The Cost of Discipleship

Following Jesus will cost you everything now to gain you everything forever.

Speakers

Matt opened by playing an unbelieving prospect: "Why should I follow Jesus?"
Common pitches — you'll find joy, purpose, a wonderful plan, heaven when you die, the missing piece, and it's free.
Those things are true in a sense, but on their own they are half-truths.
This summer's series returns to the foundations: nine scenes in Luke's Gospel answering "What does it mean to follow Jesus?"
Shaky foundations make a life crack or lean like the tower in Pisa; the only fix is going back to the foundation.
Jesus led with the fine print — enlarged, emboldened, highlighted for every potential disciple.

Jesus sets terms for "all," "anyone," "whoever" — not a special class of super Christians.
Matt listed the labels we invent instead: cultural, casual, Chreasters, cafeteria, consumer, spectator, and campfire Christians.
A self-denying death: picture a throne over your heart on a spiritual X-ray. Everyone is born sitting on it.
Getting off that throne means my money, time, body, and future are no longer mine.
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity: "Give up yourself and you'll find your real self."
A cross-carrying death: Rome's worst penalty, a public spectacle of shame, the condemned hauling the crossbeam to the site.
A daily death — not Lent-style sacrifice or a mountaintop weekend, but every day, every hour, every dime.

Comfort — "Foxes have holes... but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Jesus is homeless; still want to come?
Comfort is a seductive idol here: latch onto finances, career, politics, a home, and you live an inch from an anxious breakdown.
Delay — "Let me first go and bury my father." He wanted Jesus on his own timeline. Did that man ever really come back?
Jesus is not a booster you add on when ready; nothing you finish, graduate from, or retire from makes you ready to bow.
Attachments — "Let me first say farewell to those at my home."
Elijah let Elisha kiss his parents goodbye in 1 Kings 19; Jesus is not just another prophet but King, Master, Savior, God.
You cannot tack the Lord of the universe onto your schedule like a new hobby you fit around school drop-offs.

Jesus attaches radical demands to eternal promises: he turns every loss into gain.
Two assets: one you can afford that will skyrocket, then crash forever; one that plunges you to the bottom, then explodes from the grave into everything forever.
Jim Elliot was 28 when he was killed in Ecuador by the tribesmen he hoped to reach — a married man with a ten-month-old daughter.
At 21 he wrote in his journal, found after his death: "He is no fool who gives away what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
The real tragedy: good school, good career, nice family, safe neighborhood, early retirement — and putting off Jesus until you wake in hell.
Verse 27's promise points ahead to the Transfiguration, a preview of glory before Jesus carried his own crossbeam to Calvary.
Bear the cross to wear the crown.

Following Jesus will cost you everything now to gain you everything forever.
There is only one kind of Christian according to the Master: a cross-carrying one.
Comfort, delay, and attachments stall would-be disciples before they start — choose Jesus over all three.
Your life here is a vapor; the next life is forever and not that far away.