Love Me More than Anything Else

Good morning, gcc. Great to be with you today. As Adrian acknowledged a few minutes ago, last Sunday was Easter. And as is always the case, we had a really full house for all the things that went on last weekend. And we're always excited about that.

Like last Sunday, we had about twice as many people here as we usually see on a Sunday. And there are a lot of things about that that are really exciting to us. Now we figure most Easter weekends, about half of the folks who are in attendance with us are people who would normally be here in anyway because being with us regularly on Sundays is their habit already. We always have some out of town guests who are here with family members. We have some folks on Easter who are regular in their GCC involvement, at least insofar as being with us on Easter and Christmas.

So Easter is one of those weekends where everyone who comes some of the time tends to show up all at once. And that's always an exciting thing. We have people here at the invitation of a friend. There are people who come because they're searching spiritually or they're looking for a place of fellowship that they can call home. And no matter what the story is that brings people here, we always pray for a meaningful connection.

We're so glad that anyone would ever walk through the doors and join us here. Now, because we expect a lot of guests at Easter and we know in advance that will be the case, we tend to put some extra thought into some of the elements of that weekend. We do invitation cards that we've handed out for several weeks. We create social media events to make it easy to share information. We plan activities for kids, and we have extra greeters in place to help people find their way.

We have ushers are serving here in this room so that as we get started and people arrive for the first few minutes, they can help them find a place to sit. Overall, we just want to do the best job we can of creating good first impressions. Now, that being said, knowing that lots of guests are coming can also create some unique temptations for churches. Sometimes there's this temptation that churches feel around Easter to put together these big flashy programs that are very unlike who we are as a church. So it kind of gives this false impression if somebody comes and they.

They resonate with it and they love it and they come back the next week and they realize that's not really who we are. That's kind of an awkward thing. Sometimes churches tend to forget that we are all on the same team, that every other church that follows Jesus as Lord And Savior is a part of the same kingdom that we're a part of. And we wind up competing with each other, trying to outdo each other in terms of best all around Easter programming. Honestly.

There's also a temptation for preachers to see those big attendance Sundays as an opportunity to preach for funny, feel good messages that entertain but stop short of challenging anybody. And we don't want to go there because of something that we notice about Jesus. When the crowds gathering to hear Jesus grew larger, he actually asked more of people, not less. Last weekend we reflected on Jesus death at the cross, his all in sacrifice to rescue us from sin. And then we celebrated Jesus resurrection, His decisive victory over death and hell.

Jesus loves us. This is the message of the Gospel. He loves us. So he humbled himself and he put on flesh and he died for our sins as what scripture calls a sacrificial lamb. But then he rose from the grave as the sovereign Lord.

And it was shortly after those world changing events of Jesus death and resurrection that he met his disciples on top of a mountain and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me all authority. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I'm with you always. To the very end of the age, Jesus established what you and I know as the Church, the body of Christ, to pursue that mission. So the reason we invite people to follow Jesus, the reason we baptize new believers, the reason we teach Jesus instructions, is because Jesus is in charge. All authority in heaven and earth have been given to him and he commands us to do these things.

But let me ask you something. Which is easier to get immersed in a pool of water or to obey everything Jesus commanded? It's not a trick question.

Of course it's easier to do a one time thing like baptism than it is to continue day after day, year after year, for the rest of our lives, taking steps of greater surrender and obedience to Jesus. But complete surrender, obedience to everything he has commanded, is what Jesus clearly calls us to. Jesus wants more from us than just religious rituals. He wants more from us than just occasional church attendance. He wants more from us than just a carefully cultivated outward image impression of spiritual devotion.

Jesus, at the end of the day, he wants our hearts. And that's why so many of his teachings delve beneath the surface to explore our inner desires and motivations. When Jesus commanded us to teach others to obey everything he commanded. He made clear that partial, selective, a la carte, cafeteria style obedience is not an option. If we're going to follow Jesus as Lord and be honest about that, we cannot ignore any of his words.

So in the spirit of full disclosure and genuine discipleship, we're going to take the next few weeks to build on the foundation of Easter by examining some of Jesus hardest, most demanding teachings, beginning with this one. Jesus calls us to total surrender. We read in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14 that large crowds were traveling with Jesus. Remember, larger crowds, higher bar. Large crowds traveling with Jesus.

And turning to them, he said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even their own life, such a person cannot be my disciple. Wait, what? Jesus wants us to hate our parents? When an angry child tells their mom or their dad, I hate you, is that what Jesus wants? Is Jesus saying he wants us to abandon our marriages and kids?

I mean, isn't that a huge problem in our society right now? Does Jesus want animosity between siblings? Should we reward our kids for punching each other? Does Jesus want us to give up on life itself? No.

Jesus taught us to love our neighbors just as we love ourselves. The word in this text that is translated hate is a word that can literally mean to detest or abhor. But in context like this one, it is also sometimes used to mean prefer against. It's a term of dramatic exaggeration. It's a literary device that speaks to choosing one thing over another.

For example, okay, I don't hate green peppers on my pizza, but I like mushrooms a whole lot more. For the record, I do abhor black olives. They're the same color as sin, so we should avoid those. Okay. I don't hate country music, but I enjoy 80s hair metal a whole lot more.

Now, in the book of Genesis, God promised to give an elderly, childless couple. Their names are Abraham and Sarah. God promised to give them a son and to bless all people on earth through them. Now, this promise was ultimately fulfilled centuries later in Jesus, who was actually a direct biological descendant of Abraham. But as a first step, God gave Abraham and Sarah a son named Isaac, who had twin sons named Esau and Jacob.

And God chose to fulfill his promise to Abraham through Jacob, even though Esau was the firstborn. Now, looking back centuries later on, on Abraham's family tree, God said at the very end of the Old Testament, through the prophet Malachi, I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. Now, God didn't literally despise Esau. God did things through Esau too. He just chose in this setting, as a part of salvation history, to work in a way that preferred Jacob over Esau.

And that's the point of Jesus words in Luke 14 when Jesus said, if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even their own life, such a person cannot be my disciple. He was saying that our love for him must completely overshadow, it must completely outshine. It must far surpass our love for anyone or anything else. It's good to love our families, but we have to love Jesus more. The new living translation, I think, does a good job capturing this.

It says, if you want to be my disciple, you must by comparison hate everyone else. Your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even your own life. Otherwise you cannot be my disciple. Now Jesus went on in Luke chapter 14 to illustrate surrender in three different ways. First, he talked about a cross.

Jesus said, and whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Jesus died at the hands of the Romans, who used crucifixion not just to kill, but to humiliate. They made their enemies carry their own crosses to the place of execution, where they were then nailed to those crosses and left to bleed to death. It was a cruel, agonizing death that Jesus endured out of love for us. And he calls us to follow him in that same nothing held back way.

Now Jesus also gave the example of construction. Suppose he said, one of you wants to build a tower. Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying this person began to build and wasn't able to finish. In 2006, some developers broke ground on a luxury housing community near Table Rock Lake in Missouri.

But then a couple of years later, a recession hit and some of the developers were found guilty of fraud and money laundering. So multiple high end homes that were already in process were just abandoned, unfinished. They call them ghost mansions. And Jesus said that if we commit to follow him but then turn back, that's like beginning a project that we couldn't really afford to build. What a waste of resources.

Time. And then Jesus gave a third illustration. He gave a combat illustration. He said, suppose a king is about to go to war against another king, Won't he first sit down and consider whether he is able, with 10,000 men, to oppose the one coming against him with 20,000.

And then Jesus went on from there to say, if he's not able, he'll. He'll send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. It is a bad military strategy to start a war that you can't win. And Jesus said, we can't be his disciples if we are not willing to go all in.

Now, there's a second related truth about being Jesus disciples, and it's this. It's that Jesus calls us to choose him over everything else. I want to ask all of us who currently are or ever have been parents of teenagers, have you ever embarrassed your kids? Isn't that one of the privileges of being a parent? Like being excessively loud in otherwise quiet places?

I don't know about you, but if we go to a restaurant and I discover that the chair is missing, one of the little rubber glides on the bottom of it and it makes a horrible kind of sound as you scoot it up to the table, I'm going to take full advantage of that repeatedly. That's a dad's prerogative, right? You ever give your kids just uncomfortably long hugs in front of their friends? When our oldest son, Colin, was in middle school playing basketball, we would go to his games, and I made some signs for that occasion. This was back during the days when Chad Johnson was playing for the Bengals, number 85, Ochocinko.

So Colin was Trace Cinco. So he would come out and we would hold those up. My favorite, though, was this one. Colin would come out and we would hold up the Geeb sign, and then we'd flip it over, and it was a manly beast. And it was even better if I could get some buddies from life group to go with me to the game with some signs of their own, so that every time he went out on the court.

Manly beast. His coaches loved it. I think he kind of half enjoyed it, even though it was a little bit embarrassing for him. Sometimes we embarrass our kids on purpose, right? But we don't always do it on purpose.

Sometimes our kids think that whatever we do or say or wear is uncool and embarrassing, Right? They try to avoid being seen with us. And that reminds me of something that Jesus said in Matthew, chapter 10. Jesus said, Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before My Father in heaven.

If we want Jesus to claim us as his own, Jesus says, you gotta claim me. I mean, it would be ironic, wouldn't it, for us to want all the benefits of knowing Jesus, but to be ashamed to live for him or speak about him or be associated with him. So Jesus went on here in Matthew chapter 10 to say something that's really similar to what we just saw in Luke chapter 14. Jesus said, do not suppose that I've come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword, for I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter in law against her mother in law.

A man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. So what's the point here?

That. That Jesus, the Prince of Peace, came to ignite conflict and start fights? No, the point Jesus is making is that if he is our Lord, that means we choose him over everything else. As disciples of Jesus, we care more about honoring Jesus than impressing people. When following Jesus teachings mean that we live differently than our friends do.

When following Jesus principles about how we handle worldly wealth means that we make different decisions than our neighbors do. When following Jesus teachings means that we deviate from what our families have come to treat as normal, we are willing to do that if he is our Lord. As disciples, we care more about honoring Jesus than we do appeasing our kids. As parents, we set the spiritual tone for our families. If we don't give our kids a choice about whether they go to school or whether they go to the dentist, why would we make something as vital as connection to the body of Christ optional?

In his book that's called Kid, CEO Ed Young urges parents not to allow our kids schedules and demands to drive everything in our homes to the detriment of our marriages and our families. James Emory White, whose church and culture podcast I listen to regularly. I love this statement. He says there are times he just challenges the Christian parents in their church to stand in front of a mirror and look themselves in the face and say these words out loud. We are a Christian family, so church is a priority for us.

Except during soccer season or band season, except during basketball season, except during show choir, except during baseball season. There's always a season of some kind going on. As disciples, we care More about honoring Jesus than fitting in with people. You know, if the friends that you have hung out with ever since high school are still thinking and acting like kids, it may be time for you to find some new friends. And I'm not suggesting that we disown people or that we turn our backs on people who need Jesus.

But we also need to prioritize relationships that spiritually sharpen us if Jesus is to be our Lord. If your holidays typically involve excessive drinking, you can, as a follower of Jesus, choose a new tradition. If your family has a long multi generational history of infidelity or knock down drag out drama whenever everybody gets together, you can renounce that legacy and you can establish a new pattern. See, the reality of Jesus being Lord is that Jesus calls us to follow whenever and wherever he leads. I want to call our attention to one more text from the Gospels.

This one is from the Gospel of Luke. Again in chapter nine. Luke nine tells us that as they were walking along the road, a man said to him to Jesus, I will follow you wherever you go. And this is what Jesus said. Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of man has no place to lay his head.

In other words, follow me wherever I go. You sure about that? My life isn't easy. It's not comfortable. I live on the move.

I live dependent on the generosity and hospitality of others. You down with that? Jesus said to another man, follow me. But he replied, lord, first let me go and bury my father. Jesus said to him, let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Still another said, I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family. So did Jesus really just tell a man grieving the death of his father to suck it up and skip the funeral and just go preach? Did Jesus really tell someone that unless he abandoned his family without even saying goodbye, he wasn't worthy to be a disciple? Not necessarily. I mean, as we've already seen, Jesus calls his disciples to total surrender, to choose him over everything else.

But Jesus also had an ability that we don't to see into people's hearts, to see into their lives. So there may be more going on here than is apparent on the surface. You know, we tend to assume that that first man's father had just died and that Jesus just insensitively says, forget about him, come with me. But it's also possible that the man's father was still living and that the man was in effect saying to Jesus, you know, down the road one of these days, once my parents have passed on, then I'll follow you. Do we have things like that in our lives?

Like, what are you waiting for, Jesus, I'll follow you after I knock out this home renovation project, Jesus, I'll follow you once my kids are grown, Jesus, I'll follow you once I'm retired. Or I'll follow you, Jesus, once I finish high school or graduate college or get settled into a job or get married or buy a house or start a family.

If we won't follow Jesus now, why would we suddenly decide at some unspecified point in the future that he's worth following then? Now we also don't know anything about the family that the second man wanted to go back and say goodbye to. It's Is it possible that Jesus knew that if that man went back, they would succeed in talking him out of answering Jesus call to begin with? I mean, there's a lot we don't know here. But Jesus point follow me whenever and wherever I lead is made very clear by what he said.

Next verse 62 Jesus said, no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here. My guess is that few, if any, of us in this room have any experience at guiding a plow that's pulled by oxen.

But driving a plow, I think has this in common with pushing a lawnmower. Again, you have to look straight ahead to keep your row straight. If you're trying to mow your grass and you're looking all over the place while you're doing it, kind of like driving your car, looking all over the place, it's going to be dangerous. You're going to make a mess of your lawn. We can't follow Jesus if we're still focused on what's behind us.

So what parts of your past, what parts of my past do we still feel this unhealthy, magnetic pull toward? Earlier in the service, we got to celebrate a video where we saw several baptisms that have happened here in recent days. And we're always excited to celebrate that moment when someone says in a in a visible, public, tangible way, I want to surrender my life to Jesus. We love that. And in case some of you are thinking about maybe that's a next step that I need to take.

Let me just share with you. Anytime someone says to me I'm thinking about baptism, there are three questions I'm going to ask them. So let me ask you these questions, and you can just try these on for size. Question number one. Do you believe that Jesus is God's son like he claimed to be?

It's one thing to believe in a Jesus of our own creation, a Jesus that we recreate in a way that seems palatable to us. It's another thing to say, no, this is who he claimed to be. Do I believe in him as God's son? Number two. Do you believe Jesus died on the cross not as an accident, not as a mistake, not as a misunderstanding, but as a necessary part of dealing with sin?

In your life and in my life, no accident. That was what it took to make possible the removal of my sin so that I could even have a relationship with God. And question number three. Is it your desire not only to receive Jesus as your Savior, not only to say, would you take my sins away and remove that guilt and shame from me, but to surrender to him as your Lord? I'm convinced that if we can confidently answer yes to all three of those questions, we are ready to be baptized with this understanding that we still, on the other side of that baptism, have a lifetime of learning and growing ahead of us.

Total surrender to Jesus as Lord. Here's the reality. It will always be aspirational. It will always be a work in process. Because as.

As long as we live, the Holy Spirit continues to show us new areas of our lives that we've yet to surrender to Him. The moment I think, okay, finally, I have given him everything the Holy Spirit is so adept at saying, but what about this? What about that? I want that, too. So I want to close this morning.

I want to just ask three questions that I want to encourage you to ask yourselves. And then I'm going to follow that up with one really important clarification. Here's question number one. Will I follow Jesus whenever and wherever he calls, or only when and where I want to go? I mean, when Jesus calls, when Jesus presents an opportunity, when we see the words of Jesus say, do this, do we follow his lead?

Or do we check our calendars and think about it for a while until the conviction sort of passes away, and then we just go back to business as usual? Here's question number two. Is there anything Jesus is clearly calling me to do that I have been procrastinating or making excuses about? I'm not talking about new information here. This is not new revelation, new insight, new teaching.

This is something I know good and well. Jesus has already clearly and definitively said this. But I'm not there yet. And I've been dragging my feet about that. What would it take to simply say, jesus, you are the boss, you're Lord and obey him.

Here's one more question. What do I hope Jesus never asks of me? Now, I'm not talking reverse psychology here. God, please don't make me wealthy. Lord, please don't ask me to go to Hawaii.

That's not what we're talking about. Seriously, is there anything that I hope Jesus doesn't ask of me? Because I have already decided in my heart that I won't do that.

If there are parts of our lives that we are consciously refusing to surrender to Jesus, then we can sing songs all day long that call him Lord. But our lives tell a very different story.

And now, with those three questions in mind, let me offer this really important clarification. Because when we talk about surrendering everything to Jesus, there is a danger that we will take that to mean earning our salvation with our good religious behavior. That God only loves us and accepts us if we are perfect. That we can't be confident of our place in God's family if we're still figuring things out, or if we ever feel a little self conscious about obedience, or if we ever hesitate or struggle to obey. So let me remind all of us of something the Apostle Paul wrote in the book of Ephesians.

Paul said this. It is by grace, God's absolutely undeserved kindness that is a byproduct of his character and not our worthiness. It is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves. It is the gift, the gift of God.

Not by works, not by things that we do so that no one can boast and say, I accomplished this. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Here's what Paul is saying. We are made right with God not by working for it, but by trusting in God's loving, gracious, undeserved gift of Jesus. No one becomes a part of God's family because we earned it.

Earlier this week, last Monday night, to be precise, I won our staff NCAA Bracket Challenge.

Yeah, I can't tell you how much effort I put into that. Let me. I did nothing. Michigan played really good basketball and I happened to put their name at the center of my bracket. And as a prize for effortlessly winning bracket challenge, when we went out to lunch as a staff on Tuesday, my lunch was paid for by John Veach.

I got a free to me lunch courtesy of John So I won the challenge and I got a free lunch and I did nothing for any of it. Which is exactly how salvation works now. At the same time, because God saves us, because God accepts us, we, we owe him everything. Think about that. The very fact that you and I are alive, we owe to him the hope that we have as a result of Jesus death and resurrection.

That's all Him.

We owe him everything. So we devote our lives to serving Him. We strive to do good, not because by doing good we can somehow earn a little bit more of his love than we had before. We do that simply because he's already given us his love, even though we don't deserve it. It is an act of nothing but our gratitude.

Our access to God costs Jesus his life, and he offers that access to us as a gift. And we receive that gift by trusting in Jesus and surrendering everything to him as Lord.

So here is today's entire message, a single sentence. Salvation is free and it will cost you your life. That's what Jesus says. I've done the heavy lifting. I made the sacrifice.

I came back from the grave. Hope and eternal life are yours when you trust me. And when you trust me, I'm going to ask you to trust me so completely that you give me everything. So I want to close by asking you, is Jesus your Savior and is he your Lord? He wants to be.

He deserves to be.

And we're here to help each other know him and follow him and surrender everything to Him. Would you pray with me, Lord God, we're grateful this morning for your invitation. Not because of anything we've done to earn it or deserve it, but because of your graciousness, because of your love and mercy. You have invited us at the cost of your own life, sacrificed in our place for our sins on a cross. You've invited us, God, to come to you, to trust in that sacrifice, to have our sins remove that barrier of guilt and shame that had previously separated us from you.

God, you've done everything necessary to wipe that out of the picture, and we thank you for that. And Father, because of what you've done for us, because of who you are, because nothing else, no one else holds a candle to you in terms of worthiness, of our attention and our affection and our allegiance. God, we ask that you would give us the humility, the self awareness, the courage to surrender everything to you. Recognizing that the moment we say that, God, we don't fully understand what everything is, but we trust that you'll continue not only to show us those parts of our lives that are not yet yours. But through your spirit, you'll give us the strength, you'll give us the will, the power to let go of those things and to continue to become more and more and more and more yours.

God, thank you for allowing us to share these moments together, to unpack a challenging and dangerous message. And we're thankful, God, that we have the privilege of following you as a family where we can be encouraged and sharpened along the way. God, thank you for these moments together. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.

Friends, as we close today, just want to stress that if today's service has in some way made you realize that you need to take a next step with Jesus, we're here to help you do that. I want to invite our Next Steps team to go ahead and make their way down here to the front. If you sense that there's a next step that you need to take as a follower of Jesus, there are three very simple ways that you can connect with us, and I want to share those with you very quickly. One of those is a series of classes. We offer them on a recurring basis every single month called Next Steps.

One of those has actually been going on during this service. But next Sunday at this hour, our Next Steps Engage class takes place. That is a class that we'll talk about what it means to find community and what it means to find a place of ministry. So if you're looking for a place to serve and a place to belong, we would love for you next Sunday to come and be a part of that. The second way you can connect with us is electronic.

For all of our friends who are online and any of us in the room who are in a hurry, just text the word next to 317-707-9997. You can let us know in just a few words what's on your heart. We'll reach right back out to you and we'd love to begin that conversation that is designed to help you discern and take that next step. And then finally, if you'd like to talk to someone in person, we have several of us right here down front who would love after the service to answer your questions. We'd love to pray with you if we could help you figure out what is the next thing I need to do to follow what I sense Jesus leading me to do.

That's why we're here. We're never finished. There's always more surrender to offer to Jesus, but as he makes us aware of what that next step is, our responsibility as disciples is to take it. And we're here to help each other do that. So thank you for being with us today.

This is a challenging series. I'm looking forward to delving into this together. We pray that you'll be back with us next week for more, that you'll bring someone with you to experience that with us. And in the meantime, let's walk out those doors determined in the power of the Holy Spirit, to surrender everything to Jesus as our Lord. Love you guys.

Have a great week.