Are you a true or a false disciple of Jesus Christ?
Hi.
Welcome to Little Lessons.
We've been talking on Little Lessons on a very important subject, the subject of discipleship,
because Jesus told his apostles, "Go all the world, make disciples.
Teach them to obey everything that I've commanded you."
That's what Jesus wants.
That should be every minister's goal.
That should be every church's mission statement.
That's what we ought to all personally be pursuing and we should be evaluating ourselves.
Am I truly a disciple of Christ?
If you've bought into the lie that you can be a believer in Jesus but not be his disciple,
well, that's a terrible lie to believe because it's a lie.
If you're not a disciple of Christ, you don't believe in him.
They are one in the same.
The true believers are all disciples.
All the disciples, they're the only true believers.
If you said, "I'm a believer but I'm not a disciple," you're not really a believer yet.
The preachers and the pastors who are presenting that kind of false dichotomy, they're doing
a huge disservice to their congregations and to their listeners because it's so easy to
see from the New Testament that that's erroneous.
Well, in our last Little Lesson, we were looking at Luke chapter 14 where Jesus, in front of
a huge group of people who are going along with him, he stops and he tells them, "Here's
what you have to do.
If you don't do this, you're not my disciple."
The first thing, he says, "You've got to hate the people you naturally love the most."
We interpret that simply as meaning that my love for my family, in comparison to my love
for Jesus, my love for my family almost has to see my hatred because I love Jesus so much.
I love Jesus with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength because I believe he's God and
God deserves, God alone deserves that kind of love.
It's great to ask yourself the question, "Do I love Jesus supremely?
Is that reflected in what I do in my life?
When I have to make a decision between loving one person or loving another one."
Again, there's not always a conflict.
I love my wife and my children dearly.
Generally, there's no conflict between my love for my wife and my children and my grandchildren,
my love, and my love for Jesus.
In fact, I consider my love for my wife as part of an expression of my love for Jesus
as well as for my children and my grandchildren.
If Jesus is telling me, "David, I want you to spend two months overseas every year.
Because of that, you're going to be apart from your family," and I said, "No.
I love my family too much," that would be a sign that I don't love him enough and that
I'm not his disciple.
Glad that in my own life I at least have a chance to evaluate that by some of the things
that I sense that God's calling me to do.
We all have those opportunities, don't we?
We have to make a decision.
It's Jesus or this person that I love.
Some families, I've heard stories, I'm glad this has never happened to me, I guess, where
the gauntlet is laid down by Christians' loved ones.
They say, "If you're going to do that Jesus stuff, you're no longer a part of our family."
That happens around the world in places where other religions are very dominant and so forth.
Those people make the decision to follow Christ.
They make it very plain and clear, "We love Jesus the most."
You need to think about that.
We all need to think about that.
Look at your life.
Does it reflect you love Jesus the most?
Well, Jesus continued.
Luke chapter 14, here's the sermon, verse 27, "Whoever does not carry his own cross
and come after me can not be my disciple."
Who's going to argue with Jesus?
He's the Lord.
He knows what he's talking about.
You can not be his disciple, he says, unless you take up your cross and follow him.
Well, again, this is another one that is worth our thinking about a little bit because it
seems unlikely that Jesus meant that we should be literally carrying a wooden cross with
us wherever we go.
We don't see that played out in the book of Acts.
They weren't carrying wooden crosses around.
It must be symbolic of something.
Well, it's obviously symbolic of death and hardship and suffering.
At bare minimum, it means that we have to be willing to pay a price, suffer for the
sake of Jesus.
I wouldn't be surprised if that phrase "carry your cross" was not a expression that was
even coined by Jesus, but perhaps was one that would have been fairly commonly used
within Jesus's world and by his contemporaries because Jesus and the Jews of his day were
all living under the thumb of the Roman Empire.
I don't know how many days you could have walked outside of the gates of Jerusalem and
not seen somebody dying on a cross, and not just in Jerusalem, but any other city where
the Romans were in control.
If you committed a capital offense, that's what they did to you.
They did it publicly.
You can imagine living in a country where this any given time, scores of people hanging
on crosses outside of the gates.
Give you a reason to want to stay home.
All those people hanging on crosses, at some point, a Roman soldier said, "Pick up your
cross and follow me."
What that symbolized was this was the beginning of the end.
We're going to go crucify you now.
Part of your punishment is, as it was in Christ's case, you got to carry your cross.
Here's the wooden beam.
Let's lash it on you and you're going to carry it.
Then we're going to nail you to it.
It's possible that that became an expression to signify doing what you naturally wouldn't
do.
Right?
You can imagine wives saying to their husbands, "Dear, I know you hate paying those taxes
to the Romans, but the tax collector's coming down the street right now.
Why don't you go get a little money, take up your cross, and go pay the guy?"
You can imagine dads saying to sons, "Son, I know you hate to go dig out the latrine.
It's a dirty, smelly job, but just take up your cross and do it."
Regardless if it was a common expression or not, it clearly represents an embracing of
suffering, rejection.
Of course, you're going to get that, some form or fashion, when you follow Christ.
Count the costs.
Are you his disciple?
Are you willing to suffer shame?
Are you willing to be ostracized?
Are you willing to be looked at as a weirdo?
Again, that varies from country to country on the scale of persecution.
Well, we're out of time for today.
Thanks so much for joining me.
I think we'll finish this on our next Little Lesson.
God bless.