(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Hey, you're listening to Cut For Time, a podcast from Faith Church, located on the north side of Indianapolis. My name is Claire Kingsley. And I'm Dan Breitwieser. 

Each week, one of us will sit down with the person who gave Sunday's sermon to discuss their message. Cut For Time is a look behind the scenes of sermon preparation, and they'll share with us a few things that we didn't hear from the sermon on Sunday. Thanks for listening.

All right. Good morning, Nick. Good morning, Claire.

All right. So you preached our second sermon in our hard sayings of Jesus passage. And really similar to Nathan's, I felt like it's not just one verse that is hard. 

It's a lot of verses that are hard in context. So would you just give us a sermon summary from what you preached? And then also just how does it kind of connect to what we heard from the week before? Yeah. So I had the text from Luke 14, that if anyone doesn't hate his father and mother, wife and kids, and his own self, then he can't be Jesus' disciple. 

That actually has a paraphrase of Nathan's text from the week prior. He goes on to say, you know, hating yourself. So taking up your cross and following him, it's an idea of total surrender and counting the cost of disciples.

So in my sermon, I focused in really on that tribal or that family bond. And I chose to talk about it in terms of identity and security, what we get from a tribe. I started using the word tribe because for our audience right now, who I was preaching to on Sunday morning in our north suburb of Indianapolis context, not many people, if any, are going to have their family disown them because they choose to follow Christ. 

So for Jesus' initial hearers, and definitely the encouragement that Luke was trying to share with the early church, where believers were being ostracized, Jews who were following the Jewish Messiah were being told they're no longer Jewish because they're worshiping a man and were kicked out of the synagogues, and they were literally losing their tribe. We're not experiencing that. But where do we find our identity and security is what I tried to drill into. 

How does this still bring true for us, even if it's not in the exact same way? So I talked about in my sermon, as far as like a summary goes, we walked through a couple of the relationships that Jesus gave the example of. So father and mother, husband or wife, and then parenting, and just how those relationships create training grounds and an opportunity to learn, practice, and model self-sacrificial love, love that requires you to lay down something in benefit of the other, to put the other's needs above your own. And then where I landed was that Jesus has already done that for us. 

I always love in preaching to try and come back around to what Jesus has done, rather than just focusing on the oughts. If we tried to focus this on pure application, how do I hate my father and mother? How should I be trying to go and hate my spouse? How should I hate my children? And just directly try to make an application. We can get into dangerous territory, but when we contemplate Christ and just the work that He has done in the context of that, and you can go back and listen to the sermon recording, we talked about the family dynamics of adoption and an heir and bringing in new heirs, and the sacrifice that that took for Jesus to have really kind of hated the tribe that He was in. 

Hate meaning that He loved that less than the glory of the Father by bringing in His adopted kids. So that was the sermon in a nutshell. We've been kind of saying that the hard sayings could be difficult to understand, difficult to live out, or difficult to apply. 

Where do you think this falls? All of them, one specific one, which one did you focus on for your sermon? I actually specifically said in my sermon, it's not the hard to understand one. I think it's really quick to dismiss. And I chose to not get into words and do a whole linguistic lecture, but it's very simple. 

And nobody was misunderstanding Jesus. He did not mean hate them. It's a comparative analysis, and it was a figure of speech that was very common back then for rabbis to use. 

So this was not difficult to interpret or understand. It's difficult to apply. If it happens in your life, if you come up with a scenario like that, that's where I think that this one lands. 

Trading what you think gives you identity and security for Christ is very difficult. Thank you. Well, in our sermon journals that we've been printing, and this one specifically has the discussion questions ahead of time. 

We're trying to remove barriers so people aren't trying to want, or they're not having to wonder like, when would those questions be released? And how do I find them? Because they've always existed for years, but I don't know how easy they are to use. And so this was something we wanted to try out this summer. And so to encourage people to go through those questions throughout the week and just try and not just like sit and receive the teaching for an hour and then peace out and forget that it exists until the following week.

Encourage them to even just look at those questions, whether it's on their own or with someone else in their household or in a mentoring relationship or something like that. So I'm going to ask you one of the questions from our sermon journal questions this week, which is, Jesus repeatedly warns people to count the cost. What costs of discipleship are believers today often unprepared for? Sure. 

I think it's related to this sermon. If you find your identity, wherever you find your identity and security. I've already mentioned, and I mentioned in the sermon that we don't often find it in our, just in like our last name, in the heritage, although some of us might. 

But whether that's in career, professional association, achievements, ultimately when you reorder the desires, we reorder where your real identity comes from. And then it comes from being an adopted. So you didn't earn it by merit son in God's household.

And that's where your real identity lies. That means you can lay down these other things. You don't have to pursue with so much passion, these other things, but we're still so drawn to. 

And I find it interesting. I spent some time just considering why does Jesus use the term disciple? You cannot be my disciple. It's not that he says you can never be saved. 

Jesus doesn't even really use that language much in his teaching. What he's talking about is following him, being shaped by him, learning to walk as he does. That's what a disciple of a rabbi would do. 

And if you're not, I think to get back to your question, the cost that we don't count is that once we acknowledge that we are a sinner and that Christ has died for us, we want to be saved by him. We then are reordering the desires of our heart. The Holy Spirit is changing us and showing us that there's something more important. 

There's a different way to live. There's a different way to order our lives that is modeled after the archetypal man who lives as we were created to live in this ordered world. And that order doesn't include any one thing taking the top seat. 

And so if you just look at your schedule, I mean, I can look at this too. I could pull up my calendar and see that career, this is the one that I struggle with, with identity. It takes up most of my time and encroaches on family time and encroaches on personal disciplines. 

There you go, the discipleship, personal disciplines, personal study in the word. There's so many times in the morning I'm so eager to get to the office, I skip prayer time. Those things are taking place. 

We don't count the cost of discipleship that you may actually not be able to pour so much of yourself into a career. I'm just talking from my experience here, that you're going to get ahead, rise to the top. You may actually look around and say, there are people who are excelling in ways that I'm not in whatever arena it is, whether it's professional. 

There's actually sports is another one that we've got athletic kids and there's an amount of total and absolute devotion to a sport that could require you to lay down actual discipleship. Walking as Jesus would have you to walk, so you can't do that. You may not actually be the best athlete out there, but you've chosen to do a mission trip to Italy. 

I'll just be very specific, you've given up a summer AAU basketball season to be serving overseas. Things like that, you cannot order anything at the highest level in your life when God is in the highest level. It sounds so cliche, but when it gets down into it, you start making really concrete decisions. 

Where am I going to spend my time and how am I going to be known in the world? When we share the gospel with people, we're often quick to count the benefits of aligning our lives with Christ. This is what it would be like, not in a prosperity way. I don't think that's bad. 

I think there are real true benefits with aligning our lives with Christ, but we're maybe slower to count the cost when we are sharing the gospel with people as well. How do you do both? Do you have an example of doing both well? I think you do both by answering questions honestly. I think if people say, well, if I'm going to accept this, do I have to give up X, Y, and Z? Am I required to do this or that? I usually tell them, it's not me laying a requirement on you, but this is not a prayer to pray. 

It's not a transaction. Our goal is not just numbers to be able to say, well, we got X number of people saved, but if they didn't count the costs, if they're the seed that lands on rocky soil and sprouts up. Being honest, because it's not our excellent delivery and salesmanship of the gospel that is going to change lives.

It's the Holy Spirit. The honesty that I'll share is, I'm not telling you what you have to do today to believe in Jesus, but I would tell you that you're more than likely going to find that once He is Lord of your life, He's going to ask you to stop doing these sins that you're asking for forgiveness for. Those things are antithetical to His design for your life. 

It's not that you have to obey in a certain way to be saved. It's that it's not just a matter of punching a ticket to heaven, that you have reordered your life around His design. When you do that, you'll find that those things don't fit. 

Whether it's giving advices, in our context, as I've already mentioned, oftentimes, we don't have the same scenario that the first century church had. That's a blessing. We should thank God for that. 

Just also realize that it sometimes creates... We don't have the stamina. We don't have the endurance that tested Christians have, sometimes, in the church. An example that I can share, I'll have to be vague, because this is a public podcast. 

I have a friend who is in a different cultural context, one that is definitely still tribal, very deeply tribal. He's heard the gospel. We've talked about it. 

I've asked him to respond, but he knows that to respond means to lay down for their culture. Religion is part of your identity and your family. It's just so intertwined. 

We can't even fathom, sometimes in the West, what it means in other cultures, more traditional cultures, to adopt a new faith and a new God. When you adopt a new God, you're not a part of anything. Your wife, your kids, your parents, everything that Jesus is actually talking about in his cultural context there, when these words were recorded in Luke. 

He has not responded to the gospel, the result. I don't count that as my failure. I also continue to pray and realize this is not my work. 

If he's God's, then he'll use me. When the opportunity comes around and he's using me currently, but I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm also not going to synchrotize it. 

I think that was a risk that we see in the New Testament, synchrotization. We saw that in Corinth, right? You can worship these other gods. You can still go to these ecstatic celebrations of other deities to keep this G-rated. 

You can still participate in all that stuff. It'll be fine. Also, add Jesus. 

No, Paul comes along and says, no, you can't do that. Not sugarcoating it, not trying to sell it, if you will. Would you say the cost, it's not just the sin, but it's also, like, we will be called to lay down the sin that we are repenting of.

Also, I think it's just not always sin, right? Other than losing your relationships with your family, I do know that when I've talked to people about it, and even honestly, when I was not yet a believer, but my sister was a believer, she lost all her friends. Then all of her friends started talking to me and they were like, oh my gosh, your sister is so weird. What's wrong with her? You should just not ever be like that.

I was like, yeah, never, until I came to hear the gospel. Then also lost all of our friends and our mutual friends and whatever. It was wild. 

If you would have told me before I was ready, hey, following Christ means losing all your friends, I would have been like, I was in high school, okay? It was like my senior year of high school. Who wants to lose all their friends their senior year of high school? I'd have been like, nope, not for me. But it was hearing the gospel truly first that then made it worth following everything else.

I don't know if someone would have told me the cost ahead of time, even though I even saw my sister walk through it, if I could have made the choice of accepting both the benefit of Christ and the cost of Christ at the same time. I don't know. I think the cost came after I realized I had made that decision. 

Well, I have a thought and then I have a question I want to turn back around to you, Claire. The thought is, it sounds like, from you describing this, that somebody did tell you the cost or you realized the cost and for a while you said no. You're like, I'm not going to pay that off. 

For me and the example that I shared of my friend, that's really what I'm talking about. Because eventually, God did the work that only he could do. It wasn't your sister. 

It wasn't anybody else that did it. He realigned your heart to say, no, no, no, this cost is going to be worth it. You realize that. 

That's the way I would think about that. Then the question is, why is it that you lost your friends? I have a presumed hypothesis. Then you could tell me if I was wrong. 

Is it that there's a lifestyle that you can live when you don't care about God or the church at all? Then when you're the fuddy-duddy, you've become the goody two-shoes. I had that experience. I didn't want to be at the parties anymore. 

I didn't want to be at the keggers at college. I didn't want to be in that scene anymore. That's where all my friends were. 

It was difficult and hard. There were poles in both directions. Is that similar? Yeah, it's similar. 

I'd say that was especially my sister's experience. That was mostly, I would say, the loss of relationship was because that's all what her friends were doing. She was no longer doing that.

I don't think actually I was involved in that scene at all. I actually just think people thought I was weird. People were like, you're in a cult and we don't want to associate with you. 

I don't know, just a weird other set of circumstances where I graduated from high school with zero friends. I could not wait to get to college because I had no one except my parents and I was the last one at home. My siblings were out of the house. 

I felt so lonely. The cost was real for you. Yeah, but thankfully short-lived because as soon as I got to college and I realized, oh my gosh, there are other people who are fun and cool, but also can love Jesus at the same time, was a relief. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Well, praise God. He is kind and he's good. He knows what we need and when we need it.

Going back to it's not always just a sin. You're right. I think in our context, oftentimes it is because, and I'll relate this back, it's because of who our God is, if you will. 

If the God in our culture is self, is pleasure, is defining oneself, establishing oneself, proving oneself, and then enjoying whatever you want to through your own standard of what you think is moral, that's our religion now. In a very real sense, that forms our culture and our bonds and how you belong. It's not altogether, when you kind of like analyze it, altogether dissimilar from traditional cultures that still exist out there that I described a moment ago that my friend is in or Corinth or any of the New Testament setting where who you're worshiping and how your life is aligned around that God will define your relationships. 

Our God today is just a little more abstract. It's self, the God of creating ourselves in our own image. When you have to give that up, you do lose the relationships with others who are pursuing that religion and pursuing that passion and faith. 

My God. Yeah. I hope it didn't sound like I wasn't also being called to walk away from my own sin.

I think that there was that also, of course. I think it could just be other circumstances too that are ghostly. If you think about even my friend or many other traditional cultures are probably far more moral than even sometimes we are. 

There's strict rules on marriage fidelity, on how they manage their money. I'm thinking of Muslim cultures, Hindu cultures, some African traditional cultures. In many ways, they're far more moral than we are in some of the traditional sense that we might list off as vices in American culture.

They look at American culture and look at our entertainment and things and they're like, oh, those guys are sinners. They're far more moral and yet there's a cost. For us, those vices have become normal and have become a way of integrating into our society because it is a way of saying I am my own God. 

It's similar but different. Do you think that over time, the longer someone is walking with the Lord, it becomes easier to do this? Do you have less to surrender over time? I don't know if you have less to surrender, but you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. The things that God is asking me to give up now in my life where I'm at at 43 are far more significant than things. 

He asked me to walk away from a pleasure-seeking, sinful lifestyle in my 20s. That was going to kill me anyways. That wasn't as hard. 

It seemed hard at the time, but it was not as hard as somebody who in my career, we go back to what are the costs and there are decisions that I make that it's not like I'm not doing my job well or I'm just phoning it in at work so that I can serve more at the church. There's decisions I make with just ordering my life and the time and the commitments that I will uphold and the level to which I will become a slave to my career that are hard to look at and go, I could be bigger, greater, more successful, but God is not asking me to do that. He's asking me to do something different.

That's harder, but it's easier because I have tasted and seen that he's good and I can continue to take those next steps. We're calling his faithfulness to be able to do the next step is essential. He calls us to remember all the time. 

How would you encourage somebody as they're listening, if they've made it all the way through and they are about to go about the rest of their day because just the thought of like, oh my goodness, surrender my life, surrender my career. How can I do that in a day? That's not going to happen right now in this moment. A small thing someone would do to show that surrender. 

This is not a matter of trying to find the next most heroic thing. It's not a contest to see who can sacrifice the most. It's really a frame of mind to say, is there anything right now in our lives that we are, even if subconsciously, even if we haven't said it out loud, but by the way we kind of say, yeah, I got anything but that, or we just assume that it is an immovable rock and we have to order everything around that. 

Is there anything that he might actually be asking us to lay down and then ask the question that you don't want to ask in prayer, not just once, but make it a part of a discipline for a period of time, a really contemplative meditate on this. Lord, is this, whatever it is, if it's family, if it's how you're raising your kids, a particular style of education or parenting or career or recreation or pursuing some kind of accolade in any way, do you want me to give that up? It doesn't mean you just give everything up. We're not talking about asceticism. 

We're not talking about everybody joining a monastery, but it means saying, have I been blind to this? And then not just saying it because you should say it, but really getting to the point of your heart where you'd say, I'm willing, if that's what you want, but he may not. He doesn't ask everybody to give everything up. He just is asking you to hold it openly.

Hold it open. That's right. Yeah. 

That's right. So what is that thing right now that you would I use the word in my sermon, clung to. I actually did my own sort of retranslation of Philippians 2, grasped, it's this idea of holding onto something. 

What is it that you don't have an open hand with, that you're still like, this one's still mine. Not going to give that one up. Anything else is fine.

And what would it look like if you just opened your hand and said, well, if you want it, okay. Yeah. Someone once told me the imagery of not just holding open handedly, but just watching it, let it be water and let it run through your fingers as well.

It's not even that you're actually holding it, but that you're just a part of it for a second. I don't know, just that imagery of am I letting it run through my fingers even and letting it fall a little bit. Anyways. 

All right. Thanks for your time today. No, thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Cut For Time. If you wish to submit questions to our pastors following Sunday's sermon, you can email them to podcast at faithchurchindy.com or text them into our Faith Church texting number, and we'll do our best to cover them in next week's episode. If this conversation blessed you in any way, we encourage you to share it with others. 

We'll be back again next week.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)