Three Critical Questions

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The Critical Question

I want to encourage and challenge you today with three questions that I believe are critical for you to answer as a church and as individual followers of Christ. And the way you answer these questions will have a significant bearing on the extent to which you are an instrument in God’s hand for his glory in the world.

So I didn’t just make these questions up, they come directly from the end of Luke chapter nine. I want to read these verses in a moment and then I want to do something a little unique.

I have spent over the last few years some concentrated time in some remote regions in the Himalayas. God has used time in the Himalayas there to rock my perspective on my life, on my faith in the church in such a way I just, part of me would love to take multitudes of you with me into the Himalayas.

It’s not possible this morning, so what I want to do is try to bring a taste of them to you. And the reason I want to do that in light of this text is the first time I was trekking on those trails, I was reading through Luke in my Bible reading at that point and I was reading this text and some others that I want us to walk through.

And so based on God’s word, I want to put these questions before you. They’re not easy questions to ask or answer, but I think there are questions we must ask and answer. We will inevitably answer in our lives and in the church.

So let’s start what we need to in the word of God. Luke 9:57. The Bible says, that as they were going along the road, someone said to him, him being Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go.

And Jesus said to him, foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head to another. He said, follow me. But he said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father.

And Jesus said to him, leave the dead to bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Yet another said, I’ll follow you Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at my home. Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

Will You Choose the Cross or Comfort?

Three questions. Number one, are you going to choose comfort or are you going to choose the cross in your life where you are sitting? Are you going to choose comfort?

Are you going to choose the cross in this church? Are you going to choose comfort or the cross? The first man in this story says to Jesus, I’ll follow you wherever you go. He’s eager and willing.

Now we know from other accounts Mark’s account that this man was a teacher of the law. It was customary for guys like this to kind of attach themselves to another teacher to sort of promote themselves, to gain standing. Jesus was pretty popular with the crowds at this point.

So he’s got somebody eagerly trying to follow him in order to advance himself. Jesus replies the son of man has no place to lay his head. In other words, if this man followed Jesus, he was not guaranteed a roof over his head.

Christianity is Not a Path to Comfort

And in this way, Jesus made crystal clear that Christianity is not a path to more comfort, higher status, or greater ease in this world. The road of following Jesus is not paved with self-advancement. It actually starts with self-denial picking up across you.

Look back up in verse 51, in Luke 9, the days drew up for him to be taken up. Drew near for him to be taken up. He set his face to go to Jerusalem. Jesus is headed to a cross, which is why he says earlier in Luke chapter nine verse 23, he said to all these people who are following him, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his what, his cross daily and follow me.

Now we hear those words and today we have reverence and respect for the cross. We’ve got to put ourselves in the shoes of first-century hearers who heard that this was not an appealing thing to the crowds.

We wear crosses around our necks, put ’em up in our homes like you didn’t do that in the first century, and be like wearing an electric chair around your neck. It’s creepy or having electric chairs over your dining room table and the people aren’t coming back over for dinner.

It’s your house. This is a picture of death dying to yourself and that is the initial invitation. So let’s be clear, everything we’re talking about here in this text is not like for really mature followers of Jesus.

The Cross Over Comfort

This is initially what it means to be a follower of Jesus and to choose a cross over the comforts of this world and we see this. So let’s take a quick tour, take a right in your Bible, go to the next chapter, Luke chapter 10, and listen to Jesus’ words, calling away from comfort toward dying to yourself.

Luke 10:3 sends out his disciples. He says go your way. Behold, I’m sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Just in case you’re wondering, a lamb doesn’t go in the middle of wolves looking for comfort. A lamb goes into the middle of wolves expecting to lay down his life.

Chapter 10 verse 25, this lawyer comes up to Jesus, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus says what’s written in the law? and the response in verse 27, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself, which leads into the parable of the good Samaritan, a story about loving the least likely people to love about sacrificing to love the least likely people. Keep going.

Luke 11:42. Jesus is speaking of religious leaders. He says, woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe meant and roe and every herb and you neglect justice and the love of God, these you ought to have done without neglecting the others. He basically says, you keep your religious practices great, but you sit back and settle for injustice in the world around you.

Sure you’re in the synagogue every day. You give pennies as a tithe, but you’re not doing what God has called you to do to show his love for the oppressed and the poor you’re keeping most for yourselves, which leads to his stinging indictment.

In the next chapter, look at chapter 12, verse 15. Jesus said to them, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness. For one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

And he told him a parable saying the land of a rich man produced plentifully. He thought to himself, what shall I do for I have nowhere to store my crops? And he said I will do this.

I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods and I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.

Relax, eat, drink, be merry. I give you a recipe for success in our world, our country says, that success is building up as much as you can. Store it away for a rainy day. Enjoy all this world has to offer.

What Does God Say About Success?

So what the world says is success. What does God say? Verse 20, God said to him, Fool this night your soul is required of you, the things you have prepared. Who will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. Say, what does it mean to be rich toward God?

Jump down to verse 32, fear not little flock for it. Is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom? Sell your possessions, give to the needy, provide yourselves with money bags that do not grow old with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also.

We could keep going on all the way to chapter 16. We see a powerful picture of a rich man who ignored the poor at his gate and found out in eternity that he had totally missed the point.

So the call of Christ is clear cell possessions, give away possessions. Give your life to those in need. Love your neighbor as yourself. So let’s go into the Himalayas for a minute.

We helicopter into about 12,000 feet where we land. It’s the highest village in this particular region where you can basically still maintain life if you call what’s around you life. They did some research and these particular villages not long ago, and they found that half of the children in these villages were dying before their eighth birthday.

I have four kids. One of my greatest fears is something happening to one of them. I can’t imagine that being an expectation for half of them and they’re dying of preventable diseases. They get a cut like my kids get outside when they’re playing, it gets infected.

It overtakes their body. There’s no medicine. They drink a drop of unclean water in a way that can lead to an entire outbreak of one village had a cholera outbreak that over the course of two days killed 60 people just like that.

One mom had 14 kids, two made it to adulthood. So severe poverty. And then to see trafficking as a byproduct of this poverty because a trafficker comes into a village like this and sees a family with a young girl and it doesn’t take a lot of convincing to say, we can take your daughter into the city where we can get her a good job.

She can make good money and send it back up here to help you and your family. She’ll come back up and visit periodically.

Sounds better than the conditions she’s in. So they’ll take young girls down from these villages either into the city or across the border, never to return home again and not do a good job.

They’re taken down from the mountains and put into brothels where they are drugged and broken to the point where they have 10 sometimes 15 men a day do whatever they want with them. We were just a couple of weeks ago, I was in the Himalayas and we were doing an art therapy session with some girls who had been rescued from trafficking.

There was an 8-year-old girl in this therapy session. I have an 8-year-old girl. So I’m walking these trails and I’m reading, love your neighbor as yourself and I’m thinking as myself, if this was happening to my daughter, my little girl, I’d do something.

What if this were our kids, our girls, our kids dying of preventable diseases? It would change the way we live, wouldn’t it? If we loved our neighbors as ourselves in this world, it would change what we prioritize in the church.

Love Your Neighbors As Yourself

I think our lives when we come together in the church, if we loved our neighbors as ourselves if we were caring for the poor, like we care for ourselves. But here’s the danger, if we’re not careful, we can create a pretty comfortable picture of Christianity where we live, our entire Christian lives in the comfortable confines of the church, all the while turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to urgent physical need right around us and all around the world.

And I get it. I walk to these trails, I see poverty, I go down in the city, I see these brothels where these girls are put and I just want to stick my head in the sand and pretend it’s not real. There’s a part of me who just wants to jump on a plane as soon as I can get back on where I can just live like this is not real.

But I guess that’s the danger. I can do that. You can do that. You can move on Monday morning, or tomorrow and just pretend like we didn’t even dive into this here today. I’ll tell one more story I’m not proud of at all.

So we had been told as we’re walking the trails, so we’re tracking and we have packs with a few snacks in them, and the people we’re working with are doing all kinds of things to address poverty in these villages.

They had asked us not to just with the snacks they have when people ask not to just start handing out snacks because that actually ends up creating some more problems on multiple levels.

It made sense. So we get to this one particular village. Not a lot of people in this village, just a few kids came running up as we were just passing through the village, a really short village.

These few kids come running up and one of ’em is a little girl about my daughter’s age and she’s got a big smile on her face and we’re just kind of playing with the kids as we’re walking. This girl latches onto my hand.

And so we’re walking hand in hand as we go down the trail and just smiling, not able to communicate her language but able to communicate in ways that supersede language. And so just smiling, playing as we’re going and we get near the end of the village and all the guys are ahead of me, are kind of getting beyond the village.

And so I turn around because it’s time for us to go, but she starts holding onto my hand tight and with her other hand, she reaches out her hand to me for me to give her something. She puts her hand to her mouth, can you give me something to eat? So I froze at first and then just shook my head.

And then she reached for my pack. And so suddenly I found myself turning my pack away from her and at this point, her smile had gone off her face. Now it’s more of this angry, look, I know you have something.

Can you please give me something? And so I start, I’m trying to pull my hand away at this point and she’s grabbing on all the titer. So I find myself finally just yanking my hand away and as soon as I do, she looks at me and tries to spit on me.

She’s not able to because she doesn’t have enough saliva. So it just kind of comes on her own chin and I turn and I walk away. I don’t want that to be the story of my life.

In a world of urgent physical need. I don’t want the story of my life to be turned and walked away. And I want to encourage you, don’t let it be the story of your life. Don’t let it be the story of this church.

Will you choose? So this is the thing. In order to follow Christ, the picture is clear. It is a call to let go of the comforts of this world to die to yourself and to live, to lay down your life for others around you.

So that’s the question. Are we going to choose the comforts of this world? Are we going to choose the cross of Christ to lay down our lives to show the compassion of God? That’s question number one.

Will You Settle for Maintenance or Sacrifice for the Mission?

Question number two, are you going to settle for maintenance or are you going to sacrifice for mission? Are you going to settle for maintenance or are you going to sacrifice for mission?

Luke 9:59 and 60, Jesus says, follow me to the second man. This man says, Lord, first let me go and bury my father. Now scholars debate whether or not this guy’s dad had died yet or not.

Some believe his dad was about to die. So just wanted to go back, spend the last couple of days with his dad before he died, and give him a proper burial, which is obviously something he would want to do.

And more than that was something he would be expected to do, need to do like an obligation, and then he would follow Jesus. Others believe his dad had just died.

I remember the moment when my brother called me to tell me that my dad, the best friend in the world, had just unexpectedly out of the blue, died from a heart attack.

I remember falling on the floor and sobbing uncontrollably. So I can’t imagine in that moment or in the evening or next morning hearing Jesus say, let’s somebody else do the funeral. There are more important things for you to focus on.

There’s an urgency here. So what is so urgent? What is so important? Even more than the things maybe we would most want or feel like we need to do in this world.

Urgency to Share the Gospel

What’s urgent is Jesus said, leave the dead to bury their own dead. As for you go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Proclaim the kingdom of God. So why is that so urgent?

So this is where especially if you are here and you’re not a follower of Jesus, I want to invite you to listen particularly closely. One, I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad I know that in a room this size, there are many who are exploring Christianity, and finding out more about Christianity.

Well, here is the good news of the kingdom, the good news that it’s the center of this book. There is one true God over us all. He’s created us all. He sustains us all.

The reason we are breathing right now is because he is giving us breath where he is to stop. So would we and we have all sinned against God. Every one of us has turned from our own ways, from his ways to our own ways.

It looks different in all of our lives. We’ve all sinned against God and as a result, we are all separated from God. And if we die in this state of separation from God, then we spend eternity separated from God.

And you look around the religions of the world and you’ll find all kinds of recipes for how to get back to God. Do these things, take these steps, pray this amount of time, follow these rituals, whatever it might be.

But the good news of the Bible is that we don’t have to earn our way to God because God has come to us. God has come to us in the person of Jesus. Jesus has lived the life.

Whose Sin Did He Die For?

None of us could live a life of perfect obedience to God. He had no sin in his life for which to die and yet he chose to die. Well if he didn’t die for his sin, whose sin was he dying for?

Jesus chose to die for your sin. My sin. Jesus chose to pay the price for your and my sins against God. But the good news keeps getting better because he didn’t stay dead for long.

Jesus three days later rose from the dead in victory over sin so that anyone, anywhere, including anyone in here at Cumberland right now who puts their faith in Jesus, asks God to forgive them of their sins through trust in his love for them.

You’ll be forgiven of all your sins and reconciled into a relationship with God for all of eternity. It’s the greatest news in the world. Your life can change forever, today, forever, 10 billion years from now different today because of the good news of the kingdom of God, the king has come to save us from our sins.

So that’s good news and it needs to be made known. So now I go to the Himalayas with me. You walk on that first day or two on the trails and you ask people, what do you know about Jesus?

Do you know what they say to you? They say, who’s that? They’ve never heard his name, nothing. Know nothing about Jesus. It is like you’re talking about somebody in a village over here that they’ve never met before. So in that moment, it hits you.

Just picture this, you’re on these mountain trails, and there is majestic beauty all around you. You’re at 12,000 feet in the air and it’s like you’re in a valley. There is mountain snow, and capped mountain peaks all around you.

You want to take a picture everywhere you turn, the beauty, the glory of God in creation. And yet in that moment, it hits you that for the last 2000 years, these mountains have been shouting the glory of God declaring his greatness and his grandeur. But not for one second, have these mountains said anything about what Jesus did on the cross

God Designed Us to Share the Good News

Mountains are silent about that because that is a privilege reserved for you and me. You and I and God’s design get to do what the majesty of mountains can’t even do. We get to make the good news known to people of how they can go from eternal death to eternal life.

So here’s the question then. If that’s true, that’s a privilege that we have uniquely we have, then why is it the case that not just a few people in some remote regions in the Himalayas, why is it the case that there are over 2 billion people in the world today who have little to no knowledge of the gospel?

2 billion people just like you and me, except they’ve never heard the good news of the kingdom. How is that possible 2000 years later you’ve never even heard his name, and have no idea about who he is?

I think the only explanation for that is we have settled for maintenance. We’ve created a whole picture of Christianity where we are content to sit back and soak in and sing about the gospel week after week after week in our church setting. While we’ve never given a second thought to how we can get the gospel to people in places that haven’t even heard it.

We think that’s somebody else’s job. Or maybe we give a little here or there, we throw relative pennies at the most pressing problem, the most significant injustice in the world. People have never even heard the name of Jesus, the love of Jesus.

So passion city church, if there are 2 billion people who have little to no knowledge of the gospel and you as a church know and love and celebrate and sing this gospel as you do as you should, then surely, God is calling multitudes of men and women from this church to take the gospel to those who’ve never heard it.

Not like one or two here or there like multitudes. I was in South Korea recently. There was one church at a point where they had 3000 people. Their pastor said, our goal is in the coming years to send out 2000 missionaries, 2000 missionaries.

It’s like two-thirds of the church. 25 years later they did it. They sent out their 2000th missionary from their church. I share that to encourage you like this church has massive potential for reaching the nations with the gospel, but it will not happen if you settle for maintenance in any way if you settle into a status quo.

Christianity, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Sacrifice for mission. Everybody laying down your life saying, Lord, do you want me to go? You want my family to go? Everybody you say this feels like this is too far. This is really for mature Christians. This is basic discipleship.

Renounce All You Have

If you’re going to follow Jesus, Luke 14:33, you renounce all you have.

Everybody, Lord, you leading me to go. And if he doesn’t need you to go, then he’s leading you to sacrifice a chunk of your salary to support somebody’s salary who’s going. Sacrifice is the right word here.

Those mountains, there’s a reason the gospel hasn’t gone there. There’s a lot of resistance to the gospel going there. In most places in the world where the gospel is not yet gone, there are reasons it’s hard to reach those places.

Difficult, even dangerous in some ways. All the easy places are taken. My friends who worked in these mountains 20 years ago when they started going up there, were immediately told, if you keep bringing this message of Jesus into these mountains, we will kill you.

They kept coming, they kept coming and people died. Think about one couple who came to Christ and as soon as they came to Christ, they were totally ostracized in their village.

They were told they couldn’t use the water source anymore. They were totally abandoned by the whole support system around them. And then one day this couple was out on working in the fields, walking along the trails and the word came back to their kids.

That a landslide had come and hit rocks, hit the mom and dad and they went tumbling down the mountain to their death. And to this day, the story is told in that village that if you believe in Jesus, you’d be introducing a foreign God into these mountains.

And remember what happened to that one couple who did that. The real story though is the landslide didn’t come. The village leaders are the ones who took rocks and stoned.

That man and woman, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that mission doesn’t come without cost. So the question is, you’re going to settle for maintenance, you’re going to sacrifice for mission.

Is Your Life Marked by an Indecisive Mind or an Undivided Heart?

Now all that leads to this third question and it is the most important one because it all hinges on this. Here’s the third question, will your life be marked by an indecisive mind or an undivided heart?

What’s going to mark your life? An indecisive mind or an undivided heart? This last guy says I’ll follow you, Lord. Lemme just go back and say farewell to those of my home. I just want to say goodbye to my family.

Friends, Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back as fit for the kingdom of God. And Jesus says, don’t even go back. Don’t have indecision.

When you get back there you start to think, is this wise, is this good? I know you fix your eyes, your heart on me, and you follow me with all you’ve got. And I use this language because I think an indecisive mind like this is certainly my tendency.

Isn’t it yours? Like here a message like this and then think, okay, I need to do something. I wonder what I should do and a week later I need to do something.

I wonder what I should do a month, a year go by. At some point, I’m going to do something. And this is not the life Jesus called us to live. He’s called us to live with an undivided heart.

Listen to this language from Luke 14, 25 to 26, great crowds following Jesus. He turns and says 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. What is that about?

Love the Lord with Everything You’ve Got

Hate your family. Now obviously we know from other places in scripture we are called to love our spouse. We’re called to love our parents and our children. The point here, Jesus is making very clear though is that when you follow Jesus, your love for him makes your closest relationships in this world look like hate in comparison.

Love him with everything you’ve got. And this is the key question, where is your heart? So lemme give you one more picture. In the Himalayas,

We hiked this one really steep mountain, like a brutal hike and the kind of hike like five steps. And then you want to stop and just look at the scenery and five more steps, and then you want to stop again and just a long time.

So we finally get up there, we’re staying there for the night and we hear that there’s a church in this five or so days in the trek, the church that has been formed in this little community. So we walk out, it’s totally pitch black, and we look down the mountains and we see to look down the mountain, we see these little lights coming up the trails.

And I said to the guy who works up there, I said, what are those lights? He said that’s the people from the church. They’re coming for a gathering. And I immediately thought these were going to be some of the fittest church members I have ever met, hiking and pitch black dark off that trail that I was going to be sore from for days.

So we gathered together in this little room, I mean just a small portion of this stage, one little light bulb hanging in the middle for worship. And we’re sitting in there as they start to come in, and with all due respect, they are not among the fittest, followers of Jesus I’ve ever met.

They’re older, frail women. They’re kids, they’re moms with kids on their backs and they all file in and they sit basically on top of each other. We’re crammed in this little room and they sing with joy and they open up the Bible and they encourage one another.

They share about the persecution they’re facing. And I look around the room and I see the faces of people whose heart belongs to Jesus. They don’t have the stuff of this world.

Is Jesus Enough For Us?

They don’t have the stuff of this church world, but they have Jesus and he’s enough for them. So I guess that’s the real question, like is Jesus enough for us?

This is the whole, it’s the crux of it all. Remember it’s not Luke, but Matthew 13:44. Remember that little parable Jesus tells? He talks about a man who’s walking in a field.

He comes upon a treasure and stumbles upon this treasure. Nobody else knows it’s there. And he realizes this treasure is worth more than everything else I have put together. So what does he do?

He covers it up and he goes, and the text says he sells everything he has. The text actually says with gladness, like with a smile on his face, he sells everything he has. I can imagine people coming up to him saying, why are you selling everything you have?

He says I’m going to buy that field over there. And they said, why are you going to buy that field? That’s absurd. That’s so foolish. And he smiles. He’s like, I got a hunch.

He smiles. Why? Because inside he knows that he has found something that is worth losing everything. For I give you a picture of Jesus. He is someone worth losing everything for.

We’re talking about the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, the final. Amen. He’s the bread of life. Christ is our creator, our deliverer, our everlasting father. He is God.

He’s the good shepherd, the great shepherd, the great high priest, the holy one. He’s the image of the invisible God, the judge of the living and the dead. He’s king of kings and Lord of lords.

He’s majestic. He’s mighty. No one compares to him, the only begotten son of the Father full of grace and truth. He’s the power of God. He is the resurrection and the life. The supremes sacrifice sacrifices the way, the truth, and the life.

Does Your Heart Belong to Him?

Jesus is all of these things. So the question is, does your heart belong to him? Because when it does, then you say to these questions, these questions all of a sudden get turned in their head.

They don’t sound hard. They sound inviting. You see, what do you mean inviting? Yes. I choose the cross over comfort because the life I have in Christ is better than all the comforts of this world put together.

It turns it all on its side as this is not just a casual say of prayer, move on with your life, Christianity. This is real following Christ. Yes, I want to sacrifice permission instead of settling for maintenance.

I don’t want to waste my life in this world. I’ve got a few years here. I want to make ’em count for what’s going to matter, not just for my 401k. I want to make a count of what’s going to matter 4 billion years from now.

So yes, they’ll settle, sacrifice, permission because my heart is enthralled with Jesus. And I don’t want to get to the end and stand before him and say, I thought about doing some things for you.

I want to stand before him on that day and say, my life was yours. I know, I know. Knowing some of the things we’re talking about here sounds hard, almost frightening.

You might be afraid to say, I mean to lay down your life, say, God, you lead me anywhere in the world. I’ll go. But here’s the good news. If you can trust Jesus to save you for all of eternity, then surely you can trust him to lead you on this earth.

And not just to lead you, but to satisfy you every step of the way. When you realize who Jesus is, you realize it’s not dangerous to surrender to him. It’s dangerous to not surrender to him.