Immanuel Sermon Audio
Luke 14:25-35
That's the perfect song as we celebrate baptisms this morning, to sing about following Jesus. And really that's the perfect song when you look at our passage this morning in Luke 14. Jesus talking about the cost of discipleship and the kind of commitment that he's looking for. So we're going to be in Luke 14 if you want to find that in your Bible. There's an outline in the bulletin where you can follow along, you can take notes. Let me start by saying thank you to those who shared last week about their trip to Kenya. I hope that we recorded that. I got back late in the week and so I don't know if that's recorded, but I hope we did. I hope I get the chance to listen to those testimonies and to hear what Chris shared. But I heard great things from those of you who were here and got to hear that. Last week I was out of the country in Cordoba, Argentina. And I think when I got in the baptistry I said something about tonight. We have baptisms tonight and they, at the church we worked with, they do church in the evening. And so I still think I was on Argentina's schedule, church in the evening. But that's where we were, picture of the downtown area, it's a city of about 2 million people. And we worked with the missionary and his particular church. And our team, there was four of us, we went down and we taught to mostly a group of pastors and church leaders. We taught Old Testament and how to study the Bible, how to have a quiet time, sort of a spiritual discipline. And most of the guys that we target in these trips, I went with a group called Reaching and Teaching, most of these guys are pastors of churches who have zero access to theological education or training of any kind. So a missionary goes to a village and a group of people believe in Jesus and he sort of puts them into the church and then he just kind of looks around and says, "You, you're the pastor." And he's the pastor and it's his job to lead the congregation and don't have the financial resources or the geographic issues are too great for them to have access to theological education. So this ministry tries to take it to them. And so we talked about the story of the Old Testament and then we did training with them specifically on how to teach the story of the Old Testament to people who can't read. Because many of the people in their congregations are either not literate or functionally not literate, meaning they can't go to their congregations and say open your Bible to the book of Genesis. They may have a Bible but they don't know how to open it to the book of Genesis. Once you get them on the right page, they can't read the story. They can't go home and study it. They can't fact check you to see if you're telling it right. And so it's a unique challenge to teach to those folks and so we tried to equip them a little bit in that direction. But this morning we're back in Luke and I'm excited to be in Luke. This is a fantastic passage that we're going to study. Let me remind you of the immediate context. A couple of weeks ago we were looking at the Gospel of Luke and we're talking specifically about the king and his kingdom. And we're talking about the invitation that the king issues to people to come into his people. And we read things like this that the king is inviting people to his banquet. He's compelling people to join the celebration. He's calling sinners to find a seat as amazing as it is at his table. And so we're reading about all of these things. The king is welcoming these people into his kingdom. And then in our passage this morning in Luke 14 beginning in verse 25, there's a little bit of a shift. All right, we're not completely changing topics. We're still talking about a king and we're still thinking about his kingdom. But previously the emphasis was on sort of this wide gate being opened for anyone who will to come into this kingdom. This invitation, he's compelling people to come in. And now Luke sort of turns the corner or you could say Jesus turns the corner and he begins to talk about once you come into the kingdom, here's what I expect. Once you find your seat at the table, here's what I'm calling you to. Once you come in, I don't care what your history, what your past, what your sin. Once you're welcomed into the celebration, here's how your life needs to change and what it needs to look like going forward. And so we're going to read this passage in just a minute, but here's the big idea. It's very, very simple. The Son of Man demands your allegiance. There's not a lot of wiggle room in that statement. And when you read these verses, there's not a lot of wiggle room in these verses. He demands your allegiance. I don't know that a lot of churches talk about this very much or maybe you could say very well. I think a lot of churches today are pretty good at offering the promises of the gospel, inviting people to the celebration, calling them into the banquet. I think most churches do a fairly good job of that. But I'm not sure how many churches, once you have been called in, are clear with you like Jesus was clear in saying, "Now that you're here, we're glad you're here. We celebrate the fact that you're here. You praise God for the fact that you're here." But this is what the king, and he is a king, this is what the king is calling you to as a member of his kingdom. He demands your allegiance. So let's look at the passage and read it. It's short, Luke 14, beginning in verse 25. Luke tells us that great crowds accompanied him, that is Jesus. And he, Jesus, turned and said to them the crowds. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he's laid the foundation, he's not able to finish, all who see it will begin to mock him, saying this man begin to build and was not able to finish. Or what king going out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with 10,000 to meet him who comes against him with 20,000. And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and he asks for terms of peace. So therefore, if any one of you who does not renounce all that he has, cannot be my disciple. Salt is good. But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? Is of no use, either for the soil or for the manure pile? It's thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. Let's pray. Father, we celebrate with those who have obeyed the Lord's command to be baptized. And we're grateful for the opportunity to sing praises to you. And we're grateful for the opportunity to hear your words in the Bible, to hear what the king of all kings has to say to those of us he has invited into his kingdom. And we know that these are difficult words. There's some things that are hard to understand. And there's other things that are pretty clear that are hard to accept and to apply to our lives. And so we pray, as Tyler prayed a minute ago, we pray for your spirit to convict us, to guide us, to give us wisdom, to open our eyes, to give us ears to hear. And we pray it in Jesus' name, amen. The setting here of this story, Luke tells us just a little bit, but it's really kind of remarkable. Okay, if you've been tracking with us through the Gospel of Luke, you remember that back in Luke 951, we came to a turning point. And the turning point in Luke 951 is that up to this point, Jesus has been teaching. He's been preaching. He's been performing miracles. He's been healing the sick, casting out demons, all of those things. But in Luke 951, Luke says, he turned, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. This is a shift. And from this point on, Jesus is intentionally marching to the cross, thinking about the cross. It's in the back of his mind room. Maybe we should say it's in the forefront of his mind. It's the mission that he came here to accomplish. Luke 1910, the son of man, came to seek and save the lost. And at Luke 951, there's this shift. And Jesus says, or Luke says that Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. And then we read this interesting verse in Luke 14, verse 25. And Luke just simply says, great crowds accompanied him. He's marching through the countryside, town to town. He's got his small group of followers, but there are also great crowds following him. And at this point, marching to his death with a small army of people around him, Jesus just turns around and he just sort of lays the hammer down. And he looks at all of these people in this great crowd, this multitude, and he starts to talk to those who think they can casually follow Jesus, follow him. That they can be sort of one foot on this side of the fence, one foot on the other in their relationship with Jesus. And he just sort of cuts the group down the middle and says, look, this is what I demand. If you're not interested in that, you can't be my disciple. Not we need to have a conference, not we need to talk about it, not let's look up the by-laws and see if we can find a loophole, you can't. It's this or nothing. Yes, there's a wideness to his grace. We've talked about that. He's welcoming sinners into his kingdom, but then he turns around here and he says, look, if you're going to come, if you're going to accept my invitation, it must be this way. I demand your allegiance. So we're going to talk this morning about what does it mean that Jesus demands our allegiance? Here's the first thing it means. It means your allegiance to Jesus must be supreme, supreme. Look at verse 26. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. If you don't hate the people closest to you, and even yourself, you can't be my disciple. Who talks like that? That's a strange thing to say. To look at a multitude of people following you and say, look around, folks, if you don't hate the people closest to you, I'm not interested in you following me at all. It's really strange when you think about some of the things the Bible says about the people closest to us. About the Fifth Commandment, honor your father and your mother, hate them, honor them. About the Seventh Commandment, do not commit adultery, be faithful to your spouse. Jesus says, here, hate your spouse. About things that Paul talks about in the New Testament, echoed from the Old Testament, respecting your parents, teaching your children, loving your children, bringing up the next generation. We care about the people closest to us, and that's a good thing and a right thing. And here Jesus looks at a crowd of people and he says, you need to hate each other if you're going to follow me. Luke 627 is even otter because in Luke 627, Jesus told us to love our enemies. So if you just jotting down notes and you're tracking along with Jesus, maybe you're scratching your head, okay, wait a minute, love my enemies, hate my spouse, parents, kids, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and then look in the mirror and hate myself. But love my enemy. Clearly Jesus is using hyperbole in this passage. In fact, he's using a common, Semitic idiom. You know what an idiom is? It's something in language that's sort of a funny little phrase and if you don't know what it really means, it makes you feel like an idiot. That's an idiom. And so there's all sorts of these. And we dealt with some of them this week as you're translating from English to Spanish or back and forth. And sometimes you say something and they look at you and think, what did you just say? So if I said to you in our culture, you understand if I say, man, my wife went to Midland the other day and she was shopping for a person. She bought a purse. It cost an arm and a leg. You say that in some cultures, they think, wow, she really wanted that purse. That's a pricey purse. You know it has nothing to do with amputation. You know she spent a lot of money on the purse. Students, some of you go to school tomorrow. Some of you started last week. Some of you might start in two weeks, but you're going to school. In not very long, you're going to have a test. And maybe you come out of that test and you say to your friend, man, that test was a piece of cake that doesn't necessarily mean it was a home at class. You mean that was easy. It's an idiom. And what Jesus is using here is a common Jewish, a Semitic idiom. You see it in secular literature from this period where people say, I hate this and I love this. And they really don't mean I have hatred in my heart and I despise my mother. What they mean is if it comes down to Jesus or mama, I'm going with Jesus. If it comes down to Jesus or my spouse, Jesus wins. If it comes down to my kids or Jesus, I'm giving priority to Jesus. And he's saying to all of these people, your allegiance to me must be supreme at the top of the pile. So I just let you off the hook. You can breathe a sigh of relief. You don't have to call your mom when you leave and say, mom, bad news. Love your mama. That's still in the Bible. But there's still a question, right? I'm not saying you have to go hate people. But there's still a question and it just gnaws at me. And the question is this, okay, Jesus says that I must prefer him to anyone else, that my relationship with him comes first, then everyone else. And the question is that gnaws on me and that makes me uncomfortable and Jesus wants it to be uncomfortable is how do you know which relationship is most important in your life? I mean, forget all the easy, cheesy, meaningless Sunday school answers. How do you really know? Because I'm going to be honest with you. I love my kids a lot and I love my wife and I like my mom pretty good. I even like my in-laws pretty good. And you look at all those relationships and you say, man, in your heart, you feel this connection, you feel this bond, you feel this affection and it doesn't almost matter what they do, you can't help but feel that. I love them. And then Jesus comes along and says, you have to love me more. And I step back and I say, okay, I understand what you're saying. But how do I know if I love Jesus more than I love these other people in my life? How do I know if I love Jesus more than myself? Because I'll be honest, I love myself. You know how I know that? When I get sick, there's only one thing I care about in the whole world, and it's not you. It's me. I don't want to be sick anymore. I love myself and you're the same way. How do you know? Here's a few questions maybe that can help you think through this. Does my commitment to family shape my relationship with Jesus or does my relationship with Jesus shape my commitment to my family? You're going to go one or two ways. Either the connection with the people closest to you will have influence and control over your relationship with Jesus and His church or your relationship with Jesus and His church will have influence over the relationships of the people that are closest to you in your life. One of those two things will be true. And so you could ask some follow up questions like this. What matters more? Would I rather maintain a not awkward relationship with said family member and keep my mouth shut about Jesus? Or would I rather make it awkward and uncomfortable and maybe burn a bridge to tell them about Jesus? Which one is more important? Which one controls? Maybe you could say around certain people in my family, am I less of a witness for Christ in word or deed because I don't want them to think I'm some sort of religious wacko fanatic crazy person or do I act like a religious wacko fanatic crazy person whether I'm with them or not with them? Which is more important? Which one takes precedence in your life? I understand when I'm asking you these questions, I'm asking them to myself and I'm sort of cringing as I look in the mirror. Maybe this question would help. Are you trying to follow Jesus? We're talking about mother, children, friends, yourself, father, wife, husband. Are you trying to follow Jesus without severing relationships that you know will not help you follow Jesus? Now we're maybe moving out into the friend category where you say look I know there's certain people in my life and they are a terrible influence on me. They make me grouchy or they make me think certain things the way they talk or the way they act or they drag me down and I start to act like them. Which one is more important? Your relationship with Jesus or your relationship with that friend? Are you willing to cut relationships so that you can strengthen your relationship with Jesus? Your relationship with Jesus has to govern every other relationship in your life. And as if that doesn't hit you in the gut hard enough, that's only relationships we haven't even talked about possessions. Look at verse 33, "Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple." Again, it sounds pretty drastic. When you read it in context, you understand that almost everything Jesus is saying here involves hyperbole and exaggeration to make his point. So he's not saying go home from a manual today and call the OA and let him know you're having an estate sale next Saturday. You don't need to do that. But you maybe need to ask yourself a couple of questions and these are tricky questions. Here's one question. Do you control and leverage your possessions for the kingdom or do your possessions control you and your commitment to the kingdom? Who has control? Does your stuff control you and your time and your ability to serve in the kingdom? Or are you controlling those things? Seeing them as blessings, you don't have to sell them all. You can keep them. That's fine. But are you in control of them? And do you leverage them and use them, your possessions, your money, your wealth, your influence for the sake of the kingdom? Another question as you think about verse 33, "Where do you find comfort and security in your material wealth or in your relationship with the king?" I can just be honest with you, as Americans, it's in our material wealth. That's where we find comfort and security, in our insurance policy, in our paycheck, in our savings account, in our nest egg, in our job, et cetera, et cetera. That's where we find comfort and security. And Jesus is saying, "It's not going to cut it." I demand total allegiance, supreme allegiance. That means you need to be more committed to me finding comfort and security and hope in me than stuff. Jesus demands our allegiance. Number two, that means death. Your allegiance to Jesus requires death. Verse 27, "Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." For the people listening to Jesus, when he starts talking about a cross, they know exactly what he's talking about. He's talking about execution. We see the cross. We put it on a chain. We wear it on our T-shirts. You put it on your wall. It's a symbol of hope. It's encouraging. It's nice. Maybe you just think it looks cool, whatever. When they started talking about a cross, and the cross popped into their brain, they thought death, electric chair, lethal injection, firing squad, hangman's noose. You picked the method, but they immediately think death. And they understand Jesus said, "If I'm going to follow him, I have to carry a cross. If I'm going to carry a cross, that means I'm going to die." Jesus says, "If you want to follow me, you've got to die." You understand that's one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons we baptize people by immersion. Sometimes I talk with folks about baptism, and I just say to them when we're talking through baptism, "What would happen if we dunked you under the water and then I just sort of held you there for a while, and then I just sort of held you down like this for a while, and then I just sort of leaned on you down there for a while, you die." That's the point. That's part of the picture, Romans 6. The old you is dead under the water where you can't live, and the new you is alive. That's part of the picture of baptism. That's what we saw this morning, is people saying, "The old me is dead, and the new me is alive." So again, he's using hyperbole, he's not talking about suicide, but he's saying, "If you're going to be supremely devoted committed to me, I want all of your allegiance. You live for me, not for you. You take all your dreams and hopes and wishes and all of that, you don't have to throw it out the window, but you've got to hold it with an open hand." There's none of this with your dreams and your plans and your aspirations and all of that. And you're saying to Jesus, "I'm dead, the old me is dead, it's not about me anymore, it's about you living in me and through me for your glory, whatever you say." Number three, your allegiance to Jesus must be lasting, must be lasting. Jesus tells a couple of stories here. One is about a guy who's going to build a tower on his property. And one is about a guy who's going to take his army to war. And the point of both stories is pretty simple. Before you do that, you need to count the cost, you need to think about it. Those are not things that you just rush into. You think about it. Count the cost before a decision like that. Can we admit that this is not how we do evangelism today as churches or as individuals? We share the gospel with people today and it's like we're selling them something. We're trying to talk them into something. Yeah, but don't you want to go to heaven? Well, of course they want to go to heaven, nobody wants to go to hell. So we sell them that. Well, don't you want to have an abundant life? Don't you want to know that God is on your side? Don't you want to have all of these fringe benefits? And it's a sell job. And we're trying to just twist people's arm into dragging them in. How does Jesus do it? He sees a huge crowd of people and he says, "You need to think about this." We see a huge crowd of people and we say, "Okay, every head bowed, every eye closed, no one looking around. I'm going to make this as easy as possible. No one's going to know what you're about to do. I just want you to slip your hand up. Okay? Got it? Put it down quick. I don't want your neighbor to see you. It's not the time to scratch your ear. Somebody's going to think you're making. Be careful, no one's looking, right, because you want it to be a secret, I want you to be embarrassed, I want it to be awkward." And Jesus just does it completely different. It's just not His style. Jesus is trying to say to people that your decision to follow Him is the most serious and significant decision of your life. And it shouldn't be something that you just try to sneak in quietly, easily, to get all the fringe benefits and then you move on with life. But He tells these stories and He says, "Look, it's like a guy building a tower." For us, maybe you say, "It's like a guy building a house." Some of you maybe have built homes, right? You've come up with the plans and you've had to pick the knobs and the cabinets and the tile. There's a lot of decisions, right? When you build something, you don't just sort of say, "I think I'm going to build a house." And then it's done. You really have to think about it. Do we have enough money? When are we going to get the loan? Do we need a loan? Do we have the land? Who's going to build it? Do we trust them to build it? Are they going to use other people to build it? What are they going to build it with? I mean, there's a lot to think about. Jesus says, "Your decision to follow me is way more significant than any building you're going to build." It's even more significant than you leading an army into war. Most of us can't even fathom that responsibility, but just try for a second to think. You've got 10,000 guys with you and here come 20,000 guys to fight and you've got to sit down and say, "Can we take them or not? Should we run away? Should we try to make a peace deal? Should we pick up our sword and go try to chop off as many heads as we can?" That's a hard decision. When you're the commander and those 10,000 lives are in your charge and you've got to decide, "Do we fight? Do we run? Do we ask for mercy? What do we do?" That's a big decision and Jesus says, "You deciding to follow me is way bigger than that. Don't make it lightly. Don't think it's something that you can just sort of secretly back into." Jesus says you need to count the cost and what he's saying is, "If you start, you need to finish." We can talk all day long until we're blue in the face about this Baptist idea of once saved, always saved and I will go to the grave fighting for it. But listen, that never gives you license to make a decision and then do whatever you want to do with the rest of your life. And if you do that, you never were saved in the first place. Period into story. Jesus says, "If you start, you finish. If you don't finish, you never really started. I'm not looking for quitters, I'm not people, I'm not looking for people who get spiritually excited and pumped up at a camp or a treat or a Sunday morning service and then the rest of the week they live like hell. I don't want anything to do with that. Your decision needs to be lasting. It's significant. It's weighty. Jesus says, "Count the cost." Number four, let's just sort of sums it up. Anything less than true allegiance is worthless, worthless. Look at verse 34 and 35, kind of strange verses. It talks about salt that has lost its taste and how you can restore saltiness and the worthlessness, the lack of value in unsalted salt. I'm not a chemist. Brooke and I took chemistry together in college and we had a really bad professor and we made it through the class, but I'm no chemistry expert. But I've done enough reading this week, last week, to know, "This is profound, are you ready for this?" Salt is salt, tracking with me, and it stays salt. Salt is salt, it doesn't become anything else. It's not like alchemy where you take iron and it becomes gold, you take salt and it becomes pepper. It doesn't work like that. Salt is salt. That's why we use it as a preservative because it stays the same. It preserves things. It doesn't change. It doesn't become something else. It is salt. And here Jesus talks about unsalted salt, literally what the Greek says is, "Foolish salt." I don't think that's a brand you buy at the store. I think Jesus is talking about something different. He's talking to people who live close to the Dead Sea. Here's a picture of the Dead Sea. You can Google this, look it up, Google Earth, Wikipedia, whatever. They're all perfectly reliable. Here's the Dead Sea. And the smart chemist that I read in commentaries are online to look this up, say, in the Dead Sea there is a lot of salt. But there's also a lot of gypsum and there's a lot of carnalite. And it's sort of all mixed together and it looks kind of something like that. And so they like the salt. People can use the salt. But sometimes when you go harvest the salt, you get a bunch of that other stuff in it. And apparently what could happen in this part of the world when you take this sort of impure salt or mixed salt is that the sodium chloride over time can leach out. The salt can like leach out dissolve go away. And you're left with the other stuff. And it's not useful for anything. It's just stuff. And Jesus says some people need to understand that I don't need any of that stuff. I want salt. And if I call you to be salt, I want you to stay salt. I don't want you to become this other worthless stuff. You can't use it in the manure pile. You can't use it in your field. It's good for nothing. He's not interested in that. And so he's saying anything less than true allegiance is worthless. He wants the real deal, a real commitment. Okay? So I read all that passage. Jesus has some really hard things. And one of the first people that came to my mind when I read this passage and started studying is a guy named Bob Beelen. Bob was a member of my church in Kentucky. And he was not a member when we got there. He joined later. And he was 10, 15 years older than me. He was a former pastor. I had pastored several churches. And before he was a pastor, he was in the military. And he was not a believer during his military days. And Bob would talk to you and he would freely admit, you know, when I was not following Jesus, when I was not a Christian, before I was a pastor, before all that, I was not a nice guy. I was just a scoundrel. And I did all the things that unbelievers want to do. I just did them. And there was no restraint in my life, and I was a total jerk. He's in the military, and he comes across a New Testament from the Gideon's. A little New Testament. He carries it around for a while, has it in his bag, and one day he finally decides to read it. So he cracks it open. He just starts in Matthew. Goes all the way to the end and reads a New Testament. And he says, "I got to the end and I was kind of confused." So I started over, and I look at the Gospels again. I start reading through the Gospels. Who is this Jesus guy? No church background. Nothing. He's just reading through the Gospels. He says, "I read through the Gospels a couple of times," and he says, "I'm really ticked off, because I'm reading about this guy, Jesus, and I'm convinced he's the most arrogant man who's ever walked on the earth." And he's talking about passages like Luke 14. And Bob, who really doesn't know anything at the time, is reading these stories, reading these passages, reading the words of Jesus, and he says, "Who are you to tell me things like that? Are you serious? Do you think you have the authority to say something like that to me, that I need to hate my family in comparison to how much I love you, that I need to be willing to give up anything that keeps me from following you? I need to just liquidate that stuff, that you want total commitment? Yeah, you did some nice things. You healed some folks. You said some encouraging stuff every now and then, but Bob just said, "This stuff really ticked me off," but he kept reading. And eventually, he gets to passages like Luke 19, 10. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. And he realized Jesus wasn't just some egomaniac who showed up and started bark and orders at folks. He was God who humbled himself and became man to save us from ourselves, to save us from our sin, to save us from death. He gave up everything to bring us into his kingdom. He said he started studying and understanding passages like 1 Corinthians 6, 19 to 20. You're not your own, you were bought with a price. Son of Man came to seek me and to save me. He died for me. He bought me. That means I'm his. He paid for me and belonged to myself anymore. And he said eventually, as he's reading through the New Testament, and he's offended by these claims of Jesus, the light bulb starts to go on slowly about who Jesus is and what he's done for him. And he says once I understood the cross in grace in Luke 19, 10 and 1 Corinthians 6, once I understood what God had done to bring me into his kingdom. The other stuff isn't arrogant, it's just sort of like, of course, I'm not my own. You bought me with your blood. You came to seek me and to save me. The king of heaven himself came to seek me and to save me. Whatever you say, wherever you lead, I'll go. And so we sum it up in conclusion with this, following Jesus is not easy. He makes some serious demands, but it is worth every so-called, quote unquote, sacrifice. Jesus never intended to make it easy. We try to do that for him. Close your eyes, slip your hand up, put it down, do this, do that. Jesus never let people off the hook that easy. It's not supposed to be easy in the beginning or the middle or the end. But what we understand when we look at passages like this and we balance them with Luke 19, 10, 1 Corinthians 6, Romans 5, 8, when we look at all those passages, we say it's worth every so-called sacrifice that we make. And we put that in quotes because we realize it's really not a sacrifice. I mean, let's be honest. It's not like Jesus is asking you to give up something valuable so you can find a place in His shabby estate. It's not like He's asking you to give up some great treasure that you have here on this earth so that you can just sort of squeak by into some pauper's kingdom. He's saying, look, you need to have an accurate view of things. And there's some things in your life that are of little value. There's some things in your life that are of no value. There's some things in your life that are valuable. But when you compare them to me and what I'm offering you in my kingdom, there is no comparison. He is not asking you to make any sort of sacrifice. He's asking you to give up things of small value or of no value to inherit something of supreme value, a place in His kingdom and a relationship with the king. Let me pray for you, Father, we're grateful for the Bible. We're grateful for the words of Jesus. We believe that they're true. We know that they're convicting. We know that they're challenging to apply to our own life and to apply to our own hearts. And so again, as we have prayed this morning, we ask again that your spirit would convict us where we need to be convicted, that you would guide us and direct us where we need to go. Father, we sang earlier that Jesus is better than any victory, than any sorrow, than anything in this world. We sang earlier that we have decided to follow Him. Father, we need grace, we need help, we need strengthening, we need brothers and sisters to walk alongside us in this journey. Father, be honored in our lives and in the commitments that we make as we sing and as we pray. Father, help us not to be too rash, too quick with our words and our promises. Help us to count the cost and to think about what does it mean to give all of our allegiance and our devotion and our loyalty to Jesus Christ. Father, I pray for those who are here who today stood up and were baptized and I pray that they would finish. Whether they have many years left or not many years left or somewhere in the middle, I pray that they would finish strong following Jesus. And Father, I pray for those who are here who are not followers of Jesus, that have not been brought into your kingdom and I pray that you would bring them in, that you would open their eyes to the truth that Jesus came to seek them and to save them and that they would see clearly what Jesus demands of them. Father, be honored as we sing praises to you, as we sing about who you are in your beauty, in your glory, in your power, in your grace, in your wisdom. Father, we love you and it is a privilege to come before your throne this morning. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.