Harbor Church - Mid City

Investigating Jesus (On Your Agenda)

Lk. 9: 18-27 Mid-City 2/13/11

We’re in a series in Luke and today we’re going to think about our text from 2 different angles: (1) The Question that we must all settle, & (2) The Mission we must all either reject or accept.  Question and Mission.  Let’s start with the question.  See there is an inescapable question that each one of us must settle at some point in our life.  It is the question that the entire gospel of Luke forces upon both explicitly and implicitly on every page.  It is the question that Herod asked in the beginning of ch. 9 and it is the question that Jesus then turns back to the disciples and says in v20, “Who do you say I am?”  Notice he takes it from the impersonal in v18, “ Who do the crowds say that I am” to the personal in v20, “Who do you say that I am?” 

This is the question.  Jesus stared his disciples in the face and asked them at point blank range, “Who do you say that I am?”  I know some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, but who do you say that I am?  San Diegans are all over the map on this question.  GJoe and Aimee recently went on the campus of SDSU a few weeks ago and asked this question.  Listen to the responses…

-Good guy.  Not religious type. 

-God’s Son, as far as I know.

-cool guy, not God

-Don’t believe in God

So, lots of different answers.  Good guy, but I am not religious or into that stuff.  God’s son, as far as I know (killed or executed).  Cool guy, not God.  Don’t believe in God, Jesus.  People are all over the map on this question in San Diego.  Well, this morning we’re going to at least look at the Bible and who Jesus says that He is.

Look at v20.  Peter answers Jesus and says you are “The Christ of God.”  What does that mean?  Well, start with the word Christ.  We typically call him Jesus Christ.  So is Christ like his last name? If you were going to look him up in the phone book in Nazareth, would you look under the C’s.  No.  Here is what Christ meant.  It meant, “God’s Anointed King.”  Then when you had the definite article in front of it, “The Christ,” you have an emphatic, “The Anointed King of God,” echoing the prophets who said Messiah would be the King of Kings.

Now notice that the very next things Jesus says is, “Shhhh.  Don’t tell anyone this.”  Why?  Well, The Romans believed that Caesar was ruling on behalf of the gods.  So to say that Jesus was God’s anointed King would be to challenge that Caesar was appointed by the gods.  Jesus knew that this would create a huge stir and would land him on the cross much earlier than he intended to be on the cross.  So he says, “Sh, keep it under wraps.”

But it certainly isn’t that he is trying to avoid being killed, eventually.  That is why he came:  to die.  Look at v21.  In v21 he lays out the reason he came, “to suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the 3^rd day be raised to life.” The question is this:  did I come to die for you?  Am I God’s Anointed King or not?  You must crown me or reject me, just as the chief priests and teachers of the law had to make their decision.

If you haven’t settled that question, I would encourage you to do 2 things: (1) join one of our Curious Discussion Groups.  Ask one of your friends how to or mark it on a card.  (2) keep coming back for this series because each week we’re going to be investigating who Jesus is.

For those of you that have settled that question, you have put your faith in Jesus and crowned him King of your life. And when you crowned him king, he looked at you, just as he looked at Peter and said v23 “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  Jesus says, “My mission is your mission.  My mission was a literal cross; yours is a symbolic cross.  It isn’t optional.  He doesn’t say, “Pick up your cross if you want to.”  Pick up your cross if you are a hard core Christian.  No. No.  If anyone wants to come after me, you gotta deny yourself and pick up your cross. 

See here is the interesting part.  You settle the question once and for all when you come into relationship with Jesus, but you reaffirm your answer every time you choose to accept his mission on a daily basis.  Those of you in the Navy get this.  Imagine that you are 18 and you settle the question of going into the Navy.  You enlist.  A year later you are given orders by your commanding officer and you say, “Nahh, don’t really feel like it today.  You will not be in the Navy very long this way, will you.  No, you reaffirm the question you settled every time you accept your mission.  Such is it with Jesus.  And He says your mission is to, on an ongoing basis, is to deny yourself & pick up your cross.

But that can be Christian-speak, can’t it.  What does that mean?  Let Billy Graham break it down for  you, “When Jesus said "You have to deny self," He did not mean you have to deny yourself a chocolate ice cream soda. He did not mean that you have to deny yourself a new television set, though that may be involved in some cases. He meant that you must deny your self, that part of you that is always interested in "me" and "mine," the "I," the ego.”

So Billy Graham says that denying yourself and pick up your cross means to deny that part of you that is all about you. We’re so self-absorbed here in Southern California.  And if you are a follower of Jesus he says to you that you must learn to get over yourself.  It isn’t about me.

So what does it mean for a college student to deny themselves and pick up their cross?  Well, I think it means that you don’t have sex with everything that moves.  That is what the world does.  That is what, if you are 18-21, you want to do because, let’s be honest, sex feels really good.  Some of you are like, “Can he say that in church?”  Yeah, sex truly is amazing.  And, without question, when you are in college in your teens and early 20s, your hormones are raging and you want to have sex.  Jesus says, “Die to yourself, and pick up your cross, and keep your pants on until you are married because I want you to have the most fulfilled sex life you could ever imagine.  I don’t want you bringing all this sexual baggage into your marriage.”

Let me apply this in another area.  I was asking my wife this week what this meant for her as a stay-at-home mom.  She said, “Well, my self-indulgence usually comes with people. She is such an extrovert and loves people so much that, he is what is interesting, people can really be all about pleasing herself.  Now don’t get me wrong, being with people and loving on people is a great thing, but people can become a bad thing when she is out with people and forsaking the things that Jesus has called her to in the home, such as teaching our kids, doing the laundry, cleaning toilets.  You know, all the fun, glamorous stuff.  So she said, “For me, to pick up my cross is to say no to people and yes to toilets and laundry.”

Let me apply this in another realm.  I was talking to a businessman.  He said, “My struggle is my agenda.  My agenda becomes all-controlling.  People are just tools that I use to turn the wheels of my agenda.”  So, for him to pick up his cross meant to hold his agenda loosely.  To be open to stopping work for 5 minutes to listen to one of his colleagues who was struggling in their marriage.  To treat people with kindness and dignity, not just as cogs in a wheel to turn the profit machine, to accomplish his agenda.

Now what Jesus does is that he basically takes this same principle of learning to get over yourself and says it in 2 different ways in v24-25.  V24“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”  Let me give you a very harsh example of two women who tried to save their life and ended up losing it.  Lot’s daughters in Gen. 19.  They have fled the city of Sodom and the whole city has been destroyed.  They are single in a married world and, in their mind, they have no prospect of getting married and having children.  Having children, in their world, was the way to save your life.  It was the way to have a full and fulfilled life personally.  Socially, it was the way to have standing in the community.  Economically, it was the way to make sure that you had a retirement plan.  Your kids were your nest egg b/c they would take care of you.  And so, in order to save their life, they got Lot, their father drunk, and slept with him and they became pregnant.  In their minds, they saved their life, but in reality they lost it.  God granted them a son each who became the father of the Moabites and Ammonites who constantly opposed Israel and the work of God in the world.  They refused to trust and decided to take saving their own life into their own hands.

Now, let me come at it from the other way around from someone who came from the Moabite line.  Ruth.  Here you have a woman who has lost everything.  Her husband has just died, her brother-in-law has died, and her father-in-law has died.  All the males in the entire family were wiped out.  Just women left—Naomi (the mother-in-law), Orpah (the sister-in-law), and Ruth.  They were living in Moab because there had been a famine in Israel and Naomi gets wind that God has provided for Israel and food has returned and she, in tears, tells her daughters, “I must go home, but I can’t care for you.  I have no other sons and will be destitute myself.  You must go back to Moab and maybe you can find another husband.”

But Ruth, in this famous line, says, “No. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay I will stay.  Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.  Where you die, I will die.”  She isn’t seeking to save her life, but rather she is losing her life for the Lord.  She has been called into relationship with the God of the universe and it has changed everything about her.  She is losing the gods of her friends and family.  It isn’t just about her.  And she knew that God was calling her to lose her life for him.  To come back to Israel, to care for her mother-in-law so that she wouldn’t be destitute.  If you asked ten out of ten people in Moab if she should do this, they would have said, “Ruth, you are throwing your life away.  What are you doing?  You are going to waste away and turn into an old widow.  What guy is going to marry you when it is a package deal with your mother-in-law?”  And guesss what, in losing her life for God she ends up saving it.  God provides this amazingly rich life for her and she sees God move on her behalf in providing Boaz and Ruth is grafted into the family lineage of Jesus.

To reiterate the point further, Jesus puts it in economic terms in v25, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” Lot’s daughters gained what was in their mind the whole world at the time, but they forfeited their very self, the essence of what they were to be about in the world.  They were to trust God, to represent God to the world, to be his image.  And when they did this, they lost a piece of themselves, even though they gained, in a wordly sense, what they wanted.

Haven’t you felt the truth of what Jesus says?  You gain what the world tells you that you should want, but you feel so empty inside.  You have the house, the car, the job, and you’ve gained the world, but in the process you have gotten lost yourself.  You remember back when life used to be fun.  You used to laugh.  And something inside of you has died.

Your boss asks you to misrepresent the company, and you do.  You gain his favor, but you lose a piece of yourself, of the you that God created you to be.

I remember having dinner with an extremely wealthy home builder in La Jolla not too long ago.  Admittedly not in relationship with Jesus.  He was absolutely furious at one of his La Jolla friends who just committed suicide.  Everyone in La Jolla knew that he had 100s of millions to his name and he checked out.  And this businessman was just ripping him up and down.  How could he do this?  He had everything.  But his soul.  He lost it in the process of gaining the world.  He knew it and he checked out.

Barbara Goldsmith is a New York Times Best selling author who has written extensively about this.  She writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker and many of her works have been case studies on the struggles that children have growing up in extreme wealth such as the Johnson family (of Johnson & Johnson, the Vanderbilt family, etc.).  She recently wrote an article entitled, “Why Rich People are So Miserable.”  In the article she quotes a line from one of her books that sums up her position. Listen, “It is my observation that as a group the [children] of the extremely wealthy suffer damage. A few escape [but most] trapped beneath the shadow of power never see their own sun . . . Others overcompensate . . . These are the two kinds of rich men’s sons, the overcompensators who have some chance of becoming men, and those who don’t enter the competition and remain forever boys.”

Remain forever boys.  You lose yourself.  You don’t become the man or woman of God that you were created to be.  You get lost along the way.  She highlights how so many of these insanely wealthy people end up endlessly in court with their brothers and sisters trying to gain the world, or hold on to the world of the rich and famous and they lose themselves in the process.

Or I read another article on this subject entitled, “Why Rich People Aren’t Happier.”  It pointed out that “the average American is less satisfied with life today than we were in the 1950s — yet we earn twice as much (and, yes, that’s adjusted for inflation).” 

Jesus then gives you the impact on your life of gaining the world.  If you gain the world and lose your self, then v27, “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory.”  See if you gain the world, then you will be ashamed of Jesus.  This is the opposite scenario of what Jesus described in John 15:18, “If the world hates you, keep in mind they hated me first.”  But if you have gained the world, then you have become like the world.  Net result: you will be ashamed of me.

Let me talk to those of you who are brand new Christians.  You are just beginning your journey with Jesus.  You are at a critical point in the journey.  You have just decided to follow Jesus and, in most cases, you now have to deal with the social repercussions.  Some of you come from families where you are the only believer?  You dread telling your family because you know it will go over about as well as a Democrat at the Republican National Convention.  Or for others of you, it is your friends.  You dread telling them because you know how they will think about you.  Some of you have already told your friends and they have stopped calling.  Now this isn’t always the case.  Some of you will have supportive friends and family. But many of you have friends who tell you that religion is private.  Do not believe that lie.  I have talked to so many people who grew up in good “religious homes,” often Catholic or Presbyterian or Anglican or Episcopalian—typically it is the more high churched denominations, and they say, “Religion around my home is a private matter.  It isn’t something you talk about.”  What are the two subjects that are off limits?  Politics and religion.

No.  That is the devil’s strategy, to isolate you.  Think about how foolish that is.  If you really want to grow and learn anything, you read about it, talk about it, ask questions.  If you want to become a good lawyer or doctor, you go to law school or med school.  You spend your life reading and talking about law and medicine.  You get around more seasoned attorneys and doctors and you shadow them to learn from them.  The only way to grow in anything is to ask questions, for it to be a community project. 

This is why we encourage those of you who are new to either go through baptism or covenant renewal. Baptism is where you publicly identify yourself with Jesus.  You experience an outward mark of an invisible grace.  Covenant renewal is similar, but it is for those who have already been baptized either as in infant or long ago and you “left the faith for a time,” and just as Israel renewed their vows to God, so should you.  It gives others the freedom to come alongside you in the journey b/c they know that you are identifying yourself with Jesus.

That is the big picture.  Identifying yourself with Jesus.  Not doing so can be deadly.  The flip side is so bone-chilling.  Read the end of v26, “If you don’t want to identify with me, then I won’t identify with you when I come in judgment.  If you are ashamed of me, then I’ll be ashamed of you.”  Now, don’t hear me saying that Jesus is going to reject you in the end b/c you haven’t been baptized or gone through eovenant renewal.  The thief on the cross is proof that this isn’t the case.

But see Jesus is trying to get you to reflect on the gospel here.  He lays out the gospel in in v21-22.  The gospel is the good news that Jesus was willing to identify himself with us so much that he took on flesh and suffered in our place on the cross, and then he was resurrected and he is coming back again to take all of those home who have identified themselves with him.  He isn’t coming for good people.  He isn’t coming for religious people.  He is coming for people who have trusted him, who have identified themselves with him.  Some of you need to do that this morning.  

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