Well, our translation says unless we love Jesus more (14:26). You may remember that Jesus says hate: unless you hate your parents, spouse, children, and life itself, you can’t be a follower of Jesus. So, I guess none of us are followers of Jesus. But we know that’s not true. We aren’t remarkably good followers of Jesus, but our hearts do yearn for Christ. We remember the beauty and joy of being touched by the Holy Spirit. We are awed by the thought of God the Father: His perfect excellence, supremacy, majesty, power, wisdom, and love. We don’t forget God’s love. All life depends upon God’s love. Even those who don’t love God depend upon His love, though they would hate to admit it, would hate even to entertain the possibility.

Our translation isn’t quite accurate, so far as the words of Jesus, but it is accurate about the meaning of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not telling us to hate our family, our friends, our own children. Jesus is not calling us to hate our life, but he is calling us to hate, to turn away from, anything that would keep us away from Jesus, anything that would try to usurp first place in our hearts. If we’re going to be very candid with ourselves, Jesus knows what he’s talking about. We read the Old Testament and there we read a tragic account of a chosen people who repeatedly, habitually, willfully chose to honor God outwardly while loving other gods, idols: success, wealth, pleasure, ambition, power, worry—the list is long, a veritable pantheon of folly.

Jesus is telling us that if we want to be his disciple—there it is, want—we must love Jesus first of all and best of all, with anything else a very distant and pale second. Well, here’s a test, one of those terrible tests that God sets before us, usually at just the worst time. O disciple, do you love father and mother more than me? And we say, quickly, automatically, No! Search your heart, now. Well, father, no, but mother? Dear, patient, long-suffering mother? Or, for some of us, mother, no, of course not! But father? Do I love God more than my devoted, beloved father? O disciple, do you love your spouse more than me? We say, without hesitation, because we know this is how we’re supposed to answer, No! Search your heart, now. Children? What about your children?

O Lord, don’t ask such questions! God isn’t demanding that we choose one over the other. We can love God and still love our parents, spouse, and children. God wants us to love them, too! The question is not one or the other, but who, most?

Or what, most? Many of us seem to enjoy comfortable lives. We have nice things, lots of nice things. Nice things are nice. I love nice things. I mentioned last Sunday that the average per capita income in Madagascar is $260. That kind of staggers the American imagination. Who could live on $260 a year? That just wouldn’t work, here. I suppose, though, that in a place like Madagascar, people can live, even with some decency and hope, on $260. I don’t know how. I can’t imagine how. I’m pretty sure it’s done without many of the things we take for granted: a TV or four, a car or three, a home twice the size of what some of us grew up in, and with half the people living there. Our closets are stuffed with clothes. Our garages are stuffed with tools and toys—projects, I mean. We make a lot; we buy a lot.

I’m not saying we should be ashamed of ourselves—I don’t for a moment doubt that just about everyone in Madagascar would be more than happy to trade places with us. Many people from south of the border want to get in on American abundance, too. Of course they do. What I am saying is that, as in the days of ancient Israel and Judah, material comfort, abundance, and prosperity—these blessings of God—seem, somehow, to become ways by which we begin to lose sight of God. Our hearts drift—oh, we love God and all, and we don’t think about Him, much. We don’t live for God daily, hourly—one hour of one day is sufficient. If we’re going to spend time in company with someone, we’d vastly prefer the company of our friends, our family, or just be in our special getaway place, communing with nature. And where is God in all this? Oh, He’s around. Jeez, pastor, lighten up!

Is this the way of discipleship that Jesus shows? Where does God rank? We love this hymn “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” We’ll be singing it in about a month. Everyone loves something, someone. Even those who have no love for God love (Lk 6:32). I don’t think love as love is or even ought to be our defining characteristic. I’d like to sing they’ll know we are Christians by our faith, by our faith, yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our faith. This is the faith that is the love about which Jesus spoke so clearly. The student of the Law asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers, “‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live’” (Lk 10:26-28). Not neighbor and God, but neighbor for the sake of God.

Where does God rank? Do we do an important thing only after taking it to God? Do we give thanks to God for the simplest things: food, a drink of water? Our breath? We’d be doing a lot of thanking, if we lived that way! We would, wouldn’t we? I wonder, if we asked our coworkers, our friends, even our family, if we asked them out of the blue what they would say is our first and best love, how many would say our first and best love is God? They would say our parents, our children, or our spouse, a cause for some of us, or a hobby, or, maybe for a few of us, regrettably, they would have the candor to tell us that we ourselves were our first, best, and maybe only love.

The hope and the blessing, the grace and the peace here is that, despite our inherent inability to attain excellence in faith, God has mercy, because God is love. Love builds, and love grows, love is patient—thanks be to God! Love is not deceived but very clear-eyed. Love is truthful and doesn’t make false excuses, doesn’t lie to itself or others. Love has high standards: Jesus shows us this with brilliant clarity and devastating devotion!

God loves. God loves us. God loves you. Love builds. Love builds together. Love invites us to build together. God beckons us—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let us build.

My first church was in a small town in west-central Illinois. It’s not a prosperous town, though the surrounding farmland is some of the best, most fertile in the world. It doesn’t take long to see all there is to see in town. One of the sites to see, at that time, was a house. It looked as if it could have been, would have been, a nice house, a happy home, if it had been finished. There it sat on the overgrown lot, plywood weathered gray like stone, where the plywood was up, Tyvek shreds lifting and falling when the wind would whisper through the empty frames of doors and windows. I didn’t know the history of that house, why such a good start, such a hopeful start, had been made, only to come to nothing: a hiding place for rats and raccoons. It was especially depressing to drive past when it was raining, or during the long, cold, snowy winters. Unfinished. Abandoned. Better never to have begun, than to begin only to leave the work abandoned, decaying, falling slow into ruin.

Devon, the boys, and I visited Petoskey, Michigan, a few years back. It’s on a little bay on the northwestern corner of the Lower Peninsula. Just off the downtown area was a huge pit, fenced off, about half a block around. Apparently, a building was going to be going up there. This was the pit for the foundation, and maybe for a parking area. It was going to be an apartment building, or an office building, several stories tall: new, stylish, desirable, for leasing, call . . . But nothing was happening. No workers, no equipment, no Coming Soon signs. Just a deep pit surrounded by a grass-clogged fence. Somebody dug themselves an expensive hole. Big plans, big hopes, big investment, and this was all there was to show for it.

Jesus says some kind of shocking, stern things. Hate parents, spouse, children, your own life, if you want to follow me. Wow. Well, he didn’t really mean that, as I said, but he kind of does. “None of you can be my disciple unless he gives up everything he has” (14:33). Well, who can, then? As in nobody, or a few fringe freaks. When hardship comes, when challenge comes, as it does and must, what do you reach for? Friends? Spouse? Parents? Food? Sugar? The bottle? Money? Your nice things? Your courage and determination? What do you cling to for security? Jesus says things that sound hard to us because they are true: serious words about the most serious things. The most serious thing is our relationship with God.

God has invited us, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, to work with Him on His project of love: our lives. Jesus tells us, before we thoughtlessly say Yes, because of course we’re supposed to say Yes to God, how could we say No?! Before we say Yes, though, Jesus asks us carefully to consider the cost. Can we do it? No, of course not! That’s why God sends us Jesus and through him gives us the Holy Spirit. In him and in him only we can. Do we want to? It’s only by the Holy Spirit that we can say Yes, and mean it, too. There are those who will say No. They don’t want God. They don’t need God, which is another way of saying they have all the gods they want. They already are living for their god, already devoting themselves to it: youth, beauty, possessions, getting, having, the desires of the flesh, family, family drama, and so on, so many idols.

Many people, in the days of Jesus, said they wanted to be his followers. He never told anyone No. He told them there was a cost to following, a cost to wanting to follow him, and that following him was an either/or matter: we either did or we didn’t, there was no kind of following. Beloved, Jesus was on his way up to Jerusalem, where he knew what was awaiting him. It was only more of what he had already encountered, already experienced, in this life: rejection, scorn, condemnation, misunderstanding. Many gathered around Jesus because he put on such a good show: cripples walking, blind people seeing, the possessed cleansed, the dead raised to life! Victory, power! Glory, hallelujah! What’s next? Jerusalem. We like victory; we love winners. We want nothing to do with losers. We like power, especially when we have it, or when those who get to have it promise to use it to give us what we want. Promises, promises.

Jesus was going up to a hill outside Jerusalem, to die there—be killed there—rejected, brutally scorned, mocked, nearly naked, awash in his own blood. All his followers had abandoned him. His own closest twelve—this wasn’t what they had signed on for! Pain, abuse, persecution, sorrow, defeat? That’s for losers! Maybe Mary, there at the cross, had some idea of what was happening. Maybe John, there at the cross, was just beginning to see what it was all about.

There is victory, there is power, in Jesus. Faith knows it, and knows that the victory comes through suffering, the power through sorrow. Who wants that? Nobody! Yet suffering comes. Sorrow comes. Reversal, hardship, adversity. Grace is the realization that none of our idols can help. Only Jesus can, who tells us we cannot be his disciples if we’re going to cling to anything other than him. He’s right! He isn’t being harsh; he’s calling us to be honest with ourselves. Big commitment requires careful thought—what has your life been about, so far, really? Beloved of God, the Spirit will make it known to you, if you want to know. What do you want your life to be about, really? The Spirit will make Jesus known to you, if you want him, most.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.