Packing for the Right Expedition, Part 1

You want to be a committed disciple of Christ, then accept the ridicule and rejection of the world. Now he says this, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. And the multitude is following Jesus. He's on his way to Jerusalem. They think they're on their way to a parade. Jesus knows it's going to be ridicule. It's going to be mockery.

It's going to be rejection and death. Did you pack for that? When you go on a trip, you might begin by making a packing list. The place where you're going to visit will determine what you pack. If you were traveling to visit Alaska, but packed like you were going to Florida, you could end up having a really hard time.

The important thing is packing for the climate you'll be entering. Well, Jesus wanted to make sure his disciples understood the cultural climate where they were going on their way to Jerusalem. He knew that many of his followers were expecting a hero's welcome and they were going to be disappointed.

Here's Stephen Davey. In his wonderful commentary on the Gospel of Luke by Kent Hughes, he wrote about the Franklin expedition that was set out to find the Northwest passageway between the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean, doomed frankly from the outset. In fact, they didn't have the data we have. They didn't have the understanding we have today.

But it is tragic to read about this. One author said, prepared for the journey according to weather conditions inside the officer's club rather than the harsh realities of the Arctic region. No one knew a lay ahead on these ice jammed waters that would eventually crush their ships.

They had not packed any special clothing beyond their military uniforms, thin top coats, gloves, and silk scarves. Day 8, the officers did off China settings, cut glass wine goblets, ornate Victorian silverware with the initials of the officers engraved in the handles set at their own personal dining spaces. History records that in 1845, Sir John Franklin and 138 officers and men set sail to great fanfare. They're from England.

They had the press and the news reports. They were sailing in the personal glory and prestige. Two months later, a whaling boat captain encountered them at Lancaster Sound and reported back to England on the good spirits of the officers and men. That whaling captain would be the last European to see any of them alive.

No one in the expedition survived. Search parties began and would eventually spend years retracing the path of this expedition piecing together the puzzle. Native Inuit or Eskimos, as we refer to them, provided a lot of the pieces to the puzzle. The expedition had been stalled early on by the freezing water. The Eskimos reported seeing a group of men pushing a wooden lifeboat across the ice, hoping to find a waterway. They discovered also a place now called Starvation Cove, where the remains of 35 men were found. They had evidently dragged one of the lifeboats for several days, expecting to encounter water and an open channel. Eventually, members of one search party saw the rather haunting sight that would become the fodder for paintings and legends, the sight of the three masts from one of those ships sticking up through the ice. Perhaps the most tragic discovery was the fact that neither ship had stocked any coal.

Each ship had turned their huge coal storerooms into libraries and stocked them with 1,200 volumes, extra settings of china, and even an organ with 50 tunes ready. Every member of this expedition, including their leader, Sir John Franklin, was confident in their expectations, but they were not prepared for the reality of what lay ahead. If you could compare walking with Christ to an expedition, what are you expecting?

What have you packed for the journey? Jesus said, I came not to grant peace, but division. Members in your family will be divided, father against son, son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

I guess that settles a happy Christmas. Luke 12. Hebrews 11 records that believers were martyred, just as they are today. Believers were promised by the apostles persecution, Galatians 6. The apostle Paul promised his young pastor, son in the faith, Timothy, that anybody living a godly life will suffer in Christ Jesus, 2 Timothy 3. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 14, words I wonder if the church is expecting today. He writes, we are reviled, we are persecuted, we are slandered, we are roughly treated, we are like the scum of the earth.

Wow. Are we expecting that? Now at this particular point in the public ministry of the Lord, he's on his way to Jerusalem, he's less than four months away from the crucifixion. He knows what's coming. Because of his amazing miracles as we've learned and studied together, feeding the multitudes and raising the dead and healing the sick and upending the traditions of the Pharisees and obviously revealing his qualifications to serve as Messiah and the king of his coming kingdom, this crowd is only growing larger.

They assume that he's on his way to Jerusalem to be crowned and he will be, not with gold, not this time. In fact the multitude thinks that the trip to Jerusalem is like a parade. Everybody loves a parade. Let's join the parade. Only this parade is not going to end with a twenty-one gun salute, balloons in the air and songs of hail to the chief. That's what they're expecting.

Cool breezes, lounging in the library. So they've packed their top coats and silk scarves. Jesus, he's not a salesman. He's done this before and we're about to encounter it again. He's not selling tickets.

He's not promising benefits and wonderful experiences. This is not a parade and Jesus frankly isn't interested in bigger crowds. That's why he periodically stops and just thins it out. He's about to do it again.

That's because he doesn't want numbers. He wants disciples. So once again now in Luke's Gospel, if you'll turn there, we're in chapter fourteen. The Lord is going to stop.

He's going to clarify the danger, the difficulty. He's going to explain what it means to be a faithful disciple. If I could paraphrase the passage for you as I have done in my study of what Jesus is telling this multitude of would-be followers and kind of boil it down to four phrases.

The first would be this, arrange your love life in order of priority. Now notice we're at verse twenty-five for today. Now great crowds accompanied him and he turned and said to them, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

That's a rather dramatic statement. It seems at first glance to contradict other passages in the scriptures and we know the scriptures don't contradict one another. The Lord has told us to love even our enemies in Matthew five forty-three. We are to honor our parents in Ephesians six we're told in verse two. We're to love our children, Titus two verse four.

We're to love our wives as our own bodies, Ephesians five twenty-eight which implies we love them and we get along with ourselves as well. Now Jesus says here we're supposed to hate them all if we want to be his disciples. In our world today, part of our difficulty in interpreting this passage is the word hate conjures up different ideas in our western minds. It refers to hostility, intense dislike, aversion. In the literature, however, of the ancient Near Eastern world, hate was often used as a word for priorities.

In other words, if I could take you back in time, we have a couple of illustrations that came to mind. Esau hated his birthright and sold it to Jacob for a bowl of lentil soup, Genesis twenty-five thirty-four. Esau didn't have an intense dislike. He didn't have an aversion. It didn't turn his stomach. It didn't make him angry. He didn't love his birthright.

He just didn't care about it. It wasn't as important to him as his hunger was that evening. And so he traded it for a bowl of lentil soup.

Let me tell you, you've got to be really hungry to trade anything for lentil soup. I'm just saying here. But here's the point. His hatred simply meant he was willing to set it aside for something that was more important to him. That's the idea of Romans nine, where we're told that God hated Esau and loved Jacob.

Same idea. This is not a statement of emotion or derision. It's a statement of determination and priority. God had determined that Jacob would be the priority in carrying out the Abrahamic covenant.

So he came first, and Esau was set aside. So what's Jesus saying here? Well, he's not telling you to tear up your Christmas gift list. He's not telling you to stop calling your parents. He's saying that other relationships are lower on the priority list as Jesus takes first place. Now that might mean more to those in other parts of our world today, when they know that if they accept Christ and they put him first, they lose family. They're disinherited. They might even be turned in. He's saying then that all other loves in your life, and they are legitimate loves, perhaps. Maybe not, but whatever they are, they are overruled.

They are superseded by our love for Christ. Let me give you some illustrations that came to my mind. There's a manufacturer, a believer, and he always comes in second in the bidding process with another larger competing company that produces the same thing. Suddenly he receives in the mail a huge order that will set his company on the fast track to a new level. It's worth a lot of money, but that contract includes a deadline, and he knows that his small company can't meet that deadline. He could sign it, and then later on come up with some excuses.

This broke down, and the supply chain this. He knew that would be lying, and so he writes this potential client a letter explaining that because he's a Christian, he can't be dishonest, wouldn't honor his Lord, and because he can't meet the deadline, the business is given once again to his competitor. He has effectively declared that his love for Christ is greater than his love for success. There's a parent in a church, and they make it clear that the staff and ministries of the church should be designed to teach their sons and daughters well. These ministries need to be active and excellent, exciting, camping in the summers, retreating in the winters, Bible studies during the week, in the afternoons and evenings and on weekends. It's critical, they say, that their child be discipled by other godly adults and in the company of other young people growing Christ, and that church couldn't agree more, but then the child is invited to join a traveling soccer team or baseball team, and suddenly that occupies the afternoons and weekends throughout the year for several years. Whether they realize it or not, they've just declared that their love for their child's athletic development is actually greater than for their child's spiritual development. Am I stepping on anybody's toes yet with these illustrations?

I'm trying really hard to thin the crowd. There's a single woman in the church who wants to be married, wants a husband, a family, begins to fall in love with a man she's dating, in fact met in church. After dating for some time though, she begins to wonder if his love for Christ is as important as hers. Oh yes, he picks her up for church, and he has his own copy of the Bible, and he volunteers to say the blessing before meals. He says he believes in God, but as time goes along, she senses more and more that his possessions, his career, his hobbies are what excite him. He never initiates conversations about the Lord or what he's learning in Scripture, but then he proposes. Suddenly she's at a crisis of priority, and although it crushes her heart and her dreams, she says no. And in that declares her love life will be based on the priority of Christ.

I could tell you over 36 years of ministry, those illustrations have occurred in this congregation by the truckload. You want to be a committed disciple of Christ, then arrange your love life in order of priority, and make sure Jesus is at the top of the list. Now the second principle could be stated this way, accept the ridicule and rejection of the world.

Now he's already said something like this back in chapter 9, we've dealt with it, I'll deal with it briefly here again. But he says this, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. By the way, the phrase here, come after me, literally expresses the idea of getting in line behind someone. And the multitude is following Jesus, he's on his way to Jerusalem, they think they're on their way to a parade. Jesus knows it is essentially a death march. Get in line behind me, it's going to be ridicule, it's going to be mockery, it's going to be rejection and death. Did you pack for that?

What's your expectation of the expedition? Jesus is quite literally saying here something that to them they would understand and get in line, and here I'll hand you your cross. Now be careful that you don't make this passage a list of requirements for salvation, as some have, without meaning to. They've made salvation a matter of justification by faith, plus you've got to be willing to do this, this, this and this. Jesus is not giving prerequisites to salvation.

He's describing what we should be expecting along this journey. In fact, I think Warren Wiersbe put it so insightfully when he said on this phrase, this is not about sonship, this is about discipleship. This is what to expect if you follow Christ.

Now Jesus, again he's making a statement to his generation that they get it, a little more difficult for us. The cross represents the most humiliating death anybody could experience in these ancient days. It was the death no one wanted to die. In fact, a Roman citizen was guaranteed no matter what they did, mass murder or whatever, they would never be crucified. The cross wasn't just a tree of torture, it was the symbol of shame. Now we'll cover this more when we get into the crucifixion of our Lord, but we've sanitized it. They were stripped naked, they were flogged, they carried the cross beam, not this Latinized cross.

The stipe, the vertical piece was permanent. They crucified over a thousand people the year of our Lord's death. They loved to do this.

They developed the saddle which they would sit the victim on, a little block of wood which would extend the excretiation of this death and then if they wouldn't die quick enough or they were tired of it, they'd push him off the saddle and break their legs so that they would not be able to exhale. They understood the humiliation of this subjugation to the Roman Empire. See this, bearing your cross would be the clearest way, the most dramatic way of announcing in this world that your life was no longer your own. You are no longer in charge of your destiny. You can imagine people in Jesus' day hearing this, I feel like Jesus saying today, pick up your electric chair and follow me. Pick up a noose and put it around your neck and follow me.

That's what it meant to them. Pick up the symbol of humiliating death. Are you willing to be subjugated by me, your King?

He isn't handing out crowns at this point but crosses. You would think, well, no wonder the crowd's going to sin. I mean, nobody's that fanatical. Nobody's going to get on a death march. In fact, even those who said they would didn't, did they? But nobody's going to do this. I was watching this past week a documentary about an annual marathon held in the Sahara Desert.

I'm amazed what people do with their spare time. I'll read about it but hundreds of people show up. You've got wind storms, sudden sand storms, grueling miles through scorching heat, over these sand dunes for several days. There are markers at distances but they can be blown over in a sudden sandstorm. Runners can get lost. They often run alone.

Each runner, this is where I started reaching for a piece of paper. There's going to be an illustration for the Shepherd's Church here sometime soon. What do you know? Here we go. They had to fill out a form before the competition began and they had to answer this question.

Get this. If you die during the competition, where do we send the corpse? You've got to be kidding because people die. What's Jesus saying?

Fill out this form. Are you willing to die? In other parts of our world when they have a baptismal service like we just had, they will ask that question to those coming out of the Islamic world. I've heard from our global workers, they will ask several questions just like we asked but we don't ask the one they ask, are you willing to die for Christ?

Because that's very well what might happen. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Thanks for listening. There's more to this lesson and we'll bring you the conclusion on our next broadcast. I'm excited to be able to tell you about something pretty new here at Wisdom International. We've rolled out new technology that allows our website to be experienced in multiple languages. We're going to be working over the next several months to upload more of our foreign language content. We have a little bit there already and we want to offer all nine of our current languages. And the exciting thing is that this technology will work with every language on earth.

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