[Note: This sermon expounds Matthew 16:24–26 alongside Luke 14:25–33. Delivered 6 July 1980, Montreal.]
We come again to Matthew chapter 16, and this time to verses 24 to 26, where the Lord Jesus says: "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?" This passage is closely paralleled in Luke 14:25–33, which adds something that Matthew does not record: "If any one 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." Luke 14 is in fact the second occasion in Luke that Jesus says this — the first was in Luke 9:23, in the same context as Matthew 16.
We need to understand what precedes this passage. In the verses immediately before, the Lord Jesus had addressed Peter as Satan: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are not on the side of God, but of men." This follows directly upon Peter's great confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God — so within moments of the highest declaration of faith, Peter attempts to prevent the cross. And the Lord calls this satanic. This is not an accident of placement: the Lord Jesus is deliberately addressing the root problem that lies behind Peter's action, and behind the failure of discipleship generally.
There are two great stumbling blocks in this passage. The first is the word "hate." How can Jesus command us to hate, when his whole teaching is about love — loving your enemies, loving your neighbour? The second stumbling block is the tension between grace and cost: we preach that salvation is free, the gift of God — and yet here Jesus says it costs everything. Both of these difficulties have driven people out of the church. I have watched revival after revival come through London churches, and then years later I return to find a bare handful of people left in places that were once full. Why? Because the church did not understand what it means to take up the cross — and when the real demands of discipleship were felt, people left.
The key to the whole passage is understanding what human love actually is. Human love is, by nature, possessive and constricting. You can see this in John 20:17, where Mary Magdalene, having recognised the risen Jesus, falls at his feet and holds on. And the Lord says: "Do not cling to me." The literal Greek is: "Do not hold on to me." Mary's love, though genuine and deep, was a love that grasped and held and was unwilling to let go. And the Lord had to say: let me go. This is human love — it naturally forms a closed circle around those it loves. My family is inside the fence; those outside are not my concern.
I have seen this in prayer. Many Christians pray: "Bless my father, bless my mother, bless my children, bless my dog, bless my cat, bless my car." When you have finished the list, what have you done? You have drawn a circle around the things that belong to you and asked God to bless them. There is nothing wrong with loving your family — but if that circle is your entire horizon, you have not understood the love of God. And Peter's "love" for Jesus was exactly this kind of love. He loved Jesus as his teacher, his hero, his Lord — and he would not permit Jesus to die. He would have prevented the cross. And the Lord Jesus, in calling this satanic, is saying: your love, however sincere, is the opposite of God's love. It savours of the things of man and not of God.
God's love has no fence. "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" says the Lord in Matthew 12:48. Everyone who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. When you are born into God's family, you discover that the family has no boundary. And God's love expressed itself in this: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." He gave him — he forsook him — at infinite cost to himself. The sword went through the Father's heart at the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Father could not answer. That is what love looks like when it is God's love. It gives, and in giving, it forsakes.
This is the meaning of the word "hate" in Luke 14. It does not mean an emotional feeling of hatred or contempt. It means, in the Hebrew sense, to forsake, to set aside, to give up — and to do so with pain. When Abraham was told to offer Isaac, he did not feel contempt for his son. He loved Isaac more than his own life. But he was willing to give him up to God, and in giving him up, he received him back multiplied. The seed must fall into the ground and die before it can bear a hundredfold. There is a loving that involves a forsaking, a hating in this specific sense — not an emotional rejection but a sacrificial release. And the promise is: in losing, you find; in forsaking, you gain.
I speak personally. When I forsook my parents to serve the Lord, I had never loved them more. The parting was painful beyond words. But the result was that my mother came to the Lord. She said to me later, "Eric, I gave you physical life, and you gave me spiritual life." And she said, "So long as I have one bowl of rice, you have one." She who had been reluctant to see me go came to understand. This is the principle: the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, and bears much fruit. The human love that tries to hold everything in its circle produces nothing and keeps everyone small. The love that forsakes and releases, at cost to itself, becomes a fountain of life for others.
# Love and Hatred — Matthew 16:24–26; Luke 14:25–33 (Part B) — The Forsaking That Is Love; Grace as the Power to Self-Give
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Matthew 16:24–26 and Luke 14:25–33, continuing directly from Part A. Delivered 6 July 1980, Montreal.]
Let me press the point further, because it needs to be felt as well as understood. Human love, when it remains purely human, actually constricts the flow of God's love through us. We are like taps — closed, blocked by the circle of our own affections. God wants to make us fountains, with rivers of living water flowing out. But a tap that is closed and a tap that is constricted can never be a fountain. As long as your love is entirely directed inward — at your own circle, your own family, your own interests — you cannot at the same time be a channel of God's love to the world. The two are not compatible.
I put it this way: my family is inside my fence, and God's family has no fence. Now when someone asks: who is my brother? — the Christian answer, if we have understood the gospel, must be the same as the Lord's: everyone who does the will of my Father. I have seen the narrowness of this exposed in very ordinary ways. I would readily give a dollar to a child in the street without hesitation. I would give forty dollars to my wife because she is my family. But if a sister in the church asks me for forty dollars — someone outside my immediate circle — I find myself thinking: who are you? Go to the pastor. That instinctive resistance reveals exactly where the fence stands. And the fence is what must come down.
Now here is the deeper mystery. I said that there is a loving in which there is a hating — a forsaking that is love at its most costly. Consider what it cost God to love the world. God loved his only Son. The Father and the Son had been together from before the foundation of the world, in a relationship beyond our comprehension. And yet God so loved the world — us, strangers, enemies — that he gave his only Son. He forsook his Son. At the cross, when the Son cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", the Father did not answer. The sword passed through the Father's heart as surely as through the Son's. That is what it cost God to love us. In giving his Son, the Father hated — in the sense of forsaking — the one dearest to him.
And precisely in that forsaking, in that giving, what happened? The one seed fell into the ground and died, and bore an innumerable harvest. Abraham offered Isaac — and received him back. The disciples left everything — and found everything, multiplied. He who loses his life for my sake will find it. This is not a paradox but a spiritual law. When you hold everything tightly, you have whatever your small circle contains. When you open your hands and give, you discover that God can fill them with something far greater. The disciples who loved not their lives unto death are described in Revelation as receiving the crown of life — those very lives they had let go were returned to them transformed and eternal.
I come now to the second stumbling block: grace and cost. How can salvation be free, the gift of God, and yet cost everything? The answer is that grace does not abolish cost — it provides the power to pay it. What is grace? Grace is not merely God's forgiveness of past sin. Grace is God's gift of supernatural power — the Holy Spirit — to enable us to do what the flesh cannot do. Paul says in Philippians 4:13: "I can do all things through him who strengthens me." He is not speaking of ordinary cheerful confidence; he is speaking of the supernatural capacity that God gives to those who rely on him. The flesh cannot love with God's love. The flesh cannot voluntarily forsake what it loves for the sake of strangers. The flesh cannot lay down its life. But grace can do what the flesh cannot.
This is Christianity: God does not ask you to do the impossible in your own strength. He asks you to take up the cross — and then he gives you the Spirit who empowers you to carry it. The cost is real. The cross is real. The forsaking is painful, not theoretical. But the grace is equally real. Without this understanding, people either abandon the teaching as too hard or attempt to fulfil it by human willpower and collapse. The disciples did not stay with Jesus by pure determination — they were enabled by something that was not their own. When they finally went out and turned the world upside down, it was not because they had gritted their teeth and decided to love. It was because the Spirit of the living God was in them, and that Spirit is love.
So let me close with this: Christianity is not about securing a reserved seat in heaven while continuing to live for yourself in the meantime. It is about being transformed into a fountain of life for others. That is what the church is meant to be — a community where each one pours himself out for the other; where there is total, mutual, unreserved commitment; where the body of Christ is actually functioning as a body. We are far from that ideal. But the foundation is there — the divine nature imparted to us, which is love — and the call is to let that nature do its full work. Take up the cross. Let the grain of wheat fall into the ground. And discover that what you lose you find, multiplied beyond measure.