Matthew-016

We continue to study the Lord’s teaching in Luke 9:57-62. This is an extremely important passage and I hope that everyone understands it clearly.

Now the parallel to this is in Matthew 8:19-22

Jesus “pours cold water”

Today, we will expound the Lord Jesus’ teaching from Luke 9:57-62 because the account is a little bit fuller. What exactly is the Lord Jesus saying here? Luke 9:57 says the Lord Jesus was walking with his disciples on the road, and “someone” came to him and said, “I will follow you wherever you go.” The “someone” may be “a certain scribe or lawyer” in Matthew 8:19, as the recorded reply of the Lord Jesus is the same. Clearly, he had been impressed by the life of the Lord Jesus and by his teaching and he makes a remarkable commit­ment: I will follow you wherever you go. Maybe like that Roman centurion, he had begun to see the glory of Christ. We saw the tremendous faith and the nature of that faith of the centurion. He saw that the Lord Jesus is Lord of all. And if you look in Matthew chapter 8, you will see how many amazing things the Lord Jesus does showing his tremendous power. This scribe may have seen some of the mighty works of the Lord Jesus, and said, “Lord, I will follow you wherever you go.”

But what the Lord Jesus replied seems to be almost pouring cold water over him. Today, if someone says, “I’ll follow Jesus,” you will say, “Praise God! Hallelujah!” You will praise God more especially if he says to the Lord Jesus, “I’ll follow you anywhere and everywhere you go.” But the Lord Jesus seems to take a great big bucket of cold water and pour it right over his head as though to say, “Cool down.” And you think: Oh? That’s not very good psychology! Here’s a guy who says, “I want to follow” and you say, “No, let me tell you some­thing first.” The Lord Jesus said to the scribe (lawyer) in Matthew 8:19-20 (cf. Lk. 9:58), “Foxes have holes, and do you see the birds in the air? They have nests in trees. But I, the Son of man, have nowhere to lay my head.” In other words, he is saying to this man, “Before you say you are going to follow me everywhere, you’d best consider what is involved in being my disciple.”

I would like you to notice how the Lord Jesus never plays on a person’s emotions. He doesn’t try to whip up your emotion until you are really excited and then someone says, “How about following Jesus?” And everyone will say, “Yes! We’ll follow Jesus!” Jesus never excites you and then takes advantage of your emotional excitement. You will never find the Lord Jesus using a mass evangelistic meeting with a ten-thousand-voice choir to excite everyone by the mass appeal of it. Never! Music and mass appeal have tremendous effect on human beings. That’s what Hitler used so effectively. You will see in a movie on the WWII, the impressiveness of how Hitler arranged the red flags with the swastika on them, the shiny boots, and the military music. That has tremendous effect on a person!

Notice the Lord Jesus never does that. It seems, as we said just now, he poured cold water over this man. I have also been doing the same thing. Many times, when people say to me they are going to come to God, I cool them off by saying, “Do you know the hardships involved in being a Christian? Do you know what is the cost of becoming a Christian?” I have been preaching regularly on that. Why does the Lord Jesus do this? He wants every person to count the cost before making a commitment.

I will never forget that time in 1952, when I was in China during the time of the Korean War. Officers came to our school to hold a tre­mendous propaganda campaign to recruit soldiers or “volunteers,” as they were called. And there were people weeping and crying and working on others’ emotions saying, “Our country is in danger!” as tears were running down their faces. There was one person in my class who wept the most and shouted the loudest, making a tremendous commotion because no one in our class volunteered for recruitment. Finally, after weeping, he said, “I will go to Korea and fight the Americans.” Then one poor little fellow by the name of Sun, I still remember his name, who could no longer endure this weeping, volunteered as well. On the day of enlistment, he was shocked to discover that he was the only volunteer! He was looking around for the other fellow by the name of Zhang, who had been crying and shouting. But now, this fellow was sitting very quietly in a corner. I was all the more ashamed because he was a member of my ball team. I would have been proud of him if he were really weeping for his country. He had got this poor fellow to go to the front by getting all emotional, yet he didn’t want to go after having shed all those tears! What I could never forget was the look on the face of this poor fellow, Sun. He really didn’t the slightest desire to go; he only responded because of an emotional appeal.

Let me ask you, would that man who was hooked in by an emotional appeal make a good soldier? If I were the commanding officer, I would dismiss any person who did not want to go. I would say, “This mission is exceedingly dangerous and difficult, and no one who hasn’t got the courage, and who hasn’t counted the cost needs to go. Just drop out right now,” because I know that the people who stay back will be the finest and most determined soldiers you can ever find. It is the greatest mistake to sweep people into the kingdom by an emotional appeal when you preach the gospel, because those who have counted the cost, who go forward with a clear, calm mind will make the finest soldiers. You cannot last long on the crest of an emotional wave in spiritual warfare. That is why so many people who raise their hands and become Christians do not persevere. I have said before and I say again, there is hardly a single drop-out of those I have had the privilege to bring to God by his grace. That is why the Lord Jesus is pouring cold water, as it were, on this lawyer.

1. A disciple must clearly define his relationship to the world

A disciple cannot make this world his home

The Lord Jesus is saying to this man, “I have nowhere to lay my head.” What exactly do these words mean? The Lord Jesus could go in the wilderness and lie down somewhere. You can always find somewhere to lay down your head even if you lie down in the park. I have slept on a park bench before. I could go into the woods to lie down if I had nowhere to stay. He is saying, “If you want to follow me, then this world cannot be your home.” That is the meaning of his statement. It is like the lyrics of a song: “This world is not my home. I’m just passing through.”

This is the first point: If you want to be a true disciple of Christ, you must clearly define your relationship to the world. I find many Christians simply don’t have this attitude. They feel this world is their home. If this is the case, you cannot be a disciple of Christ. Hebrews 11:9-10 tells us that Abraham, the father of faith just saw himself in this world as a pilgrim passing through a foreign country, and if we want to be good disciples, we must be clear about what is our attitude to this world. If you love this world, you simply cannot be a follower of Jesus.

I need to say again that by the world, we are not speaking about the mountains, the bees and the birds and these kinds of things. The Bible does not refer to those by the word, “world.” The “world” in the Bible refers to a man-made, human system which is alienated from God because it doesn’t obey God. Christians have to define their relationship to this system. If we love the world, as 1 John 2:15 tells us, “he that loves the world, the love for the Father is not in him.” You cannot serve God and money at the same time. You have to make your attitude clear. Since so many Christians have not defined their attitude to the world, they can’t endure very long as Christians. They always want to have the best of both worlds. They want to have the money in the world as well as the kingdom of God. Having money is not a sin in itself, but your attitude towards that money is very important. The love for that money is going to destroy you.

Be willing to endure hardship and suffering

The next thing to consider is, what does the Lord Jesus mean by not having anywhere to lay your head? He is saying, “You cannot follow me unless you are willing to accept hardships.” The Bible has a lot to say about hardship and suffering because a Christian is bound to suffer a lot of hardships in the course of discipleship. The Lord Jesus wants you to understand very honestly that when you want to follow him, you must be prepared to take hardship and suffering.

In China, every one of us knows that if we become a Christian, we are going to suffer hardship. We don’t need a sermon to tell us that. If I remained in China, I could never go to university because I wouldn’t be allowed to enter university as a Christian. So if I become a Christian in China, I must be prepared to accept the hardship of always being a laborer even if I had secondary school education. I could never be much more than that. There is nothing disgraceful about being a laborer. It’s very good to be one, but it simply means that my contribution from now on will be limited only to this. I would not be allowed to do anything else. But that hardship is still relatively little compared to the fact that I would be under the surveillance of someone in the government all my life. In fact, I had already experienced being regularly interrogated about my activi­ties as a very young Christian in China. So as Christians, we must be prepared to accept hardship.

Learn self-discipline

Yet in North America, where life is relatively good to everyone, I find that Christians get soft. You need to keep being tough if you want to be a Christian. Since the external environment at this moment does not provide us with many hardships, we need to learn a lot of self-discipline. We need to not take life too easy even if we have the choice to take it easy. As far as possible, I would like every Christian to have some physical discipline, like jogging, something that toughens you physically. That is good for both the body and the soul.

One sight I cannot stand is to see those bishops, cardinals, pastors and priests with pot bellies. It is so disgusting! All of them should be put under military discipline for some time. I think it would do them an enormous amount of good spiritually as well as physically. A flabby-looking bishop obviously has no self-discipline. These are people who certainly disgrace the gospel in my eyes, and in the eyes of many people. Every Christian must learn to discipline himself. If you can walk, then walk. You don’t always have to drive. I think we sit so much in the car in the West, that our leg muscles must have atrophied!

We can also learn to discipline ourselves even in what we eat. Even though we can afford to buy sirloin steak every day, we can learn to eat less of that and more simple food. Let every Christian be a good, well-disciplined soldier. That is what Paul said to Timothy, “Endure hardship like a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” (2 Tim. 2:3)

When the fathers and mothers bring up children, put your sons and daughters under some discipline where they can walk. Make them run, work, that is to say, bring them up tough, not as flabby weak­lings. Just observe, whenever you see a true disciple, you will find a disciplined, tough man. He is a man who can be relied upon to keep himself firmly under control. The flabby man only makes a flabby Christian. Some people kill their children with kindness, but I say to you, be kind to them but be firm as well. Discipline never hurts any child. They will love you the more for it.

All this shows that a disciplined man knows how to control himself in relation to the things of this world. So I hope your neighbors will be seeing you all running around the block in the next few weeks. I run around the training race course in Pincourt so long as my physical condition allows it. And I know that Billy Graham does jogging every day. That is exactly what the apostle Paul says that he does to himself in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “I discipline myself very severely. I even give myself black eyes.” It doesn’t mean that he has black eyes physically, but it’s a figure of speech that means he keeps himself under discipline. My prayer is that our churches today, will raise a new generation of Christians who are true soldiers of Jesus Christ.

When they invited me to speak at their summer conference in Winnipeg this year, I was so happy to learn that their theme was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I said, “Good, you’ve got me as a speaker then.” If they came up with some other fancy theme, I would say, “Go find another speaker. I’m not interested in that.”

So the first point in discipleship is, you must take a proper stand in your relationship to the world. A Christian is just passing through the world.

2. A disciple must put God above our obligations in the world

The second point is our relationship to the obligations or duties in the world, and it is not always easy to put God first. What the Lord Jesus says in Luke 9:59-60 is somewhat even more difficult to understand: “To another man he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” But he said to him, “Leave the dead to bury the dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

The man says, “My father has died, so I need to bury him. I have an obligation to my father.” Now the Jews had a formality that involved a period of mourning, and it took 7 days to carry out the funeral ceremonies. In some cases, it could take up to 70 days. When Israel buried Moses, the ceremonies lasted 70 days that is, more than two months. The Lord Jesus’ reply to this man was surprising: “Follow me. Leave the dead to bury the dead.” Certainly, his teaching else­where is to honor your parents. In fact, in Mark 7:11-12, he severely rebuked the Pharisees for not honoring their father and their mother. How are we going to understand the Lord Jesus’ astonishing reply: “Leave the dead to bury the dead”? His attitude seems to be contradicting what he said before to the Pharisees. We are almost shocked by such a reply because after all, the fifth of the Ten Commandments tells us we are to honor our father and our mother, and the Lord Jesus strongly upheld it. He said, “I have come to fulfill the Law, not to break it” (cf. Mt. 5:17).

To understand his reply, we have to understand our relationship to the obligations of the world. We must certainly love our father and our mother, but there are certain circumstances where we have to choose one or the other. That is exactly what has happened here. The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 10:37, “He who loves father or mother, wife, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” How can we apply this? Certainly, we must love father, mother, wife, children and all the people who are dear to us. But when faced with a choice, we must love God more than all else. This is the point the Lord Jesus is making.

What is the choice in Luke 9:59-60? Immediately following this passage is Luke chapter 10, where the Lord Jesus is sending the disciples out on a preaching mission to Israel. They are now about to go forth. They are not going to hold up the work of the preaching mission for 7 days in order for someone to go through the funeral ceremonies. The disciples are to go forth now to preach the gospel. How many people in Israel will have died in one week? They will never hear the message of the kingdom anymore. The work is urgent.

If you have to go forth on mission to preach the gospel, and your beloved father died, what is your choice? To go through all the funeral ceremonies or to preach the gospel? Which? It is a hard choice. Of course, we love our fathers, but we have the responsibility to preach the gospel. Which would you choose? The disciple has to choose to preach the gospel. Just think of this man and his problems. He may say, “If I don’t bury my father, how would I be showing my reverence to my father? What would my relatives think of me as a Christian, that I would rather preach the gospel at this moment because the mission must go on, than go and bury my father?”

Almost every Christian will say, “I’m sorry, my father has died. I’m not going on the mission now.” Or “I’ll go and bury my father first, and I’ll join what’s left of the mission at the end.” I can say that not only 99% would do that, but 999 out of 1,000 would. Today, every Christian will give this spiritual-sounding reply, “If I don’t go and bury my father, I will dishonor God.” But is it that spiritual?

A Christian doesn’t have to do what a non-Christian can do

Listen to the Lord Jesus’ teaching even if it disturbs you very much. The Lord Jesus said, “Your choice is to go and preach the gospel if you want to be my disciple. By burying your father, you will be doing something that the spiritually dead can do. You don’t need the spiritually living to do that.” A very important spiritual principle is emerging here: A Christian doesn’t have to do what the spiritually dead (a non-Christian) can do.

Love your parents while they are alive

Your father has died; it is all right to show that you love your father by wanting to bury him. But if you love him, love him while he is alive. There is nothing much more you can do for him when he is dead. Love your father and mother when they are alive. Remember, they will not always be with you. One day, they will pass away just as both my parents have. I love them both very much. If I didn’t love them when they were alive, then it is too late when they have died.

One day your parents will die. Now is the time to love them, to show how much God loves them through you. But there are some people who are very strange. They don’t have any liking for their parents, and when their parents die, they buy the nicest coffins they can find, and a great big mountain of flowers. They find a nice piece of ground to bury them. Now it makes no difference to your parents whether their coffins are made of bronze or wood, or a mountain of flowers because they cannot benefit from that. The reason these people do such things is because their conscience feels bad. They think, “All my life I didn’t love my parents, so I have to make up for it. I’ll buy them nice coffins.”

So the Lord Jesus’ teaching is this: once they have died, there is not much more you can do for them. By all means do the best you can for them at the funeral. However, if you are faced with a choice of going to the funeral or preaching the gospel, every disciple will say, “I must go and preach the gospel.”

I find there are many things that the Christians are doing that they could leave to the non-Christians. The non-Christians can bury the dead; you don’t need to do that. That is the case too, in many pro­fessions. But the preaching of the gospel is something that the non-Christians cannot do. Therefore, if you are faced with a choice, do what you can do that they cannot. If you have the gift and the calling to preach the gospel, that is what you can do that the non-Christian cannot.

So the Lord Jesus teaches the same principle in Luke 9:59-60 and in Matthew 10:37 – by all means love your father and your mother, but if you have to make a choice, you must love God more than they, like the Lord Jesus. In the same way, my wife should love me, and I want her to; but I want her to love God and Christ more than me. It is very important that she will always love them more than me, because this is what the Lord Jesus taught, and because they are far more important and greater than I am.

The more you love God, the more you love others

Something wonderful emerges from this. When someone loves God and the Lord Jesus more than you, he doesn’t love you less, he loves you more. So I say to you, those of you who are about to get married: make sure that your husband or your wife loves God and Christ more than you. The more you get them to love God and Christ, you will find something amazing happening – your husband or wife will also love you more! But if you want your spouse to love you more than God and Christ, their love for you will gradually diminish. That is some­thing very surprising. I still don’t understand it, but it’s absolutely true.

If you are a parent, never make the mistake to say, “You must love Daddy and Mommy over God and the Lord Jesus.” You will discover that in the end, they neither love God and the Lord Jesus, nor do they love you much either. But if you say to them, “I want you to always love God and the Lord Jesus over Daddy and Mommy,” the surprising thing happens – they will love God and the Lord Jesus, and they will also love you more. It’s so wonderful!

It is the same principle in Matthew 6:33, of seeking first the kingdom of God and all the other things will be added to you. The secret is that as your parents or your spouse love God and Christ more, God puts a purer and stronger love for you in their hearts. So nobody has to be afraid of the Lord Jesus’ teaching here.

The Lord Jesus always put God, his Father and God’s kingdom first, but see how much he loved his mother. I don’t think any son ever loved his mother more than Jesus did. Even when he was hanging on the cross in tremendous pain and agony, he had time for his mother, and asked his closest disciple to look after her. We can also see how much his mother knew that he loved her. She followed him everywhere he went as a disciple. How many mothers do that? But such was her love for her son that she was even at the cross when he died.

Here is the Lord Jesus’ teaching, and what I ask every one of you who wants to be a true Christian or disciple to do is: When faced with a choice, always love God and Christ more, although you love your parents. When my mother died, I was preaching the gospel in Ontario. When the telegram came to say that my mother died, do you think I would have dropped my preaching of the gospel and gone to my mother’s funeral? I love my mother very much. I have not quite overcome that love up to this day. But if I have to choose between preaching the gospel and going to my mother’s funeral, I will stay on to preach the gospel even if it hurts me tremendously. This is a choice that a disciple must always make. When you choose, always put God and Christ first. So this second point deals with our obligations in the world.

3. A disciple must break his ties and affections for the world

Let us continue to the third and last point. In Luke 9:61, another person says the same thing to Jesus, “I will follow you, Lord.” Then he says, “But first, let me say farewell to those at home.” That seems to be very reasonable. That person may well be thinking, “Surely, you can’t say that I’m going to follow you but I’m not allowed to go home and say good-bye. Do I just disappear into thin air?” This passage doesn’t tell us how far his home is because that is not the point here. The point is this: but first, let me go and say farewell. There is something I have to do first before I can preach the gospel. The Lord Jesus immediately detects something wrong in his thinking. In the kingdom of God, to the disciple nothing comes first before God.

The critical word is “first”. The sentence would have read perfectly well as: “Let me go and say farewell.” That is what Elisha said to Elijah: “Let me go and say farewell to my parents.” And Elijah said, “Go.” (1 Ki. 19:19-21)

As I said before, you cannot put anything first before God and God’s work. The Lord Jesus immediately looks into his heart and knows his mind. And Jesus replied: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and keeps looking back is fit for the kingdom.” Here it is very important to understand the force of a Greek present continuous tense, which doesn’t come out well in the English. The English present tense, “looks back” can mean just one look back, but the Greek present continuous tense must be translated as “keep on looking back.” This means he is looking back all the time. How are you going to plow the field with your head looking back?

This last point deals with our affections for the things that keep us looking back to the world. You will never make a disciple if you keep looking back to your ties and affections for the world. Many Christians don’t wish to break their connections with the world. They keep looking back.

For example, I give up my job to serve God, but I keep looking back and say, “I hope I can go back to my work soon.” If that is the case, I might as well not start at all. To become a Christian is a matter of po fu chen zhou (破釜沉舟,that is, “to smash your pots and sink your boat”). The English expression is “burn your bridges.” There is only looking forward for a determined soldier, no looking back. This Chinese proverb is from that famous incident during the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States period in Chinese history (chun qiu zhan guo春秋戰國), when the general took his soldiers across the river, and he not only ordered the boats to be sunk but also the cooking pots to be smashed. He said to the soldiers, “There is no boat to take you back to the other side of the river. Either you fight to win or you’ll die. If you don’t win, you don’t have another meal to eat.”

Here we can see that this is exactly the attitude the Lord Jesus requires of his disciples: Go forward without looking back. As Paul says, “Forgetting the things which are behind, we press forward towards the mark” (Phil. 3:13-14). That means to say, “For me, there is no turning back. I have made the decision to go forward from now on.” If you intend to go forth to serve the Lord, don’t keep saying, “I’ll open this little path for myself to fall back on when things ahead get tough.” You will never make a disciple.

Are we true disciples?

We need to summarize these three points. To be a Christian means we must determine first of all, our attitude towards the world. We must be willing to endure hardship and discipline, and he who is not prepared to do this will never serve God. Many people say to me, “I will serve God and work at my job at the same time.” Sure, but what is the real reason for that? It’s true that not everyone is called to preach the gospel, but some people are called, and they refuse to go because they cannot face the hardship.

If you are earning $18,000 a year at the moment, are you willing to take $9,000 to be a preacher? Are you willing to have your income cut in half? Are you willing to have your standard of living much lowered? Many people refuse to preach the gospel because they cannot face the hardship, so they make excuses and say, “Well, I can serve God in the church.” Surely, you can; no one says you can’t. But is that the real reason why you are not serving God as a full-time servant? If we were willing to take a little bit of hardship, I am sure that almost every one of us could contribute so much more for God in or outside the church if we were willing to give him more. We could store up much more treasure in heaven in this way.

Many people say, “How can I serve God?” Well, here is an area of service you could do – give to his work. Here is something which every Christian can concretely do, even as a student. Instead of buying one extra soda, you could give that money to God’s work. Often, if we have to choose between coke and plain water, we will choose coke and spend the money. Actually, it costs you more and it is bad for your teeth, because there is too much sugar in soda. It just tastes nice, but it’s bad for your whole system. In fact, the doctor will tell you that sugar is bad for your heart as well. Moreover, it contains saccharin, and if you’re a man, taking too much saccharin puts you in danger of having cancer of the bladder. Therefore, you pay more for the privilege of destroying your teeth, risking heart trouble and bladder cancer, when that money could have gone to God’s work. It’s worth thinking about.

Secondly, we need to define our relationship to our obligations to those we love very much in the world. We have problems because we love them so much. I have to preach the gospel, so I have to be away from home sometimes for weeks at a time. That is hard on my wife and child. Shall I say I’m going to stay at home and not go out to preach the gospel because it’s dangerous for my wife to be left alone with a child, and she has no transportation? No, we have to define our obligations even to those we love.

Thirdly, every true disciple defines his affections for the world. He is prepared to burn his bridges behind him, to serve God without keep­ing his head twisted at the back to look at the world.

If you say you love the Lord Jesus, do you find his teaching on the requirements for discipleship difficult? Let it examine your heart to see if you are a true disciple.