LIFE: According to Jesus
08/14/2011 - Die Daily
On April 9, 2005, my father died. He was 84 years old. He had been in the hospital since February battling pneumonia and a whole list of other physical ailments. So when he passed away on that Saturday morning in the hospice unit of Abington Hospital I had mixed emotions.
There was the deep sense of sadness that comes with saying your final goodbye to a loved one. But there was also a soothing sense of relief knowing that dad was finally out of his suffering and in the presence of Jesus. April 9. I'll never forget that day.
Not too long after that I was reading about the life of man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during World War II. He was one of the few pastors who spoke out against the atrocities of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime.
And because he publicly criticized the Third Reich he was arrested and eventually executed in a Nazi concentration camp on April 9, 1945, sixty years to the day before my father died. He was just 39 years old.
In addition to being a pastor, Bonhoeffer was a prolific writer and one of his best known books was an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount called The Cost of Discipleship. Today it's considered a Christian classic that I can highly recommend.
In the book Bonhoeffer spells out what he believes it means to follow Christ and opens by saying, "When Christ calls a person to follow him, he bids them come and die."
How's that for an easy read? Tough stuff, I know. He goes on to contrast what he calls cheap grace with costly grace. It's one of the most quoted sections of the book.
In Bonhoeffer's words, "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.
"Cheap grace is to say, 'Of course I've sinned, but now everything is forgiven, so I can stay as I am and enjoy the consolations of forgiveness.
"In contrast to this is costly grace. Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man or a woman to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him. It is grace because Jesus says: My yoke is easy and my burden is light."
This morning we continue our series called LIFE: According to Jesus. And in Bonhoeffer's words this is a series on costly grace, not cheap grace, not taking what we can from Jesus when it's convenient for us and then going our own way. Jesus is not a vending machine or an ATM.
This is a series about following Jesus no matter what the cost, following Jesus when life gets tough, dying to ourselves, and taking up our cross every single day. This is a series that's serious about calling all of us to deeper levels of commitment. This is about becoming a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ who makes a difference in this world.
We started out by saying that Jesus came to give us life and real life for us begins when we yoke ourselves to Jesus. Life is a yoke. And then we said that life is process. It begins with being curious about Jesus and then convinced that Jesus is who he claimed to be, the Messiah, the son of the living God. And then we become committed to Jesus and begin to arrange our lives around his teachings and finally by God's grace we end up being continuers who abide in Jesus for a lifetime. We run the race all the way to the finish line with hopes of one day hearing Jesus say those words, "Well done, good and faithful servant."
And now we're looking at the seven marks of a disciple that enable us to do that. The first mark is an incomparable and unrivaled love for Jesus. Jesus is number one in our lives above and beyond anything and anyone else. He has our heart.
The second mark is a commitment to learn and follow the teachings of Jesus. That's why we value the Scriptures. That's why we read them and study them and teach them and discuss them and sing them and memorize them and most importantly, obey them. We want to be wise men and women who build our house on the rock so that when the storms come, and they will, our life remains rock solid.
The third mark, that Scott taught on last week, is a decision to renounce ourselves as the authority and focus of our lives. Like his good friend, Rob, who spent his whole weekend preparing a message for his church when he would rather have been playing board games with his friends. When I heard that, I thought I'd actually prefer preparing a message to playing board games all weekend. But that's just me! But for Rob that was a huge sacrifice and a good, practical example of what it means to "deny ourselves" and put Jesus first.
And now the fourth mark, the one we want to look at today, follows on the heels of that. It's a commitment to a life of submission and sacrifice to the cross.
Jesus puts it this way in Luke 9:23, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.
The fourth mark of a disciple has to do with the cross. Right in the middle of these seven characteristics stands the cross. The cross is the hinge on our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.
The cross is at the crux of our faith. In fact, the word "crux" is the Latin word for cross. Today we're going to be remembering the cross the way Jesus instructed us to through the bread and the cup at the Lord's Table. That's always a powerful time that we need to revisit again and again and again.
But what does it mean to take up our cross daily? What's that about? That's a great question. And I think the answer starts by first understanding what the cross meant in the world in which Jesus lived.
Everyone who was there when Jesus said these words knew what the cross meant. The cross was the electric chair or the lethal injection of that day. It was Rome's preferred method of capital punishment. It was the symbol of a torturous, shameful, submissive death for anyone who dared challenge the Empire.
Crosses were erected everywhere and anyone viewed as a threat was hung on one. The cross was Caesar's way of saying, "You cause trouble and this is what happens to you." And victims hung on crosses for days until their bodies would bloat and rot, and stink and decay, and be filled with maggots and become food for vultures and wild dogs. The Latin word "excruciating" literally means out of the cross. In fact, the cross was so inhumane that even the Romans finally outlawed it in 315 A.D.
Today, the most common symbol of the Christian faith is the cross. They come in all shapes and sizes. We tattoo them on our bodies and wear them as jewelry in our ears and around our necks and inscribe them on stained glass windows to decorate cathedrals. But that wasn't always the case. The first symbol of Christ followers was the fish because the cross was so despised.
Jesus said, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of people." So when a follower of Jesus met a stranger on the road, the Christian would take their walking stick and draw one arc of a simple fish in the dirt. And if the stranger drew the other arc both of them knew they were in good company.
So the cross was a symbol of shame and pain and submission. That's what it meant to all those who heard these words. No one ever wanted to end up on a cross.
But what did the cross represent for Jesus? The cross was the ultimate test of his obedience to his Father's will. It was the final exam for Jesus. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do. And he wrestled with it in the garden of Gethsemane when he prayed, "Father, if it be your will take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done." The cross represented Jesus' submission to the will of God.
And so I think Jesus is saying here, "If you really want to be my disciple then you have to submit yourself to the Father's will just like I'm submitting myself to the Father's will no matter what the cost. You need to pick up your cross every day and die to yourself just like I'm picking up my cross and dying to myself. And when you lose your life like that then you'll actually gain your life because then you'll discover what life's really about. It's about living for me and my kingdom."
He'll go on to say in Luke 9:24-25, For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. 25What good is it for you to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit your very self?
The fourth mark of a disciple is a commitment to a life of submission and sacrifice to the cross.
Following Jesus means giving up control of my life. It means losing my life in order to find it, throwing it away and submitting my will to God's will. And that can be excruciatingly painful at times especially when I don't understand why hard things come into my life. And we all know what that feels like. The illustrations are endless. So we cry like Jesus did from the cross, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?"
But relinquishing control of our lives to Jesus is not an instantaneous, once and done event. It's not something we check off a list and say, "Okay, that's done. What's next?" Instead, dying to self is a daily, repetitive, lifelong process. It's an agonizingly slow process, at least it is for me, like a crucifixion that demands turning more and more control of our lives over to God. That's taking up the cross daily and without it Jesus says, "You cannot be my disciple."
One of my professors at seminary liked to describe the cross in terms of a metal screen or a grid hanging in the doorway. And every day when we get up we have pass through the metal screen. It's not easy, but it's something we have to do if we want to be Jesus' disciple.
And the parts of us that aren't like Jesus need to get stuck to that screen, like dirt gets caught in a filter. And when we're young in our faith the mesh is big and the openings are pretty wide as God strains the big things out of our lives, the behaviors that aren't pleasing to him and that are obvious to everybody. But as we mature in Christ the mesh gets tighter and tighter and starts to strain out the smaller things in our lives, the unhealthy attitudes and thoughts that perhaps only we know. But all of it's an essential part of the process of dying to sin and to self and living for Jesus.
A few years ago Michael Smith wrote an article in Discipleship Journal about taking up the cross and hanging on to it. This is what he said.
"We tell the Lord at the beginning of the day that we want to do his will regardless of the cost. Yet we often find, by nightfall, that our cross, so earnestly accepted in the morning hours, has been dropped somewhere along the way. Why is our cross so difficult to hold on to while Christ persevered to the end? What did the cross of Christ have that ours lacks?
"The answer is nails. The nails are to Jesus' cross what our obedience is to Christ's call to discipleship. Have you noticed the nails that are offered to you each day? They are the momentary situations in which you have a choice to make: Deciding not to explode in anger when your child breaks something you told her not to touch. Helping someone when you are rushed for time and don't feel like helping. Being honest even it costs you time, money, position, or a potential client. Not insisting on having things done your own way even though you're convinced you are right. Sometimes the nails seem so small, yet the nails are so essential." The nails are what keep us stuck to the cross.
How true. We take up our cross daily when we accept the nails that represent the multiple decisions we make each day to submit our will to God's will. And when we do that we find the life of Jesus living itself through us because if we don't die to self, we'll just die and forfeit our lives when we could have made the most of them for Christ and his kingdom.
The apostle Paul put it this way in Galatians 2:20, I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
I love what A. W. Tozer said about Galatians 2:20, "There are three characteristics of those who are crucified with Christ. First, they have no plans of their own. You can't make many plans when you're hanging on a cross. Second, they are looking in just one direction and can't turn their head. And third, they're not coming down." That's costly grace.
But why submit our lives to Jesus? Why would we even want to? Why should we die daily for him? I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Because Jesus loves me and you more than anyone else and died once and for all in our place and for our sin on the cross. Nobody else has ever done that for you or will ever do that. Nobody loves you more than Jesus loves you. Nobody. He is worthy of our complete devotion and that's what this table represents that we'll observe in a moment, the death of Christ that he wants us to remember every time we come to it.
The apostle John said this about the cross in 1 John 4:9-10, This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood and embraced that love. He loved Jesus so much that he was willing to die for his faith in Christ. And he did. He was hung in Flossenburg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated by Allied Forces and only 23 days before the entire war ended. He was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service in that camp and turned to a fellow prisoner and said, "This is the end - for me the beginning of life."