Following Jesus is not about achieving your aspirations of success, or using Him to gain your dreams. This is the wrong idea of the role of the Christ.- You follow Jesus when you realize that without him, you have no hope. You follow Jesus when youunderstand that the suffering and rejection he undertook was to save your soul from hell. Because youcan’t save yourself from that. This is the role of the Christ, to save our souls from sin and death and judgment, and raise us into new life and fellowship with God.2. Jesus calls those who would follow Him, to abandon everything else.-
34Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said:
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoeverwants to save his life
will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
37Or whatcan a man give in exchange for his soul? 38If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in hisFather's glory with the holy angels."
Jesus wanted to make it very clear, if you're going to follow me you better realize its going to cost youyour life.- Over the past few weeks, this abandoning of oneself has been something that I’ve had a hard timewith. When I was growing up, my parents fought a lot. Many of you, from having talked with me knowthis. The thing that a lot of people don’t know though, is that they fought a lot because of money. As Iwas growing up, my dad had a lot of dreams and ideas, but often he had difficulty following through.So we had to fold up shop and close down a number of businesses throughout the years due tofinancial constraints.- The problem is this fear of instability carries over to me. For instance when I get married, Idon’t want to fight with my wife. I don’t want to be unable to provide for my family. I don’t want tohave to pinch every penny, and worry about how we’re going to pay the rent… because it was a realconcern when I was growing up. As a child, it tore me up inside that my parents would fight thatmuch, and be so miserable. And I don’t know what I’d do if that happened to my wife and children.- And so since I’m graduating from seminary in May, and while I was thinking through what Iwould be doing next year, my plans began shifting towards things that would provide more stabilityand financial security. And so I was being swayed because I simply wanted that security. Now is whatI’m thinking, wrong? Aren’t I supposed to be responsible for my life and prepare even now for myfuture family? Yes. But I knew in my heart I was compromising and allowing the fears of insecuritytake control of the path that my future would take. When I accept Christ’s message of salvation, Ineed to surrender MY FUTURE and MY FAMILY’s FUTURE into HIS HANDS, this is God’s gift to me, that Ican surrender these things to Him and follow Him in discipleship.- Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote "The cross means sharing the suffering of Christ to the last and to thefullest. Only a man who is totally committed in discipleship can experience the meaning of the cross."- What this writer is talking about is that we have a difficult time understanding the immensity andthe gravity of Christ's suffering and rejection without having suffered or been rejected ourselves. Andthis is not a call to simply seek out suffering, but as a Christian what the gospel message is, is a savingof a person from their old life, their old attitudes, their old fears, and failures, and letting these gocompletely. Now if you do not consider your old life as that bad, or that it is acceptable, how can thepurpose of this message of salvation, really save? What have you been saved from?- Therefore Jesus is trying to make it really clear in this passage, and leaves it as if he and hisdisciples are at a crossroads. If you really are going to follow me, it's going to cost you everything. Allthat you hold dear, you have to be willing to follow me to the end.- This is the meaning of verse 35. Because if you want to save your life, you’re going to have to loseit, but if you lose your life (abandoning all that you value, all your dreams, ambitions of the past) forme and for the gospel, you will save it.3. Jesus' call promises communion with him.- (Mark 8:31 "... and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.") What Jesus is sayingwhen he describes His Passion, and Resurrection, is that the call to follow Him will mean suffering andrejection, but it also means fellowship with God. It means Jesus will be with us, and we with Him whenhe rises again. And this is the reason why Easter is celebrated today, and onward, the joy of knowingwe are living in Christ’s Resurrection.So far this message can seem pretty dark and depressing. But I just didn’t want to sugar coat it. Jesusis very clear, if these people who were his disciples, and you and me if we are to believe in Jesus, weare called to be His disciples… If we’re going to allow him to take on our sins to die on a cross, we gotto remain loyal. We got to remain close to him, even if it means suffering and rejection. It is a loyaltyto Christ, out of a realization that our lives can only find true meaning when we are connected toChrist.
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