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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indy. This summer we're going through the Gospels, learning about how understanding the tougher sayings of Christ can lead to a deeper connection with him. Now here's the teaching. 

Luke chapter 14 verses 25 to 33. 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. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. 

For which of you desiring to build a does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with 20,000. And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 

So therefore, if any of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. This is the word of the Lord. Good morning. 

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Nick Carter. I'm the Director of Adult Education here, and it's a privilege to be able to teach classes, to serve in that way, to lead our adult education ministry, and occasionally preach. But if I were in my hometown where I grew up and I was introducing myself on a stage or really in any context, I would just stop at, I'm Carter. 

The Carter family settled in the southwest corner of Howard County five generations ago, and today kind of populate the whole town in the sort of way that on a first date, you would eventually look deep into your date's eyes and say, Who's your grandma on your mom's side again? And you see, Carter settled in the southwest corner of that county, and the Carter family descendants owned and farmed most of the land in that little slice of Indiana. My grandfather, my dad's dad, was the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the first Carter to settle in that area. And Grandpa Carter married a Payne, not a Payne, P-A-Y-N-E, a rival farming family. 

And if this is all starting to sound like Jane Austen fiction, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. Listen up. 

So Grandpa Carter, the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the Carter farming dynasty, died suddenly in 1954 of a brain tumor. 1954. Leaving my grandmother and four sons, four Carter boys who would now be raised in a household led by a Payne woman.

Great Grandpa Walter, Great Grandpa Walter Carter, the firstborn of the first settler, took back all of the land that his firstborn son had been gifted by him. Then he took all of the land, equipment, and assets, and livestock that his firstborn son had acquired together with my grandmother, with his wife, and he put it lovingly into a trust in the name of the four Carter boys. Which on paper meant Grandma was penniless, except that she could depend on those boys for her livelihood for the rest of her life, and she did. 

Now, you're probably wondering, how does somebody get something like that done legally? And the how is interesting. I'm guessing that there was probably a handful of Carters at the Kearney Courthouse, but the how is not as interesting for this sermon as the why. Why is what I want you to think about. 

Why was it so important that the Carter land, the Carter estate, the Carter farm had to stay in the Carter hands? Because, answer, as human beings we are tribal. At our core, we are tribal people. Now, you may not have as clear a ties to a tribe as I do, post-industrialization, you know, land ownership and that kind of thing is not as central to our tribal binds, but tribalism still exists in all kinds of ways. 

What makes a tribe isn't the thing it's formed around, whether it's land or a business empire or a state. What makes a tribe isn't what it's formed around, it's what it's formed for, and tribes are formed for two things, identity and security. Your tribe forms your identity, and in that identity, you will find security.

Your tribe forms your identity, and in that identity, you will find security. The tribes, where we find belonging, a form of, a sense of identity, who we are, and in that identity, then, we, knowing where we belong, knowing how we fit in, that feels secure. It gives us security. 

That's what tribes do. They make us feel secure. Whether it's a literal tribe, like being a Carter, or if your tribe is something more like a professional association, a college alma mater, a rotary club, a political affiliation, a common cause, or, dare I say, a common enemy, we commit ourselves to a tribe, because by doing that, we will find identity and security. 

But as we learned last week, following Jesus will shake our idea of security to the core. Take up your cross and follow me. That's what Pastor Nathan preached on last week. 

Jesus says, to save your life, you will lose it, and our text today tells us that losing our life for Jesus' sake could mean even stepping outside of our tribe, trusting that it's more secure in Christ. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. We're in a series this summer called the hard sayings of a kind Savior, and this week's saying comes from Jesus' teaching you heard read from 14, Luke 14 26, and Jesus tells you to hate your mom and dad, hate your husband or wife, hate your kids, and if not, you can't be his disciple. 

It appears on the surface that Jesus is contradicting all of the rest of the Bible, right? I mean, honor your father and mother and stuff, what happened to that? Well, he's not. Spoiler alert. It was a figure of speech, okay? This isn't a hard saying because it's hard to interpret. 

I don't want you to overthink the word hate because it was a common figure of speech in that time, and I can tell you that because nobody got upset listening to him. Jesus' initial hearers, they understood implicitly what he meant. Luke, as he relayed these accounts, all of Luke's readers, nobody was upended by this because it was an idiom, it was a figure of speech to say to love that thing less than you love the other, okay? It was a comparative analysis.

This isn't a hard saying because it's controversial. It's hard because even if we can figure out what Jesus really meant, it's still hard, right? Just the idea to think that following Jesus could mean leaving behind your identity and the security of your tribe, it's hard to imagine why we should do that, it's hard to imagine what we would hope to gain by doing that. But to avoid any doubt, yes, honor your father and mother, love your spouse, love your children, care for them, but not in order to solidify your tribe. 

Do you guys see the difference? If you're loving those things because it will solidify and secure your identity, that, that's what Jesus is addressing with these words. These relationships are not the highest form of good. Marriage is sacred, parents deserve honor, children are a blessing, but the text tells us there is something bigger, better, outside of that. 

They're good only because they were given to us to model and reflect the true relationship that the Creator wants to have with us, and they were given to us to teach us how to live in relationship with that Creator. So, for example, let's take the, the first of these relationships that Jesus mentions, father and mother. You guys know the command, honor your father and mother. 

That wasn't a command to children alone, by the way, it's not just obedience in, in the childhood era. In a agrarian, tribal, multi-generational society where family bonds mattered a whole lot more than just holiday dinners, God formed his people to honor the generation before them. Honor comes from the same root word as glory, okay? So, and that, in this word group, it kind of bears the idea of weightiness, heaviness, okay? We might use the word gravitas or significance, okay? So, so give your father and mother the significance that, that the gravity and the weightiness of their position, their, their position, by the way, not their perfect execution of the role, not their worthiness, that their position as your father and mother deserves.

Giving honor to someone else is simple training grounds for honoring God, all right? It is a daily practice of being able to posture humility and submission, and those things are all formative. By practicing how we honor our parents, we can learn how to honor God, simple enough. But you might ask, doesn't honoring your father and mother in a tribal society actually serve to secure my identity? I mean, living in that little corner of Howard County, didn't it behoove me to honor the Carter patriarchs? Maybe. 

A couple of thoughts. First of all, you got to remember, there does come a time when your father and mother lose their usefulness. Teenagers, it's not yet, it's not yet, we're talking, but they're, if you've, it's not yet, but if you have cared for aging parents, I don't have to explain that there comes a time when keeping this command will eventually demand selflessness and humility to serve that far exceeds the utility that lasts in that relationship.

So, whether it benefits you or not, honor your father and mother. I think it's interesting how it seems that we actually, I'm speaking as a guy in my 40s, we reach our prime, my parents are still doing great, but we reach our prime as our parents decline. If you're to keep this command, it will, in most cases, cost you. 

And as we say in the software industry, that's a feature, not a bug. It's designed that way. That self-sacrificial love, the opportunity to give it, is a gift.

It's the opportunity to honor our parents as a gift to us because it gives us a glimpse, a little picture, of God's commitment to us. You think God loves you because of your usefulness to Him? No. No. 

Second, the family bond is a picture of God's family, not the other way around. So, when Jesus is addressing in this hard saying is that you may, as you follow Christ, you may come to an intersection in your life where to obey Him, to obey Christ, to honor God, above all else, it could require you to lay down the security that belonging to your family might offer you. I want you to think about Ruth. 

When her husband died, all the cultural instinct, all of her tribal bonds said, go home, right? Go back to Moab, go back to your people, go back to your God, find a new husband, go back. Even Naomi said, you should probably go back. It would be a better idea for you. 

But Ruth's now famous reply wasn't primarily about just liking Naomi. It was about Naomi's God. Where you go, I will go. 

Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. So, she didn't abandon family binds, she didn't abandon the idea of a tribe, but she subordinated it. She reordered her identity around something or someone bigger, higher, and so doing, she didn't even lose family at all. 

In the end, she was grafted into one that would eventually produce the very king that Israel had been hoping for. Marriage relationships. That's the next topic that Jesus goes on to. 

It's the next example that he gives. A man cannot follow him if he doesn't hate his wife. I'm sure Grandpa Carter loved my Grandma Carter. 

I know there was romance there. I've actually read a couple of the letters that he wrote to her early in their marriage and in their courtship. It's kind of sweet. 

There was romance there for sure. And yet, it's still a relatively modern example of an age-old truth about marriage that at its core, especially in a tribal society, they are alliances. So, it's important, as important as marriages are, as sacred as they are, as holy as marriage is, it is another picture for us of God's covenant toward us. 

And as a picture, that means it's not where we get to find our ultimate identity. It's one of the most intimate and challenging relationships you could ever be in, and it's an area where you get to practice and learn the kind of faithfulness God has toward you. I want to press in a little deeper on that idea, and hopefully, something will click here.

We'll see. I want you to consider how the first marriage in Scripture was described. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. 

That's how marriage was described in Genesis 2. Leave his father and mother. In marriage, the way it's designed, the man leaves his tribe, his place of identity and security. He lays that aside. 

He steps out of that in order to create something new, something new that's been designed for him, a new identity and security that's not for himself alone, but for his wife. And to secure that for her, he clings not to his tribe, where he came from, where his seat of honor might have been, but to her. So already, what I want you to be seeing in these dynamics is that God has designed us to step out of places of comfort into something that he's designed that's better, something new that he's designed for us. 

And here again, Jesus' words are hard, that your devotion to Jesus, your identity as one of his disciples, that that's your higher identity. So if you're finding all of your identity in your marriage, in your spouse, in the picture-perfect household that you're building, or telling people on Instagram you're building, if you're trying to present that, you've got it reversed. Following Christ informs how you love your spouse, not the other way around.

Very often, loving your spouse, how Christ loves the church, means a measure of patience and grace. It means a measure of confession and vulnerability that I guarantee probably won't be on your Instagram reel, that you don't want to portray as part of your identity. That's what it means in that relationship. 

Lastly, Jesus turns to the topic of children, those people that we've created in our image, right? The ones that will carry on our name and inherit the security that we've created. God says that children are a blessing, and they are. But that blessing is itself, again, like the other two I gave an example of, to teach us the real blessing that it is to be God's child, to be called his child. 

How we love and care for and provide for our children, like honoring our parents, like loving our spouse sacrificially, they're training grounds that should reflect the fact that God first loved us and called us his sons. This is one, whether you think of yourself as tribal or not, this is one as Americans that we do really struggle with. We make kids into idols. 

We put all our hopes of achievement into them, we believe that our lives exist to make them successful, and we fear that if they are not successful, that our identity, our identity as successful parents then is challenged. So I've made it a habit, it would seem, of quoting our catechism that our children's ministry uses, so let's keep that streak alive, shall we? Question 17, what is idolatry? Answer, idolatry is trusting in created things rather than the creator. If you're a parent, in a very real sense, you're creating your children in your own image. 

And if you're a foster parent, a step-parent, if you're a grandparent, just a fun aunt or that cool uncle, by the time that you invest in children, you are, in a very real sense, creating kids in your image. And that's not wrong, but it is not ultimate. It's an example given to us by God so that we can experience in some small way what it means that he invites us to call him father.

Are you trusting in the created rather than the creator? Jesus says if you love your children so much that you want your identity to be wrapped up in their achievements, to be found in them and the mark that they leave on the world, and the things that they achieve rather than what Christ has already achieved for you, that's not what it means to follow Jesus. So, honor your father and mother, but honor God more. Love your spouse, but love Christ more.

Love your kids, but trust Christ for your and their ultimate security. All of these familial relationships, they've been designed by God as images, imperfect reflections, if you will, of the real relationship God wants with us. And so, as images then, they are aids for us to be able to imagine how God relates to us. 

And if that's so, then why does Jesus say this? Just as great crowds were told. Luke tells us that great crowds are starting to follow him, and then he chooses to say, hey, by the way, this could cost you all of that family, all of your tribe, all of the things that you think gives you security. If these relationships are gifts of God, if they were given to us to help us imagine God, why does Jesus say what he says? Well, I opened to telling you a story about a wealthy family, an heir, protecting the inheritance, protecting the tribe, and it's a pretty unique story. 

But I'm willing to bet that in a room like this, most of you, let's say that if you've reached the age of, I don't know, 30, you probably have life insurance. You may have already started a retirement savings. You may be thinking about what you could pass on, or if you're only at 30, maybe you're thinking about college savings. 

But if you're older than that, you're already thinking about what might be passed on. I mean, many of you probably already have a will, right? So yeah, it's pretty incredible, the story that I shared of what happened to my grandfather. But as incredible as that is, I don't think it's too difficult, right, for us to relate with the idea of protecting something to pass on, to leave a legacy. 

So having started with that story, let me tell you a different story. There's a father. He owns everything. 

It's God. I'm not really good at making up stories, so just work with me on this. It's God. 

There's a father. He owns everything. If he doesn't have enough, he'd just speak and create more, okay? This father had a son. 

He didn't have eight kids like Grandpa Walter had, but he's had one, one and only son, his only begotten son. That's a word that we don't use much anymore. You know what it means? It means he's the natural, he has the natural right to be the heir, a legitimate direct descendant.

It's a word that was used in traditional cultures where inheritance and tribalism mattered a lot. It was a word used to delineate between the begotten son versus the adopted son. See, adopted children are full children. 

They are legitimate heirs. They're full children. There's not a second class in that, and yet there still was just a word, a way of describing the difference.

Jesus was begotten, not the adopted son, and if you had a begotten son in this ancient context, adoption was wholly unnecessary, okay? Adoption was not a thing that people did with infants out of compassion or any other reasons. Adoption existed for one reason in that system, and that is if you had an estate that was going to be passed on, but you did not have a begotten son, then you would pick somebody worthy, maybe a servant in your household, and adopt them so that your estate could pass on, all right? Or in very rare cases, if you had a begotten son, but he had ticked you off and you had disowned your begotten son, you could adopt a different heir and be like, sorry, son, right? But this father, we're told, parted the heavens and spoke in an audible voice to communicate, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Adoption, one would think, had no purpose for a father in a tribe like that. 

It is not something you would expect him to consider. It's completely superfluous. There's no need. 

He has a begotten heir with whom he is well pleased. After all, how would the son feel, I wonder? I mean, how would you feel if you were the one and only begotten son beloved by the father, the son with whom the father is well pleased? How would the son feel if the father said, you know what I want to do? I want to split your inheritance a lot of ways. I want to adopt a whole gaggle of new heirs to share your inheritance with. 

Just imagine the son. That's what we do here when we gather. We gather to learn more about the son, what he has done for you, and to worship him. 

So I want you to imagine the son when the father shares a plan like that. Honor your father and mother. Okay, dad, if that's your will, I'm in. 

Who are you going to adopt? The angels? I mean, they're pretty cool, right? No, no, son, we're going to adopt mankind, Adam's tribe. Adam's tribe? Well, we can't just adopt them. They're in debt, so deep in debt that they're in debtor's prison. 

You get it? Yeah, son, I know. You'll have to pay their debt. You'll have to buy them. 

You'll have to redeem them. Redeem. See, these are words that we use to talk about what Christ has done, but sometimes we forget what they meant in a tribal economy like this. 

And then imagine the son. Well, what's the budget, dad? How much? What will it cost to redeem them from the debt that they've paid so they can be adopted? Can you imagine the son? Can you imagine a begotten son whose own life is the payment to buy and then adopt fellow heirs to share his inheritance with? What kind of a son is that obedient? Galatians 4 reads this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son. 

And if a son, then an heir through God. Imagine a father that generous, and imagine a son that obedient. Obedient even unto death so that his father could purchase you, adopt you, and make you an heir with him. 

That, church, is your tribe. That is your tribe. This is indeed a hard saying of a very kind Savior. 

Jesus is saying something hard to hear. It's hard to fathom. It's hard to reconcile with our natural instincts about what we think the natural order of tribal identity and fidelity would be, but he's saying it because he has lived it, right? And he has died it. 

He tells us that in this tribe, you can't cling to what you think gives you identity. You can't cling to what you think defines you. He did not count equality with God something to be clung to. 

He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name that is above every name, and so we highly exalt him. He's no longer the one and only son, but by laying down his life, he became the firstborn among many, many brothers. 

We are co-heirs with Christ, but for that to have happened, the son first had to set aside the glory that was rightly his, and he did it for our sake and because it honored the Father. Now, look where this is situated, then, in Luke's gospel. Just before this writing in Luke's gospel, Jesus was telling a parable about a great banquet where there were unlikely guests that the master was going to invite. 

The blind, the lame, the poor. It's a simple picture of grand generosity, so naturally, great crowds begin to follow him. We can understand why, and then Jesus interrupts this successful ministry to tell this hard saying. 

He warns them to count the cost. He says, you will have to end up renouncing everything or you might renounce everything to join this tribe, and then what's next? You get the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the prodigal son. These parables that are designed to communicate just how far God will go to redeem and adopt his tribe. 

Jesus, you see, in this saying, he is not describing something entirely new or without precedent. What he's describing is exactly what he has already done. The cost he already counted and he decided was worth it to redeem co-heirs his adopted family for the glory and honor of his father. 

Whatever you think gives you identity, whatever you imagine is giving you security, the son's identity was equality with God, and he laid that down. The son's security was in staying safely at the father's side in heaven that he took on flesh. So whatever tribe you may think you belong to, Jesus says that you have to hate it. 

Consider it far less valuable than the tribe for which he laid down everything to bring you into. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Your parents, your marriage, your children, they are a gift from God.

But it's not a gift to give you your ultimate identity and security. These relationships are a gift in that in them you can learn the way to love the way that the son did, the way that the son brought you into his father's tribe. That's why those relationships exist. 

And if you don't, if you don't hate them, that is, if you don't love Christ more, if instead you put your earthly tribe, the one that you've, above the one that you've been adopted into, if you put your earthly tribe above the one that you've been adopted into, then you will not learn to walk as Jesus has walked for you. And that is why he says you're not being discipled by Jesus. He is a kind Savior who tells us the hard things. 

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we get to cry out to you, Father, because of the spirit of your son. Lord, laying down what we think gives us identity, God, it is hard. 

It's hard for me, and I just praise you and thank you that you have given first the example of Christ, that we can look to him. We can look to the sacrifice that he made as we think about what you may be asking us to sacrifice. I pray that that would be on our hearts as we respond to you in worship. 

In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you for engaging with our community by checking out this podcast. If you would like more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faithchurchindy.com.

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