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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.

Before I read the scripture this morning, a reminder, we are entering into a new series and as has been our habit for a while now, that means there are new booklets available. The scripture will be in these as well as some other helpful things. If you didn't receive one and you want one, particularly because you're going to read the scripture from it right now, wave your hand around a little bit.

I've heard the ushers would love to bring one to you right now, or you can pick up one later. Otherwise, you have the scriptures that you brought with you or Bibles that are in the chair racks in front of you. But I invite you to stand with me as we read scripture, reading this morning from Matthew chapter 16, verses 24 through 28.

Then Jesus told his disciples, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the son of man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. Well, it's good to be back with you all on what I am calling the newly appointed Let the Youth Pastor Preach Sunday. Normally, the youth pastor preaches on that, you know, Sunday in between Christmas and New Year's.

That's where I, you know, cut my teeth preaching here at Faith Church. But today is the newly appointed Let the Youth Pastor Preach Sunday. Does anyone know why? It's 6-7.

There you go. You might be pleased to learn that first hour enjoyed that joke just as much as you did. So, well, I'm excited to get us going and kicking off this new series, The Hard Sayings of a Kind Savior.

And so as we turn to God's word in Matthew chapter 16 today, let's just begin with quieting our hearts with a word of prayer. Father, Heavenly Father, we treasure your words. We treasure the words of Jesus and we want to learn how to apply what it looks like to follow Jesus.

So may your spirit convict us where necessary, reveal the parts of our lives where you still need to do work within us. And so in this time together in your word, we ask that may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight because you are our Lord, our rock, and our Redeemer. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Do you want to get well? That's a question that has been rattling around in my brain for the last few weeks and months as I've been reflecting on it. But that question reminds me of a situation that I had a couple of years ago. I was at my home away from home, the dentist, and, you know, all the Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper I drank in college was paying dividends now in adulthood, and I had another cavity I had to go get filled.

And after I got the cavity filled, I noticed I had this incredible shooting pain on the right side of my mouth. Anytime I tried to chew on the right side of my mouth, I couldn't do it. It was too painful.

So I just chewed everything on the other side of my mouth. And so after a couple of weeks thinking it would go away and it didn't, I called the dentist up and said, hey, something's up. They're like, okay, come back in.

Well, maybe we didn't, you know, file down the filling as much as we needed to. So I go in, more Novocaine, more pain, and guess what? Still didn't solve anything. This happened like three times where I went, kept going back, kept going back.

And they're like, oh no, it should be fine. I'm like, it's clearly not. And eventually I got to the point where I just, I didn't know what else to do.

So they took x-rays again. You know, I think at this point most people would just go to a different dentist, but I was stubborn. So I just kept going back, expecting different results.

And eventually they look at the x-ray and they say, you know what might be happening is the filling that we put in is too close to your nerve. So they recommended a root canal. And so I, and many others like me, have had to get root canals and a crown.

And I'm not going to bore you with the details, but I do not recommend it for a fun time. But the, essentially to get to the root of the problem, they had to, you know, get to the heart of it, right? That to endure pain was worth it, even though it costs something. And so as we look to these sayings that Jesus has for his disciples and for us, we are going to ask ourselves similar questions.

What are you willing to do to get better? What are you willing to sacrifice to get better? Because Jesus is our great physician. And so we're taking a look throughout the Gospels at some of these things that Jesus said, specifically the ones that we would often describe as hard or difficult. Sometimes he said these things to his disciples, sometimes to a broader group of followers, sometimes to the Pharisees and the doubters.

And not every hard saying is difficult in the same way. Some of these things are hard to understand, right? Jesus spoke in parables many times. Some of these things are hard to accept.

If you think of when Jesus says, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, it'd be much easier to accept if Jesus said, hey, you don't have to pay your taxes. And some of these things are hard to live out. And that's kind of where we're going to camp out today.

A saying from Jesus to his disciples that is hard to put into practice. And some of these hard sayings are a combination of all of the above. The hard sayings of the Bible can often be stumbling blocks leading to frustrations.

We come across things that Jesus said and we recognize that they don't immediately make sense to us and it often leaves us with more questions than answers. Jesus' hard sayings are not barriers to discipleship. He's not trying to turn people away.

But it's an invitation. They're invitations to deeper relationship. Jesus loves you too much to leave you the way that you are.

And so throughout this series, if you find yourself being challenged or taken aback by some of the difficult things that Jesus has to say to his disciples, ask yourself this question, how is Jesus inviting me into deeper relationship with him? What is the invitation that Jesus is making to you? So there may be some Sundays where you're not walking out of here feeling warm and fuzzy. The word of God is powerful. It is powerful to encourage but also to convict and challenge.

So my challenge to each of us this morning is to let the spirit of God work within your heart as these hard sayings from Jesus challenge us deeply. So where are we headed this morning? You heard our scripture read from Matthew chapter 16 verses 24 through 28 and the invitation that I believe Jesus is making to his disciples and to each one of us is to embrace the cross-shaped life of following Jesus. Embrace the cross-shaped life that Jesus is calling you to.

And so today we will examine three choices that each of his disciples and each of us has to make if we want to follow Jesus. Now, before we get into Matthew 16, 24 through 28, we do need to do a little bit of background, a little bit of context, right? One of the side effects of preaching through a thematic series is we have to do a little bit of extra legwork to properly orient the passage within its context. And yes, we could just kind of take these verses as they are, but we need to remember that the Bible was not written or given to us to be sliced and diced and cross-stitched on pillows.

And so as we come to each hard saying, we'll need to keep the context of Jesus and his ministry in mind, asking questions like who is he saying this to? What part of his ministry timeline is he in? What other context is helpful for our understanding? And sometimes it can also be helpful to compare with the other gospels if they mention it. How did the other gospel authors write about these things that Jesus says? So if you're taking notes in your journal, that's great. These are a great resource for you, a space to take notes.

There's also some ongoing questions throughout the series that you can find for your personal study or for study in your communities. But if you have your Bible open to Matthew chapter 16, you'll also see that our passage for this morning is sandwiched between two very key moments in the life of Jesus and his ministry and in the life of his disciples. Jesus has retreated to the northern region of Caesarea Philippi.

He is looking for some time away from the crowds and is looking for some intentional time with his disciples. He goes away from his normal didactic and lectures and he's entering into conversation with his disciples, right? He's dialoguing with them. And he asked them this question, who do the crowds say that I am? So the disciples offer some answers, well, some say Elijah, maybe Jeremiah, maybe you're John the Baptist raised back from the dead.

Then he challenges them with this question of, well, who do you say that I am? Then Peter, ever the spokesperson, speaks up. What does he say? You are the Christ, the son of the living God. And then Jesus blesses Peter.

He praises him and says, yes, this is the truth and yes, it is my father in heaven who has revealed this to you, right? You did not come to this understanding on your own. And then in verse 21 of chapter 16, Matthew uses a key phrase that helps us orient this to the timeline of Jesus and his ministry. He says, from that time on.

It's the same phrase that he also used in chapter 4 to signify the beginning of Jesus's public ministry in Galilee and Capernaum. From this time on, he began to tell his disciples that he will suffer at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and rise again on the third day. So from that time on, Jesus has his sights set on Jerusalem and he knows what is waiting for him when he gets there.

Peter though, still on that spiritual high from getting an A plus on that question Jesus just asked him, decides to teach Jesus a little something about what it means to be the son of the living God. And he pulls him aside and admonishes him. He rebukes Jesus.

And the language that Peter uses is very strong in the Greek and it doesn't exactly carry through in the English, but he's saying, Jesus, it will never be this way. You are terribly mistaken. As we would have said in Tennessee where I grew up, it ain't going to happen.

It is not going to be this way. Peter cannot comprehend how Jesus, as the son of the living God, is going to suffer and die. Then Jesus, in turn, rebukes Peter saying, get behind me, Satan, you are a hindrance to me for you are setting your mind on the things of God.

You are not setting your minds on the things of God, but on the things of man. Now that might seem like a lot of unnecessary information, we haven't even gotten to our hard saying yet, but I see it as necessary for our understanding of who Jesus is saying this to and what is the context with which he is saying it. Peter, and likely the other disciples, as I mentioned, could not comprehend or imagine a world where Jesus is the son of the living God, Jesus is the Messiah, and yet Jesus would need to, it would necessitate for him to suffer and die at the hands of their own nation's religious elite.

So how on earth is this the way of the Messiah? And then the other part of the sandwich after our passage in Matthew chapter 17 is the transfiguration of Jesus, as Matthew records it, where Peter, James, and John were witnesses to what Jesus did on the mountain of transfiguration where Elijah and Moses come and they're witnesses to his glory in part. And Peter again, you know, doesn't quite understand what's going on and asks Jesus if he should pitch some tents so that, you know, they can stay there a while. Doesn't get it, but we're not going to get into that right now.

But in the middle of these two moments, Peter's confession of Jesus as the Christ and the transfiguration, in the middle of that, Jesus tells his disciples, if anyone, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. Remember, Jesus is inviting his disciples and us to embrace the cross-shaped life. And in this heart saying, we're looking at the three choices that every disciple of Jesus must make.

And the first choice is to deny yourself. Will you choose to deny yourself? These two words sound easy, but are far from it. It's not just a denial of desires, though, you know, a denial of desires can be a good spiritual discipline.

All right, I'm going to deny myself chocolate today. Or maybe you'll say, I'm going to deny myself happiness and eat a kale salad for lunch. This is essentially just exercising self-control, and it's not really what I think Jesus is referring to here.

It's also not just ignoring the self, or worse, it's not this sense of false humility. We know, because Scripture teaches it clearly, that we are sinful, that we are broken and we live in a broken world. So we might think that to deny oneself is simply to ignore any thought, any need, any fear, any anxiety that might well up within us.

And this attitude could lead to a sense of false humility or masochism, right, where we actually enjoy the pain that we're going through. We like to tell others about how much we are in pain and suffering. And yes, we are sinful and broken, and we're living that way until Jesus comes again in glory, but that doesn't mean that we have to deprive ourselves of joy, pleasure, satisfaction, or good food.

All these things are good graces from God, but should be kept in that proper perspective, right? So what does Jesus mean by deny yourself? This verb for deny can often refer to a response to a statement, right, denying that something is true or denying that something is false, but it can also carry with it this relational connection. It's the same verb that is used to describe Peter's denial of Jesus when Jesus is on trial. He denies that he has any connection to Jesus and even swears an oath that he does not know him.

Self-denial is thus a recognition that our relationship to ourselves becomes secondary. I should no longer consider myself as the most important person in my life. My thoughts about myself should take a backseat to what Jesus thinks about me.

My identity is no longer what I decide, but it is decided by the one who has bought me and purchased me, which is Jesus. The things I tell myself in my inner monologue become secondary to what God says to be true of me in his word. Jesus is not making a statement about whether the idea of self is good or bad, but rather our primary allegiance is no longer to ourselves.

And Jesus has a lot to say about the cost of discipleship and allegiances, and it's actually where we're going next week in this series. Who is your primary allegiance to? Is it to Jesus or is it to yourself? So if you wish to follow Jesus, then the first choice you must make is whether or not you will choose to deny yourself. The second choice is to follow Jesus sacrificially.

Will you choose or have you chosen to follow Jesus sacrificially? Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. I think some of the weight and the shock of that statement that Jesus makes is lost on us, some 2,000 years removed from when Jesus said it. To us, the cross has been a religious symbol, pointing back to Jesus our entire lives.

The cross reminds us of God's grace and love poured out to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that is what it should be. It is no longer an image of shame, but it is an image of hope.

But it didn't always happen that way. That's not what the cross was intended for. And something I read this week kind of caught my eye.

The author says believers can tend to allegorize any unpleasantness as a cross and then spiritualize it as part of discipleship. You know, when your family makes you late, or you lose your patience in traffic, or maybe you're like me and you root for a sports team that is chronically down on its luck. We just describe that as, well, that's my cross to bear.

And then we think that through these minor inconveniences that we are truly walking the path of sacrificial discipleship because we're mildly inconvenienced. But before the cross became a symbol of God's love for us, or before it became a euphemism for ongoing troubles while being human, it was for centuries seen as a humiliating tool for capital punishment and death. And many of these ideas or facts about crucifixion from the Romans we know because of what Jesus did, because of what Jesus did on the cross.

But just by way of reminder, the Romans had perfected the use of the crucifixion. They killed thousands upon thousands during their kingdom's expansion and military conquests, but the crucifixions were reserved for only the worst enemies of Rome, only the worst criminals. Because crucifixion was more than just a way to kill someone, it was to humiliate them, to completely and utterly remove any semblance of identity or worth.

And so it was an extremely evocative image that Jesus is leaving with his disciples about what it takes to follow Jesus. And it was not lost on them, or any of the Jews in first century Palestine, that part of the humiliating process of crucifixion was that the condemned person carried the crossbeam to the place of their execution. This is what happened with Jesus on his road to Golgotha.

It was one last burden in life to bear the weight of your means of death. Carrying the cross was proof of complete and utter submission. They were completely conquered and surrendered to their demise.

They were not fighting back, they were surrendered to what was going to happen. Dr. Doriani, in his commentary on the book of Matthew, says this, To the Greek, a crucified man was utterly humiliated. To the Romans, a crucified man was evil and powerless.

To the Jew, a crucified man was cursed by God. But Jesus said that the cross and the resurrection are God's words of life and God's paradigm for discipleship. And herein lies the paradigm shift that Jesus is laying out for his disciples.

The path of following Jesus, the way of discipleship, requires identifying with Jesus and completely surrendering and submitting to him. That path necessitates denial of oneself and the willingness to suffer as part of identifying with Jesus. Taking up our cross is not to atone for our sins or to deal with the curse of sin.

Jesus did that completely and eternally in his death and resurrection. There is no longer any sacrifice for sin that needs to be done. On the cross, he said, after all, it is finished.

Carrying one's cross was proof of complete and utter submission, and to follow Jesus requires the same. I came across a new term this week. It's a term called cruciformity.

It was coined or originated with author Michael Gorman in his book of that title in 2001. Discipleship and following Jesus is a path of cruciformity. It means that having every aspect of one's life, ethics, and community oriented around the self-sacrificing love, humility, and obedience demonstrated by Jesus on the cross.

Our lives are patterned after the example of Jesus on the cross. We are called to live cruciformed lives. So what do you choose? Have you chosen to follow Jesus, the risen Christ? If so, have you fully submitted to him as the Lord of your life, or are you merely following him as a fan? Do you recognize the love and kindness that he offers as a good master? Unlike the cruel and unruly and unforgiving masters that you used to serve, and those masters that we all used to serve our sin and ourselves, unlike ourself, Jesus is a forgiving and kind master.

He is good. And while it is a choice that we can make to surrender to Jesus, it does not often happen as easily or as quickly as we would like, right? Because we would love to be able to make that decision to follow Jesus and then shablam, we're just totally and completely wholeheartedly surrendered to Jesus in mind, body, and spirit. But it doesn't happen that way.

Walking the way of Jesus, taking up our cross to follow him, it often looks like finding those parts of us that we're still holding on to, those pieces of our lives that we're holding with a tight grip instead of surrendering to Jesus open-handedly. It looks like letting Jesus scrape away the scales of sin and pride that we haven't yet surrendered to him. It looks like a long obedience in the same direction, as Eugene Peterson said.

It looks like faithful following. And that brings us to the third choice we face as disciples of Jesus. The third choice is to value eternal life over earthly gain.

What are you choosing to value? Are you going to value eternal life or are you going to value earthly gain? Jesus continues in verses 25 through 28 by saying this, for whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the son of man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.

Jesus follows up the shockingly difficult statement about bearing one's cross with a bit of heavenly perspective. Yes, following Jesus looks like laying down your life in self-denial and taking up your cross. But even if you tried to hold on to everything you had, even if you reject that idea of laying your life down, you try to hold on to everything, you're going to lose it anyway.

It's going to slip through your fingers. There is nothing that can be gained, eternally speaking, by clinging and holding on to what your life is or what you hope it to be. By trying to hold so tightly to your own plans and your path through your life, you will inevitably lose it all.

He asks this rhetorical question, what will it profit a man to gain the whole world and yet lose his life or to lose his soul? The answer to this rhetorical question is nothing. Nothing can be gained. Jesus is truly putting earthly wealth and the pursuit of financial gain in proper perspective.

He's not condemning healthy financial stewardship, but rather all the money in the world is not worth the price of your soul. He is exposing this folly of this way of thinking. He is explaining to his disciples the surpassing value and worth of living a life marked by self-denial for the sake of following Jesus.

He is setting them up to see that the greatest value is found in denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following Jesus, and that it is eternally rewarding. So let's think about the eternal nature of this, right? Jesus says, the son of man is coming again in glory, and when that day comes, each person will be given according to what they have done. For those who have not yet fully surrendered or submitted, this truth that Jesus is coming again, it should bring about conviction, wake you up to the reality that you are living for yourself, and doing so is going to cost you your soul.

For those who have surrendered and have submitted their life to Jesus, this promise and reminder of his return is one of great joy and hope. We will be repaid for what we have done, namely, we have put our faith and trust and reliance in Jesus. He is our savior, he is the risen son of God, so what we will be given is eternal life, the free gift of God's grace.

We will have eternal life in Christ forever. And then Jesus, to his disciples, brings this future reality to the present situation. He says some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the son of man coming in his kingdom.

He says that to his disciples, and he died and rose again and ascended, and here we are almost 2,000 years later, and he still has not returned, and all those disciples died. So what was Jesus saying here? In a way, this is kind of a secondary hard saying in this passage, right? What does he mean? Well, there are about six or seven different options of what—sorry, I had to fit one more in there. Six or seven different options about what Jesus could mean, but you'll have to tune into Cut for Time this week to hear about them, and we'll tackle any other questions you may have.

But the bottom—

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