[Note: This is Part A of the sermon on Luke 14:33, delivered 17 October 1982, Montreal. The series is titled "Regeneration and Renewal." The preacher had been resting for six weeks since the previous sermon in this series (335). Part B continues directly.]
Today we continue in our study of the Lord's teaching. I have not been preaching for the last six weeks, so I am really picking up where I left off. And I do want to thank the dear brothers of the first team who took the main weight upon themselves so as to afford me a time of rest. The only thing that is regrettable is that whereas I am better, they are worse off physically now. So it seems that when I get better, they get worse — and when I get worse, they get better. Maybe we can keep it that way. But I do appreciate their love and concern.
We must return to the question we dealt with six weeks ago: the meaning of dying spiritually in order to live spiritually. This remains a problem in the minds of some, in spite of several messages on it. All the more so because I received a letter from a brother who said that various persons in the church still could not get clear about this point. Namely: we were speaking about the need to know what it means to die in order to have the fullness of life in Christ. It is a common experience among Christians that they are powerless, weak, without joy or peace. And then there is this disturbing question: they do not know whether they are dead or alive. When I was baptized, I was supposed to have died with Christ — and yet my conduct and reactions after that seem to show that I didn't really die. At least, if I did die, I cannot have died very completely. If you have not died completely, are you really dead or not?
Also this question: can you be totally committed and yet not have died to the old way of life? And the persons who say they are totally committed end up being quite uncertain whether they are committed or not. Every time they fail in the Christian life, every time they sin, they begin to wonder all over again: am I saved or am I not? Should I be baptized again? Like Sister Meikou, and even Helen. And this worries them further — it took these persons so long to find out they were not in a right relationship with the Lord, so what will happen to the likes of us? We may go on for fifteen or twenty years and then wake up one day to realise that after all the old self had never died and there was no real commitment. And this insecurity and fear will drain away any vitality, what little was there in the first place.
Now, let me speedily make a correction concerning the case of Helen. Some people remarked: if it took Helen twenty years to find out she had not died, then what will happen to the likes of us? There are several errors on this point, and I had occasion to check with Helen to get my facts correct. She never claimed to have ever died. She conceded that she had never died spiritually, and that her understanding of commitment had been entirely partial. And exactly as I had said at the summer camp baptism: the part is the enemy of the whole. You are committed in one area and think that commitment in one area represents the whole — and that is a very serious danger. Particularly for those of you who are thinking of serving the Lord full time.
What do we mean by this danger? For example, a person gives up his job and profession to serve the Lord or to train for ministry. In giving up his profession, he sees himself as having expressed total commitment. But is it total? In giving up your job and career, you may not have given up your old temperament, your bad temper, your self-centredness. Then you have given up something less important even than your job. What is the use of giving up your job when you keep your selfishness, your nastiness, your bad temper? Have you really given up what matters to God? This is what I mean by the part being the enemy of the whole. And I find that many people thought that in giving up their profession they had really given everything — they had not. If they have not surrendered the whole attitude they had before, then they bring that old attitude right into the ministry. The only difference is that they have now given up their jobs; inwardly they are the same self-centred people, because many people become Christians or even go into full-time work in search of something for themselves. Let us be honest about it — in search of a deeper inner satisfaction than their professions can give. And they are not mistaken in that: there is a satisfaction that comes from serving God that no profession on earth can give. When you see people come to the Lord, when you see lives transformed — that gives a satisfaction no profession can match. But the danger lies here: you may go into this work without having left behind the old mentality.
The result is that there are some Christian workers whose conduct and behaviour is much less than what Christian conduct should be. When you get to know them, you will have the shock of your life to see how they behave. And this comes as an observation not only from laypeople but from workers themselves. When I took a few days of holiday, I went to see Brother Thomas — one of last year's summer camp speakers. He invited his pastor to come and meet me. This pastor, as I mentioned last week, had been a research biochemist with a PhD in biochemistry, which he gave up entirely to serve the Lord. He told me he attended a pastor's meeting — he had only been in the ministry for one year, so he had his eyes open. He attended this meeting, which was a closed meeting only for pastors and Christian workers, where you don't have to worry about what the lay Christians outside think of you. He said: the way these pastors spoke to one another, their insistence on themselves, their pride and arrogance of conduct — he was staggered. He stood up and said to these pastors: I am ashamed to be in your midst today. Your conduct is a disgrace to the gospel.
Why do people who are committed to full-time work behave in this fashion? The reason is simply this. Yes, they left their profession behind. Yes, they made a commitment. But no, they did not leave their bad temper behind. No, they did not leave their old mentality behind. They brought all of these things with them into the ministry, and that is the disaster. Now what is the relevance of this to you? You may have made a commitment to the Lord at baptism — Lord, I put my life into your hands, I belong to you. Fine. But you brought all your old ways of behaviour into the church. Your critical attitudes — brought into the church. Your grumbling attitudes — brought into the church. You brought all this old garbage into the so-called new life. And how is your new life going to be new as long as you bring all this with you?
Now let me speedily address the basic question. I return, as I always do, to the teaching of the Lord Jesus himself. Where did he teach these things? In many places, but let me concentrate today on Luke chapter 14, verse 33. The Lord says: "So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple." Let me read the whole paragraph for context. Luke 14, verse 25: "Now great multitudes accompanied Jesus 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. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." He then gives two illustrations — counting the cost of building a tower, and a king going to war outnumbered two to one. "So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple."
There is something about the absoluteness of the Lord's words that immediately makes us feel very uncomfortable. The demand is not only high — it is absolute, unlimited, complete: all. There is no way we are going to escape this allness. Now, God's salvation and grace are the gift of grace. But what most people do not like to hear is that this gift of grace, when you accept it, will cost you everything you have. The pearl of great price may be a gift, but you have to sell everything in order to obtain it. Costly grace, expensive grace — that is the grace of the Bible. But today, too often the church likes to preach a cheap grace, a grace that costs you nothing, so cheap that no department store sale in the world could remotely compete with it. And that bears little resemblance to what the Lord is saying here.
You either take the words of the Lord Jesus or you forget it. If you try to stay somewhere in between — if you say, I am going to be a moderate Christian, not a fanatic who takes this all thing seriously, but somewhere in between — you will pay a higher price. What higher price? Exactly what I said: instead of discovering that life is abundance, that Jesus came to bring life and bring it in abundance as John 10:10 says, you will discover that life is a continuity of death — defeat after defeat, failure after failure. And ultimately you end up with nothing either. A Christian life that is frankly very miserable — so miserable that, I apologize for putting it this way, I would recommend you go back into the world and enjoy it while you still have time. Because to be miserable now and at the judgment — that is to be of all people most foolish. The worldly man is at least wiser in this respect: if he is going to end up at the judgment later, he might as well enjoy himself for twenty or thirty years now. But to be miserable both now and at the judgment — what kind of logic is that? That is why the Lord Jesus said the children of darkness are wiser in their own generation than the children who want to be children of light.
Now let us look at this verse carefully. "Whoever of you does not renounce all that he has." Let me immediately say: all that he has by no means refers merely to material possessions. In fact, the context has very little to say about material possessions. Often when we think of "renounce all that one has," we immediately think of property, bank accounts, income, money stored away for a rainy day. This term certainly includes such things but hardly refers to them primarily. As I have said, you can give your body to be burned and still have no love — and that will not do. The giving up of material possessions can become a substitute for giving up something yet more important: the self-centred way of life we have become accustomed to.
I want to warn of this matter very seriously, particularly if you do not have much to lose. It is very easy to give up your possessions when you have next to nothing. If I have a hundred dollars in the bank and you say give up all you have — well, you can have the hundred dollars. And if I do not have a very good job anyway and you say give up your job — fine, I am sick of that boss who is breathing down my neck and those colleagues giving me lung cancer with their cigarettes. Hallelujah, take the job. Give up everything — it is easy. And then I bring my bad temper into the church. I bring my selfishness, my arrogance, my pride. Hold on, my friend. You cannot get around God in this way. He goes for something much deeper than your possessions and your job. Your possessions are valuable to you but not that valuable to him. What is more valuable is your soul, your life. You can give your job and keep your soul — that is possible. And that is exactly the grief of the apostle Paul in Philippians chapter 2: he said he could find no one except Timothy among his co-workers who genuinely sought the interests of Christ rather than their own. Among his co-workers — not among the church, but among those who had given up everything to follow the Lord. There was still a great deal of self and pride. They had transported their whole old life with them.
Have you indeed been totally committed? That is the question. For Helen, she told me that giving up her profession — nursing — was no problem. Giving up material possessions was no problem. But when it came to giving up the old way of self, the self-centred life — that was the problem. Remember what the Lord says: it is the one who loses his soul, not merely his possessions, who will gain it. He who tries to keep his soul to himself will lose it, even if he does not keep his possessions. You can give up your possessions but keep your soul — your life as it has been lived — and that, he says, you will lose.
Now let me look at this word renounce. In Greek it is the common word to say goodbye, to bid farewell. He who does not say goodbye to all that he has, he who does not say farewell to all that he has, cannot be my disciple. And from here I would like to take on the exposition still further — to illuminate what the Lord means by saying goodbye. Now, goodbye is set in the context of a departure. You don't say goodbye unless you're going away. Bye.
[Continues in Part B]
# Death: Bid Goodbye to Self and the World (Part B) — Exodus Illustration; Apotassomai; Baptism as Red Sea Crossing; Boston Millionaire; Swiss Hike; Instantaneous vs. Progressive Dying; Sanctification as Victory
[Note: This is Part B of the sermon on Luke 14:33, delivered 17 October 1982, Montreal. The series is titled "Regeneration and Renewal." Continues directly from Part A.]
But when you put on your coat, open the door, and you're going out, then you say goodbye. And what is more, here is a final, decisive goodbye — it is goodbye forever. And how do we understand this? The best way to illustrate this point is to speak about the Exodus. You know that in the Old Testament, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 10, was written for our instruction. It shows what happened to people who decided they could modify the Lord's words, water them down a little, and live that way.
Exodus means departure. There came a day when God said to Israel: you are going to follow me out of Egypt. You are going to say goodbye — farewell to Egypt forever. You're going to leave everything behind, because clearly you can't take your house with you, even if it's only a mud house. Are you going to walk around with a table through the wilderness? Are you going to carry the precious chair you inherited from your grandmother? When they left Egypt, they had to say goodbye to their fields, their vegetable patches. What was particularly valuable to them, of course, was their onions and their garlic — not very valuable to us, but very valuable to them. In the wilderness they were dreaming of the aroma of the garlic. No more onions, no more garlic. And so they had to leave all of this behind.
The Lord uses the word: say goodbye to all that he has. To say goodbye is something dynamic. If you don't move, you don't have to say goodbye. But when you leave, then you have to say goodbye — it becomes motion, away from something. Just as our brother Harold lately was saying goodbye to those people in his company: if he were staying, he wouldn't have to say goodbye, but when he leaves, he says goodbye. The Lord is saying: unless you say goodbye to everything you have, like the Israelites left all they had behind, there's no way you'll be my disciple.
Of course, they didn't come out of Egypt naked — they wore their clothes and carried a few immediate necessities. When the Lord says goodbye to your possessions, he doesn't mean you'll be sleeping in the street tomorrow making yourself a public nuisance. The problem, again, is when we think exclusively of material possessions. What he's saying goodbye to is the whole old way of life in Egypt: no more the dominion of sin, no more the bondage and slavery of the old way of life under sin.
For those interested in the exegetical details: the word translated here as "renounce" in the RSV is more literally translated as goodbye or farewell — it's the very common expression used in the New Testament Greek, as in Acts chapter 18, verses 18 and 21, where it simply means saying farewell. Paul leaves Ephesus, he says farewell for the last time. This same Greek word is used here in Luke chapter 14.
Now, the farewell of Exodus is very interesting, because in the New Testament the word Exodus is used in a twofold meaning. It is used of the Israelites leaving Egypt, but the same word also means death. The Exodus, for example, is translated with reference to the departure from Egypt in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 22. But the very same word is used of the death of the Lord Jesus in Luke chapter 9, verse 31, and it is used of the death of Christians generally — in the case of Peter specifically — in 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 15. The departure from Egypt, spiritually, is the symbol of our death to this world.
This is exactly what Paul does in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 2, where he says the Israelites were baptized into Moses at the Red Sea. And so, those Israelites who left Egypt were baptized into the old covenant in the crossing of the Red Sea. In the same way, you and I, when we left the world — if we did leave the world — were baptized into the new covenant in Christ at our baptism. Paul continues to parallel this with verses 3 and 4, speaking of communion: they drank the spiritual drink which was Christ, they ate the spiritual food that God provided. These things were written for our instruction.
Did you say farewell as the Israelites did when they left Egypt and were baptized in the Red Sea? Did you say farewell to the old life? If not, you are not even on the level of the Israelites — never mind the new covenant, you are not even on the level of the old covenant. They literally, really left their life behind in Egypt. Once and for all, they crossed the Red Sea. Did you do that much when you became a Christian? What did you leave? Because in most cases, I see you have not left anything — not your profession, not your studies, not your possessions, nothing at all. Not even the old self. And then we wonder, how come the Lord's words are not fulfilled in my life? He said, I came to give you life, and give it abundantly. How can you experience God's provision in the wilderness when you took your whole old nature with you?
The wilderness, by the way, is a wonderful place if God is with you in it. There in the wilderness: a pillar of fire at night, a pillar of cloud by day. You have no water? Water gushes from the rock. You have no meat? The manna falls. What a wonderful thing, to walk in the wilderness with God. But why did what could have been a glorious wilderness become dreadful for the Israelites? Because they left their houses behind, they left their money behind, but they took their own nature with them — their selfishness, their complaining spirit, their discontented attitude — and that ruined everything. Their sojourn could have been less than a year. Instead they brought all their wretched old attitudes into the wilderness and turned it into a living hell.
Is that your experience of the Christian life? Because with every Israelite, every one of them had to leave Egypt behind, except the clothing they wore and the few necessities they carried. They wept as they looked at their house for the last time. My little mud patch — not much, but very dear to me. And you leave.
Now let us come to one final point before we close. Is this dying progressive, or is it instantaneous? Do we spend the whole of our Christian life dying — dying to one sin, then another sin — so that the Christian life becomes more death than life? Or is this dying once for all? To answer this question carefully, we must understand that in scripture a person is made up of spirit and body. When Paul says in Galatians 6:14, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ, by which I have been crucified to the world and the world to me" — what died? His body was not crucified on the cross. What was crucified was his spirit. He died with Christ spiritually.
So is it instantaneous? Of course — in so far as at baptism, decisively and once for all, we have said goodbye to the world. Galatians 6:14 is not an ongoing process; it is once for all, finished, expressed in the aorist tense in Greek. But the body is still with us. The flesh is still with us, and as Paul says in Romans 7, sin dwells in the flesh. That is why Paul says in Romans 8:13, "if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you shall live" — and that putting to death is in the present tense, a continuing process. He says the same thing in Colossians chapter 3, verse 5: mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth.
So: is it instantaneous or progressive? Instantaneous spiritually — once for all. Progressive in terms of the flesh — a continuing process. And here is the glory: in scripture, the person is identified primarily with the spirit. The self, the person, is identified with the spirit. The body is something that I have. This means that if the self, the spirit, has died with Christ — if it is totally committed to Christ and has forever said goodbye to the world — you will live in constant victory. Even as those things in the flesh are being progressively put to death, you will live in freedom all the time.
I say this in all humility, because in humility it must be. There is no credit to myself. But I have great difficulty understanding any Christian who lives in defeat. Am I perfect? Of course not. Am I victorious? Thanks be to God, yes. 2 Corinthians 2:14: thanks be to God who always gives us the victory in Christ Jesus. That is the abundant life.
Sanctification — please grasp this word carefully — sanctification, holiness in the Christian, does not mean the eradication of sin. It means the victory over sin. This error has caused so much trouble among holiness preachers. Holiness is not, in the Christian life, eradication of sin. We will always have sin in us, but it is the victory over sin. Though sin continues to be in your flesh, and you will progressively be putting sin to death, you will be in constant victory. Victory is meaningless unless there is a battle. It is precisely because we have the battle against sin in the flesh that we experience the meaning and reality of victory. And for victory there has to be power.
A story is told of a millionaire who became a Christian in Boston. One day after becoming a Christian, seeing a beautiful car, he was heard to say: "I wish I could afford that car." He was a multimillionaire who could afford thousands of such cars. But what happened? He knew he had died. He had no more possessions. The money in his life was no longer his — he was merely, for the moment, a steward of it, in the process of disposing of it. And interestingly, the word translated "renounce" or "goodbye" is in the present tense in Greek — a continuing process. The Lord is not simply saying you give everything away at one moment, but that it is a continuing process of stewardship and giving, because we are stewards. Whatever feels like no burden at all at the beginning grows heavier and heavier as you carry it.
When I was in school in Switzerland, we used to be required to make long-distance hikes, sometimes for several days. The teachers used to say: don't carry anything extra. We said: why not? Whatever feels like one pound is going to feel like ten pounds in a few days. And those of us who didn't listen had every reason to regret it. You start with the camera — nothing at the first hour. Two hours later the strap is cutting into your shoulder. And after a few more hours you feel as though you never bought a camera in your life. That is the reason the Lord says: leave it behind. That is why Hebrews says, laying every weight aside that you may run the spiritual race.
This power will never be your experience until you take the words of the Lord Jesus to heart. Say farewell — farewell to all that you have, not just your material possessions, but your whole mental attitude, your whole nature. All this is farewell. And then you will experience the power of his resurrection. Let it cry. Thank you.