. Now imagine Philemon is receiving this letter from Paul, and he has found out that his runaway slave, who has, you know, cost him so much grief, has now become a Christian.
How do you react to that? What's going on inside Philemon? To follow Jesus well, if we read this letter, he's now confronted with some hard realities. First, he needs to change his thinking about the virtue of holding on to Onesimus as a slave, even though culturally it's appropriate and legal. While the Roman system didn't see slaves as full image-bearers of God, he now has to imagine and realize that Onesimus fully bears the image of God with him, and to allow this slave who broke the law to be received by him as a brother, if he's going to follow Jesus and experience Christian life fully.
Even Philemon would need to submit eventually to Onesimus's ecclesiastical authority. Isn't that wild? He was my slave, now he's my bishop, right? This is what he's gonna have to go through internally. There are some very earthly attachments, and we read behind the letter to Philemon, that it's gonna cost him to get rid of, or to change, to find the full life that Jesus wants to bring him into.
First, he's gonna have to change his mind, and he's gonna have to admit that he was wrong. That's hard. He's gonna have to give up his legal right to own another human as property.
That's hard. He's gonna have to let go of his desire to feel important as a man of status and wealth. He's gonna have to work through his feelings of anger about losing his investments.
Now, that's what it's gonna cost him at a very practical level here, to follow Jesus, to be fully formed as somebody who is following Jesus as his Lord, and set those worldly attachments aside to enter fully into life and what the kingdom of God could look like. It's only in the kingdom of God where your slave becomes your bishop. That's amazing.
Assessing the Risk of Discipleship
So Jesus had told this parable about counting the cost, and next he tells a parable about considering the risk that of what you're gonna have to undergo when following Jesus as Lord. He tells this parable about a king who's considering going to war with another king, and that king has to take inventory of his soldiers to see if this war that he's going to start with another king is viable. Does he have an army, a sizable army, that can confront the other side? And if it's not possible, then he needs to readjust, and he needs to make other plans to send a delegation to make peace before he's forced into a war that he can't win.
And so as I think of that first parable about counting the cost, that has a lot to do with initially stepping into following Jesus, taking the initiative to go into it. This one is about as you're following Jesus, you're constantly navigating the battle, the conflict that you're in, the ongoing battles that are going to happen as you follow Jesus. It invites us into an examination of our own capacity, and a bit of reflection before we run headlong into things that we don't yet have the capacity for because of our spiritual maturity.
Youthful vitality often has an excitement to run into things that outpace their character, and their capacity, and their skill. I think of my early 20s and all the missteps that I made professionally, by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and you know, wish I could go back 20 years and rectify those situations. But you know, I had to learn that stuff, and so praise God I wasn't a priest in my 20s.
So you need to build the capacity over time for the ways that you are following Jesus. He's not asking us to jump into the deep end when we don't know how to swim. So this passage about this king who's declaring war can be read as a grace to us.
No one expects a child to emotionally regulate themselves, articulate their longings clearly in abstract ways, and do the hard work of making repair when they've hurt each other when they're like younger than six. I know a lot of adults who have a hard time with this too, right? And so you know, but we don't expect a child to be to do that when they're not developed mentally, when they don't have the capacity yet. And these are skills that are developed over time in small ways, and our life like Jesus is a lot like that in the spiritual journey.
There's this kind invitation from Jesus to take one day at a time to grow, to build capacity in the small things, and to risk more and more and more reasonably as we move from the disorder of worldly attachments and disordered loves into the love of God and the life of the kingdom. St. Thomas Akempis said this well. He said, when a spirit of fervor is enkindled within you, you may well meditate on how you will feel when that fervor leaves.
So I take that to say, walk with Jesus, don't run. And I also find grace in this for myself, and I hope it's an encouragement for you this morning too. When you wonder why you're not further along than you should be, when I wonder why, why am I not as far along as I should be in my walk with Jesus? He's inviting us not into this unwieldy picture of perfection that we can't attain. He's in this life-changing image that's unattainable, but he's inviting us into just the next right step with him as we journey along this path of salvation.
Conclusion
Life is hard. Life is complicated. I hardly have to tell anybody that. If only it was as easy as asking this question, what do I have to do to be saved? But instead, Jesus is inviting us into something deeper, into rightly ordering our loves and affections and attachments, and asking this question, what do I have to love to be saved? He invites us into this lifelong journey of discipleship where we're daily counting the cost of what it means to be more like him each day. He invites us into his goodness and kindness in a life of following him in little things, more and more, so that we see more and more of life in the of God.
Life in the kingdom of God is where God's glory is shown when we become who God's made us each to be in our own uniqueness, and we can be honest and we can see God where we can repair brokenness in community, where the worries, the disorders, and the attachments of this world no longer have that same pull or power to draw us away from the goodness and the love and the presence of God. Let me pray for us. “Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, peace I give to you, my own peace I leave with you. Regard not our sins, but the faith of your church, and give to us the peace and unity of that heavenly city, where with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign now and forever. Amen.”
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.