Course Correction

Sermon Transcript

I may be dating myself, but I remember watching the Karate Kid on VHS when I was a kid. Somewhat famously among my generation and older, at least, the karate kid was trained by an older teacher, Mr. Miagi, first by being required to wax a car–”wax on, wax off,” was the saying. Then his instructor also made him paint a fence over and over and over again. To follow Mr. Miagi meant waxing a car and painting a fence, even when those things didn’t bear any obvious connection to karate. And we all follow someone, to some extent. It could be someone ahead of you in your profession, and following them means going to get your MBA, working extra hours, or attending certain conferences. It could be a political party, and following them means voting for certain candidates, listening to certain news outlets, liking certain people, and disliking others.

 

What does it mean to follow Jesus, though? That’s what the section of Luke on which we’re focusing today shows us. In Luke chapter 9 we’ve finally gotten the answer to the question the first 9 chapters of Luke were asking: Who is Jesus? Jesus is the Christ, the promised savior of God’s people. God even bore witness from heaven that this is his Son, and he told us how he wants us to respond: Listen to him. Listen to him about what? In this text we get to listen to Jesus tell us what it means to follow him. He already said earlier in chapter 9 that anyone who would come after him must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow him. But what does that mean on the ground level? What does it mean for your life? Today we’ll see that following Jesus means rejection without retaliation, and renunciation without regret. So first we’ll talk about rejection without retaliation, then renunciation without regret.

 

Rejection without retaliation

 

Luke begins our passage today by telling us that these things took place when the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up. Jerusalem was uphill from where Jesus had been staying in Capernaum, with an elevation gain of over 3000 feet. So first, Jesus would “go up” to Jerusalem. But here the taking up is in the passive voice–Jesus is to be taken up. That’s because he’s already told us in Luke’s Gospel that he must suffer, be rejected, and be killed in Jerusalem, and the way he’d be killed is by being lifted up on a cross. But he also said that after he died, he would be lifted up again from the dead, and not only was he lifted up from the dead, but he was lifted up all the way to heaven, where he lives and reigns forever at the Father’s right hand. So Luke tells us that when the days for these things to take place drew near, Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem. That’s an idiomatic way of saying that he set a determined course for Jerusalem.

 

A couple years ago I figured out that I’d be in the UK around the same time the tennis tournament Wimbledon was happening. So I set my face to go to Wimbledon. I researched the ticket queue in advance, I watched multiple YouTube videos on how best to manage it, I booked flights and lodging accordingly. When in London, my dad and I attempted to go on Monday, but there were no same-day tickets left. Fear not, though, I planned for this contingency–Tuesday morning I woke up at 4 am, got an Uber to the facility, and got in the queue at 5 am. I then waited in it for 5 hours, until at 10 am I finally got my ticket, and entered the facility, in which I got to watch a full day of tennis. I did all that to watch a few guys hit a ball. Jesus exercised that kind of determination to go suffer, be rejected, and be killed. 

 

He knew that’s what was coming; he’s already told us multiple times that’s what was coming! And now as the days draw near for it to happen, we don’t find him resisting it; we find him rushing headlong into it. Kids, can you imagine your parents telling you to clean the bathroom, and you immediately dropping everything else, running to get the supplies, and getting the job done as quickly and diligently as you can? Now imagine if the command was far harder than a chore–imagine it was to go suffer, be rejected, and be killed. Yet this is the commission Jesus received from his father. He knew something far worse than a messy room was ahead of him, something far less entertaining than centre court at Wimbledon; he knew suffering, rejection, and the cross were ahead of him, and still, he set his face to go, trusting that on the other side of suffering, rejection, and death, he would be lifted up from the grave and risen to heaven, just as we now know he was. And because he obeyed like that, he now has all the perfect obedience that we need to be taken up with him when we die, if we will follow him in this life.

 

But what does following him mean? That’s what we’re looking at today. So we read next that as Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, he sent messengers ahead of him, who entered a village of the Samaritans. The route from Capernaum to Jerusalem was a 3 to 5 day journey, and back then they didn’t have hotels or AirBnBs to book. So residents of a town would often keep a guest room, an inn, at which travelers could stay. These messengers went ahead of Jesus to see if any residents of this village of the Samaritans would give Jesus a place to stay. But the people did not receive him, verse 53 says, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.

 

To understand this, you have to understand some of the background on Jews and Samaritans. In the year 722 BC, so right around 750 years prior to this story we’re looking at today, the Assyrian empire conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, the land of Samaria, and removed most of the Israelites from that land. Then they resettled other, non-Israelite people there. When Israelites later returned from exile, they intermarried with these non-Israelite people, and also, as is so often the case with intermarriage, they tried to combine their religions. They didn’t recognize Jerusalem as the site of religious worship, though the Jews claimed that’s where the true temple was located and the only place the true God could be fully worshiped. So the Jews generally viewed Samaritans as both ethnically and religiously impure, and the Samaritans had a similar disdain for the Jews. Yet the most direct path from Capernaum to Jerusalem was through Samaria.

 

So now here comes Jewish messengers on behalf of the Jewish Jesus trying to get him a place to stay so he can go on to the Jewish Jerusalem, the city the Samaritans hate above all. In the mind of the Samaritans, this would be like a North Korean trying to pass through South Korea on their way to Pyongyang. So here we read that the people in this village did not receive Jesus, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. 

 

But when two of Jesus’ disciples, James and John, saw this happen, they asked Jesus if he wanted them to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume the Samaritans. That might seem extreme to you, and perhaps a tad unrealistic, but there is biblical precedent for their request. In the book of 2 Kings, chapter 1, we read of a certain king of Samaria, named Ahaziah, who fell sick, and sent messengers to inquire, not of the Lord, but of a false god named Baal-zebub. The messengers get stopped on their way by the true prophet of the true God, Elijah, who we’ve just seen appear on the mountain with Jesus a couple weeks ago in verses 28-36 of Luke 9. There Elijah told the king of Samaria that he would surely die from this sickness. So the king of Samaria sent a captain of his army with 50 men, likely to try to intimidate Elijah, get him to reverse the prophecy, or at least to shut him up. And do you know what Elijah did? He called down fire from heaven, and it consumed the 50 men. In fact, he did it again when Ahaziah sent another 50 after the original 50 died, and neither time is there any sense in the narrative that Elijah was doing anything wrong. To the contrary, Elijah was an instrument of the LORD’s judgment on the wicked Samaritans.

 

A Samaritan king rejected the LORD, so Elijah, the LORD’s prophet, called down fire from heaven and consumed 50 of his men. Now here, what do James and John see? They see an entire Samaritan village rejecting the LORD who’s now come in the flesh in Jesus Christ, and they are, in a sense, Jesus’ prophets. They are among the twelve disciples that Jesus set apart to be apostles, whom Jesus gave authority to perform miraculous signs like those that the former prophets like Elijah performed. So they wonder, “Should we then also call down fire from heaven to consume these Samaritans?” 

 

But verse 55 tells us that Jesus turned and rebuked them. He himself did not call down fire from heaven, and he rebuked his disciples when they suggested such a thing. Consider how much right Jesus had to do such a thing. Jesus is the true God, the one against whom we all have sinned. He made us, and yet we all have lived in various ways as though he doesn’t matter. If you create something, like let’s say you build an end table for your living room, I think we’d all recognize that you have the right to do whatever you want with it. You could put it up on a pedestal and display it as a piece of art if you want; that’s a bit strange, but you made it! Now imagine especially if the end table wasn’t doing what you made it to do. Imagine you put your drink on it and the top just fell, leaving your drink to spill on the floor. What good is such an end table? You have every right to take that end table and throw it in the back of the garbage truck. So when you consider that the LORD not only made us, but that we have rejected the purpose for which he made us, does he not have the right to send fire from heaven to consume us? There are stories in the Bible in which he does just that; you can read them in Leviticus 10 and Numbers 16, for example, and I already mentioned the way Elijah did. On top of the baseline of guilt we all have before the holy God who made us, these Samaritans had an opportunity to show hospitality to God incarnate, and they rejected him.

 

Yet Jesus not only doesn’t call down fire from heaven; he rebukes the very suggestion. Why? Not because their sin isn’t real, not because God isn’t holy, and not even because the Lord will not judge sin. Not only has God sent fire to consume his adversaries in the past, but God will do so in the future. Listen to this vision of the final judgment from Revelation 20:15 – “And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” We are sinful, God is holy, and God will judge his adversaries in the end, but that is not what Jesus came to do. Later in Luke Jesus tells us that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). Remember why Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem: Not to inflict suffering, not to dole out rejection, and not to kill, but to suffer, to be rejected, and to be killed. The Son of Man came this time not to bring judgment, but to bear judgment. 

 

You see, here’s the broader reality: If the fire of God came down from heaven in judgment on human sin, it would consume us too. To borrow an image from theologian Miroslav Volf, the wrath of God is not a weapon I can put in my hands and point at my enemies. That’s the temptation, isn’t it? We see heinous crimes committed, we see people who threaten us and our safety, and we cry out for justice! But if we could only see our own sins clearly, if we could only see them with the piercing clarity with which the LORD sees them, we would cry out for mercy! God’s wrath comes upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, including my own. And that’s why it’s such good news that the Son of Man came not to bring judgment, but to bear it. He was going to Jerusalem to suffer, be rejected, and be killed to bear the wrath of God in our place, for our sins, so that we could be forgiven. And he wasn’t just going there for the Jews; he was going there for the Samaritans too.

 

Jesus had a plan for the Samaritans beyond consuming them with fire. He had a plan to be consumed on their behalf. Then after he was taken up, he sent his Holy Spirit to his disciples, and though they’d left that village of the Samaritans on that day, here’s what he told his disciples then: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). And sure enough, in Acts 8 we read of a disciple of Jesus, Philip, who went to Samaria, and proclaimed to them the Christ. Luke tells us there that “when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women” (Acts 8:12). And when the apostles heard that the Samaritans had received the word of God, John was even one of the apostles they sent. 

 

The rejection they faced from the Samaritans on this day, though, comes with the territory of following Jesus. They try to go into a village, they get rejected. You try to share the gospel, you get rejected. You let your Christianity show a bit at work, and suddenly your boss seems a little less excited about you, and your co-workers don’t seem to bring you into the inner ring as closely. But we can infer from this story at least three reasons we should not retaliate in such situations: Our own sinfulness, the work of Christ, and the final judgment. First, there is our own sinfulness. If you ever find yourself holding a grudge against someone, rehearsing getting back at them in your mind, or stewing on past hurts, this is a great place to go: Consider your own guilt before a holy God. The severity of a sin is measured not so much by the act itself, but by the dignity and worth of the one whom it is against. If I leave the service today and spit on the ground, you might think me a bit impolite, but you probably wouldn’t take personal offense. If I leave the service today and spit in your face, though, you’d understandably take offense, and that’s because you’re worth more than a slab of concrete. But God is the being of infinite worth, and he’s the one we’ve sinned against! Yet he’s been so merciful to us! He’s sent his son to suffer, be rejected, and be killed in our place so that we could be accepted by him, and today, though we commit new sins against him every day, there is never any new condemnation for us! Instead, there’s only more grace, and in the coming ages God says what he’s going to do is show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:7). How can we who believe that for ourselves then call down fire from heaven on others?

 

That’s our sinfulness, but then there’s also the work of Christ. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, and he’s commissioned his church to go be witnesses of that to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the end of the earth. We live in the days of God’s patience, not of God’s judgment. So we warn people of the coming judgment and proclaim to them how to escape it, rather than trying to take it into our own hands to execute that judgment. We recognize that on the cross Jesus died for the sins of people from every tribe and language and people and nation, and we profess that his death on the cross fully satisfied the wrath of God against the sins of those for whom it was offered. So if God is satisfied with the death of Christ, if that’s enough to satisfy his wrath, but we still maintain a wrathful spirit against those who reject us, do you see what that’s saying? It’s saying the death of Christ was enough for God to forgive, but it’s not enough for you. It’s saying you’re holier than God, and that though his wrath is appeased by the death of Christ, yours is not. So we don’t retaliate because of the work of Christ on the cross.

 

But what about those for whose sins Christ did not atone, those who will persist in rejecting the offer of salvation made through him? This is where our third reason for non-retaliation comes in: The final judgment of God. For one thing, we don’t have perfect knowledge of who the people are who will persist in believing, and who the people are who will persist in rejecting Christ. James and John thought to bring down fire to consume that Samaritan village, but some of those Samaritans were predestined for life, and believed the gospel when Philip preached it to them, something that never would have happened if James and John had called down fire to consume them that day. But furthermore, even if they knew definitively that the Samaritans would persist in rejecting Christ, it’s not their job to execute the final judgment on them. So we read in Romans 12:19 – “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” Jesus rebuked his disciples on that day because Jesus trusted that the LORD was competent to mete out whatever judgment needed to be meted out on those Samaritans, and will we not trust that as well?

 

We live in an era of rage, and though Jesus is no passive coward, he is so patient, so meek, and so merciful to the undeserving. To the degree we fail to be as his people, we forget of what spirit we are, and we fail to follow him. Following Jesus means we accept rejection without retaliation. And next we see that following Jesus means renunciation without regret.

 

Renunciation without regret

 

So they leave the village in Samaria and as they are going on the road to Jerusalem someone said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus doesn’t even call this man first; he volunteers, and volunteers enthusiastically. But here again we see something we’ve seen throughout Luke: Jesus isn’t just looking for greater numbers. Where most leaders would be glad to have an enthusiastic volunteer who basically says, “I’ll do whatever you tell me!” Jesus wants him to know what that entails first.

 

He replies that foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. He’d just tried to enter a village to get a place to stay for the night, and they didn’t receive him. That night, he didn’t know where he’d be sleeping. He owned no home of his own, and he had no lease to an apartment. Now here comes this guy saying he’ll follow Jesus wherever he goes, and Jesus essentially asks him: Are you willing to follow me into a lower, more desperate condition than that of a fox or a bird? We have a sizable homeless population in Philadelphia; some of you here today may be homeless. But generally no one tries to be homeless. If a homeless person comes to you who have homes and says come, follow me, and stay with me wherever I go, would you go sleep under a bridge with him tonight? 

 

But that’s the kind of renunciation involved in following Jesus. It’s a renunciation of all earthly securities, a place to sleep at night being among the most visceral. If you are not ashamed of Jesus and his words, there will be some who don’t like that, and among those may be those who confer your degree, those who cut your paycheck, or those who buy your products. Why does that have the potential to scare us so much? Because no money eventually means no house, and no house means nowhere to lay your head at night. In some neighborhoods and among some nations, the people who don’t like Jesus may be neighbors or even government officials who are willing to exercise violence against you because of it. In those situations, you especially don’t want to be out in the open, with no place to lay your head at night.

 

So why follow Jesus? Why renounce earthly security and run the risk of having nowhere to lay your head at night? Because if you follow Jesus, you get to be with Jesus. If the guy inviting you to sleep under the bridge with him tonight were Jesus, you’d be wise to say yes. What could possibly go wrong if you were with him? He has the strength to stay awake all night to stand guard. He’s more powerful than anyone who would try to attack you or rob you. He owns everything in all creation. If you need a jacket, he could get that for you. And the whole time, you’d get to be with him, and he’s better than a king-size bed in a penthouse suite. That’s not to say that if you follow him, he won’t let anything bad happen to you. He tells us just the opposite. But it is to say that the only way anything bad will happen to you is if he allows it, and if he does allow it, you can trust that he will be with you through it, and will ultimately take you up to be with him forever. Listen to what he tells his disciples later in Luke 21:16-19 – “You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. 17 You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 By your endurance you will gain your lives.” He tells us right there: Some of you they will in fact put to death. You’ll have nowhere to lay your head, and someone will come get you. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives. Is there any better deal out there than following Jesus? I mean sure, you can hold on tightly to your illusion of earthly security, but as John Piper has said, you can’t put enough locks on your door to keep out cancer. And how long will that place to lay your head last anyway? Leave it behind, and follow Jesus.

 

To another verse 59 tells us that Jesus said, “Follow me,” so this time he initiates. But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” We don’t get more insight into the circumstances; was his dad dead and the funeral was tomorrow, or did he mean that he knew his dad would die someday, and he wanted to stay and spend the last years of his dad’s life with him, and then complete his duty as a son by handling the burial? Whichever the reason, the desire was a natural one, and even a good one. Jesus is the same God who gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, one of which was to honor your mother and father, and in its original context, that did especially mean caring for them in their old age. Jesus upheld this commandment himself when he rebuked the Pharisees for supplanting it with their traditions (Mark 7:8-13). 

 

But the commandment to honor mother and father was never meant to be at the expense of the first commandment, to have no other gods before the LORD (Exodus 20:3). Him only shall you serve, Jesus said (Luke 4:8). So if Jesus says follow me, you don’t first go bury your father, right and good as it ordinarily would be to bury your father. I think of a friend of mine who is in college ministry, who moved multiple times, seemingly every 5-6 years, for as long as I knew him, for the sake of the ministry. He had three kids, and he once told me how his parents would regularly criticize him because not only did he not live near them, but he took their grandkids away from them! Well, he understood what Jesus said here: When the choice is between doing what your parents want you to do, and doing what Jesus wants you to do, there is no choice for followers of Jesus: You do what Jesus wants you to do. 

 

Kids, do you realize that? Parents, are you teaching your kids that? There are few things that should give a Christian parent more joy than for their kids to grow up and say, “Sorry mom and dad, but you won’t see much of me in the years to come. I’m going to another country to proclaim the gospel to people who haven’t heard it before.” Let them take the grandkids with them; Jesus is worth it. So Jesus responded to this man who wanted to first go and bury his father, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” A couple brief things to notice here: First notice how Jesus characterizes everyone who doesn’t follow him as among “the dead.” Obviously the bodily dead can’t bury anyone, yet he says, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” He’s referring here to spiritual death. To be a follower of Jesus is to be made alive together with Christ; to be apart from him is to be one of “the dead.” 

 

Notice next what following Jesus means rather than burying his father: It means going and proclaiming the kingdom of God. We saw earlier in Luke 9 that Jesus set apart twelve of his disciples in particular as apostles and told them to go proclaim the kingdom of God, but here we see that while they had a special commission and authority to do so, Jesus expects any who follow him to proclaim the kingdom of God. One of the mistaken notions Jesus is trying to correct here is the idea that he can be a mere addition to one’s life, like one might add a part-time job to their pre-existing life. So you still go to work like you always did, live in the same house you always would have, and bury your father like you always would have. But what Jesus is showing us here is that following him is a whole new life, that imbues our lives with a whole new mission. When we are made alive together with Christ, we become part of what he is doing to advance his kingdom over every square inch of creation, restoring it to the flourishing under his rule for which it was created. And one of the primary ways we all do that is we proclaim the kingdom of God. We proclaim that there is a real God, that all have sinned against him and are therefore under his judgment, but that Jesus Christ has come to bear that judgment and rise from the dead so that whoever would give up their rebellion and trust Christ for salvation would be forgiven, made alive, and enrolled as a citizen in the kingdom of God. Then, with that kingdom in mind, we rethink our jobs, our houses, our families, and everything else in light of how it serves to advance the proclamation of that kingdom. Part of following Jesus is proclaiming the kingdom of God, or as Pastor Mark Dever has put it, “If you say you’re following Jesus, but you’re not interested in helping others follow Jesus, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

And then, finally, verse 61 tells us of yet another who said that he would follow Jesus, but he wants to first say farewell to those at his home. Notice in both the second and third cases here, there is someone willing to follow Jesus, but they want to do something else first. In both cases, Jesus is not ok with it. Delayed obedience is disobedience. If you are here today and you are not a Christian, we’re glad to have you as long as you want to come. We recognize that most believers in Jesus did not become believers in Jesus the first time they heard the message of Jesus. It is a weighty decision, as even this passage indicates. When Jesus gets the enthusiastic offer from someone to follow him wherever he goes, Jesus stops to clarify. If you came up to us after the service today and said you’re ready to follow Jesus, we wouldn’t baptize you today. We’d want to have some similar conversations with you to what we see here to ensure you understand what you’re signing up for. But that’s not because the decision isn’t urgent. Every moment you spend not turning from your sins and following Jesus is a moment you remain in disobedience to him. There is never a good reason not to repent and believe, and therefore there is never a good reason to delay following Jesus.

 

So here, the desire to turn and say farewell to those at home is not a reason for delay that Jesus finds compelling. It too is an understandable, even good desire, and it has biblical precedent, once again in the life of Elijah. Elijah’s successor was a man named Elisha, and there was a time recounted in 1 Kings 19 when Elijah found Elisha plowing a field. Elijah then threw his cloak onto Elisha, which symbolized calling Elisha to follow him as a prophet. Elisha then said this: “Let me kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow you” (1 Kings 19:20). Elijah let him do that, and then Elisha followed him. So here, the third man Jesus encounters on the road makes a similar request, but Jesus doesn’t let him! What’s that showing us? It’s showing us that Jesus is greater than Elijah, and because he is, the call to follow him is even more urgent, and more worth the loss of all things, than the call to follow Elijah. Elijah was a prophet, but Jesus is the one of whom the prophets spoke, the Christ, the Lord.

 

So he says in what perhaps is an allusion to the Elisha story, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” At that time a plow would be drug between two oxen who were yoked together, and the human operating the plow would be behind them, with one hand holding an ox goad to keep the ox in line, and the other hand on the plow to guide it and make sure it was at just the right height to till up the soil while also not hitting rocks or damaging itself in some other way. For a plow operator to look back while doing this would be disastrous to the plowing operation–it could send it off in the wrong direction, or lead to irreparable damage to the plow. So Jesus compares following him to putting one’s hand to the plow, and says that anyone who does that and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God.

 

Some of you don’t remember much of a pre-Christian life, but many of us do. And those of us who do also remember ways we found to be happy in our pre-Christian lives. Though the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, after they came out, they often looked back fondly on the garlic, the watermelon, the leeks, all the while forgetting the harsh slavery to which they were subjected. Brothers and sisters, life in Egypt wasn’t better. Don’t you remember what drove you to Christ in the first place? I’d venture a guess that it wasn’t because your life was so just fulfilling and your conscience just so clear and your future just so bright. Why ever say to him, then, that you want to first go and live more of life without him, before beginning life with him? 

 

Baptism, the initiation rite of Christianity, even depicts this. It signifies going into the water one person, and coming out a new creation, and when we bring you up out of the water, nobody ever turns around and looks back at the water. They’re looking forward, to a new future with Jesus. There is no undoing that, no getting back into the water and coming out as who you used to be, just as once God causes someone to be born again, he never sends them back to spiritual death. So part of what following Jesus means is renouncing our past life, and not looking back. It means we let it all go without regret. Here’s how one of Jesus’ early disciples put it in Philippians 3: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith⁠.”

 

Why count everything as loss? Why leave those in your home without even looking back? Because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. In order to gain Christ. The one who loses everything, and gains Christ, comes out way in the black. He is the son of man, who for us and our salvation, left his Father’s house, and set his face to go to Jerusalem, without looking back. And when he comes again, fire from heaven will consume his adversaries, but not a hair of your head will perish if you leave everything and follow him. You will face rejection if you follow him, but we need not ever retaliate against those who reject us, for we know how much mercy we’ve received from God, we know that Christ died for people such as these, and we know that the judge of all the earth will do right in the end. Following Jesus means renouncing our claims at retaliation, it means renouncing all earthly sources of security, it means renouncing even our family duties, and it means doing so with no regrets, for in the end, those who follow Christ, gain Christ.