Love People More Than Standards

Summary

Discover the power of open hands and radical hospitality in your spiritual journey. Learn how embracing these principles can transform your faith community and personal growth. This video explores key teachings from Luke 14 on counting the cost of discipleship.

Transcript

It is good to be gathered together. My name is Jonathan. I get to be a pastor here at Journey. And it truly is a privilege to be able to gather together with you all today. Whether you recognize it or not, we believe a couple of things. Number one, we believe that God calls us as the church to gather. So as Jeremy said earlier, there are none of us who are here by accident.

But we believe that responding to that call is a great gift that each of you chose to give to this community by being here today. So it's something we like to acknowledge, and something that we want to make sure you know, that we do not take your presence here for granted. So whether you are here with us in person, or if you are gathered with us online now or in some future moment, we are grateful for the ways in which you contribute to this community. One thing that I want to begin by saying is around here we talk about the next step. We talk about discipleship as identifying and then taking the next step. Identifying through prayer and leadership of the Holy Spirit to lead us to the next right thing for us to do. And I wonder how many of us, as we are gathered here today, how many of us might have come here today expecting that at some moment the Holy Spirit is going to illuminate in us, identify in us a next step for us to take, and then prayer for the courage, the skills, the abilities, the discipline to take that.

See a lot of times I think we kind of go through life without really taking time to identify what are our expectations. We usually don't even think about it. So I think it would be a great thing for this church to be full of people who have the expectation that when you show up here on a Sunday morning, through the encouragement of this community and by the leadership of the Holy Spirit, that you would be able to identify what is the next step, and then we would all take those steps together. So with that in mind, I want to pray for us as we turn to the scriptures. God, we pray that you would fill us with your joy, with your Holy Spirit, that we may know your ways and trust in you above everything else. We ask these things today, Jesus, in your name and for your sake. Amen. Over the past several weeks, we have used an analogy to guide our conversations.

Many people walk through life with clenched fists. They are holding to, grasping tightly onto whatever it is that they have or whatever it is that they are pursuing. This posture, as we understand it, is rooted in the patterns of brokenness. This posture is rooted in the opposite of how Jesus has instructed us to live. This posture, when we live life this way, and don't be mistaken, there are many people who are gathering together in churches across this country, across the world, who are sitting in the pews today, and they are grasping perhaps tighter than anyone else to whatever it is that they are holding onto. But this posture creates in us animosity, creates in us fear, creates in us a scarcity mentality when it comes to how we interact with our neighbors. And in contrast to that, the kingdom of God, the posture of the kingdom of God is to live with open hands, ready to receive the good gifts, the blessings of God, but also to offer in return the blessing and good gifts of God.

And instead of being grounded in fear and animosity and scarcity, this posture of open hands is grounded in an abundance of the kingdom of God and is a blessing to us and to those around us. So we have been considering ways in which we might, as individuals and as a community, learn to live with our hands open. 1998. Where were you?

What were you doing? One of the highlights of 1998, if you can't remember back that far, was that there was a sci-fi thriller blockbuster hit called Armageddon starring Bruce Willis. And Ben Affleck has one of the Aerosmith songs as the soundtrack. If you have never seen that movie, you've not lived. I don't know what's going on in your life, but you need to make time to stop maybe today, this afternoon, and watch the movie Armageddon. It was at its time really a one of a kind film. It had a lot of different theatrical effects that today might seem cheesy, but at that point was sort of groundbreaking as it came out.

And I'm not ashamed to admit it. I have admitted this in certain environments and people make fun of me, but it is one of my favorite movies. I have a lot of fond memories about that movie. I haven't watched it in a long time, so I don't know if it holds up, but it is a good movie for me. The premise of this movie is that there is an asteroid headed towards Earth. The asteroid is the size of Texas, and if it hits Earth, no matter where it hits, it is going to destroy civilization. It is going to be the end of humanity.

And so NASA develops this plan that they have identified this crew of roughneck oil drillers. who are going to fly into space, land on the asteroid, drill a hole in the asteroid, drop a nuclear bomb, and then flee and obliterate the asteroid into pieces, avoiding catastrophe. And they have recruited Bruce Willis, who is the boss of all of these other drillers, and they have tasked him with the getting all of them on board to go to space with him. And there's this moment where they're all sitting around the table, and Bruce Willis says to everyone, the U.S. government has asked us to save the world.

What are we going to say? Are we going to say no? Spoiler alert, they do not say no. They say yes, and Bruce Willis becomes the savior of humanity. Ben Affleck gets the girl, and it's just an all-around great movie. But as they go around the table, they are counting the cost as to whether or not accepting this mission is something that they are going to do. It is a wise thing for us, before we journey down some path, before we enter into some way, before we make a decision, it is wise for us to count the cost.

And the passage that we are going to read in a few moments from Jesus's teaching is one where he encourages us to count the cost. So a recap of where we have been. We've been moving kind of slowly through Luke chapters 12, 13, and 14. Some themes that have developed from that. First of all, we began talking about everybody's favorite subject, the judgment of God. And we've talked about how judgment comes to the people of God first, which is a little different maybe for some of us. Oftentimes the people of God use God's judgment to judge the people who aren't of God, but the people of God, judgment actually comes to them first.

And the judgment is not about condemnation or punishment. The judgment is an invitation to repentance. Repentance is identifying when things are wrong in us and turning from that and living in the power of the Holy Spirit to be free from whatever it is that we are repenting of. So then we talked about how repentance is the gateway to the kingdom of heaven in our lives. Repentance is the way in which we maintain our connection to God's grace, how we maintain our connection to God's love and the work of the Holy Spirit in our life. Repentance is the beginning point of that. Repentance is not a one-time thing that you do at some point in your life.

It is a daily pursuit. It is a posture of life and it is a gateway to the kingdom of heaven. And the only proper response as the Holy Spirit works in our lives, as Jeremy talked about last week, as we read about in Philemon today about the warming of hearts, the only proper response when God is active and working in our lives is a radical hospitality where people who are strangers become familiar, where we live with open palms, offering whatever God has blessed us with, given us for the sake of our neighbors. It's interesting when we're having this conversation that if you were to gather a lot of spiritual leaders from today and ask them, what is the key to the spiritual life? How do how does a person grow spiritually? I think, I didn't do this, but I think that we would probably get mainly three answers. They would say to pray, they would say read scripture, and they would say go to church.

Those are kind of three of the mainstays that help us grow in our relationship to God and grow in our relationship with one another. And those are great things, right? As we have gathered here today, we have participated in all three of those things at one point or another. But if you were to ask the ancient spiritual fathers and mothers, or if you were to ask people who have consecrated their whole life to following Jesus, many times they have a bit of a different perspective. Now prayer, scripture, getting together in worship are certainly important, but they tend to add a fourth one that many of us overlook today, and that is the discipline of hospitality. And what we learn in studying the scriptures is that hospitality is a key to the community of faith unlocking the kingdom of heaven. Repentance is the gateway to the kingdom of heaven.

Hospitality is how a community of faith unlocks the kingdom of heaven. Now, can we get a little honest for a moment? Hospitality can be very hard, right? It can be difficult. Especially today, people can be divided over which fast food restaurant has the best french fries, right? So when you get into serious issues, divisions can be very, very deep. And oftentimes people, and this is not just us here today, but people all throughout history, we can allow these things that our differences create in us.

As we talked earlier, we can hold on tightly to our identities, to our values, and think that anybody who doesn't agree with us, or live like us, or look like us, we can separate ourselves from us, and we can decide that they do not belong at our table, right? It's not comfortable to talk about, but it's the truth that all of us struggle through. Several times in scripture, Jesus was interacting with people who wanted to hold on tightly to their identities and values, and wanted everyone else to become like them before they could enjoy life in the kingdom of heaven. And every time, Jesus called that circle drawing, that holding on tightly into question, and condemned it. I had a professor in college who was talking about the kind of trade in the Christian church of predicting the end times, right? You read through Revelation, some of the Old Testaments, and you've identified some kind of pattern, and then there's a spokesperson that rises up, and they say, on this date, such and such is going to happen, and the world is going to end. When I was in college, it was right around the time of Y2K, when the turn of the millennium, and everybody thought that that was going to be the end of the world, and then 9-11 happened, and then that was going to be the end of the world.

My professor said something, he said, if you are going to go into the business of predicting the end of the world, just realize it has a 0% success rate. That has never happened. No one has ever been able to successfully predict the end of the world. If Jesus, every time somebody tried to draw a circle and keep people out of the table, or out of the kingdom of God, if Jesus condemned that every time, then it would probably be wise for us to stop doing that. And it would be wise for us to trust Jesus over our inclinations to hold tightly, and to open up and allow the Spirit to do the work in us and through us, to whomever the Spirit decides to work with. As Christians, as a pastor, you are not, I am not, we are not the morality police. It is not our job to tell everybody what to do, think, say, act like, look like.

That is not our job. Our job is simply to be a conduit of the Holy Spirit. And if we see someone who we believe needs Jesus, we've all seen those people before, right? That person, they need Jesus, right? We've all been there. Somebody's probably said the same thing about us at one point in our lives. If that is our understanding of somebody, then the thing that we should focus on the most, of course, is praying for them.

But the next move then is radical hospitality, where we bend over backwards to be conduits of grace, of the grace of God. But oftentimes, we find ourselves in places where people who are different than us offend us, right? They say something, they do something, they behave in a certain way, and it offends us. Dallas Willard, who's one of my favorite authors, he wrote this, I think a mature Christian is someone who is very difficult to offend. Now, I don't want to upset anybody or hurt anybody's feelings, but it is my experience that people within the church tend to be the ones who offend the easiest. And we have to understand this and know this, because if we do not, then we will find ourselves on the wrong side of the equation. In our culture, we are divided along religious, non-religious.

We are divided amongst partisan politics. We are divided about beliefs, likes, and dislikes. But what Jesus calls us to as his followers is not that any of these should separate us and create enemies, but instead that we should seek hospitality towards any and everyone who is in our path. Could you imagine how our world would change, how the church would change, how our country would change, if Christian people decided that at any cost, we were going to be hospitable to whomever was in front of us? That's what Jesus has called us to. Over and over and over again, Jesus challenged this circle drawing, this clenched fist way, and made it abundantly clear that grace is for everyone. There has not ever been a person that has ever existed at any point in time that grace was not for.

There was not ever a person at any point in time that God did not give himself for. And so with that understanding, it is our call as the church to set the table, to send out the invitations, and then to welcome whomever it is that responds, and not just begrudgingly say, the seat is open, you can sit there and ignore them and not talk to them, but welcome them with open arms. And here's the kicker, with grateful hearts. People, no matter who they are, if they are willing to give of their time for something, it is something that we should acknowledge with grateful hearts. And we do this, the reason why we do this is because Jesus is Lord, and we have made that proclamation in our lives, and when you make that proclamation, if you choose to keep it and live up to that, there is only one word in your vocabulary when it comes to Jesus' calling on your life, and that word is yes.

So if Jesus... calls us to do it, the only proper way for us to respond is with yes. And so we come to this teaching of Jesus where he calls us, before we proclaim Jesus is Lord, to count the cost. And here is what Jesus teaches. Luke 14, beginning in verse 25, here's what he says. Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said, this is probably going to be a bit shocking to us, if anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes even their own lives, such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me, cannot be my disciple.

Now, I want you to think about this in light of our conversation here today. It is very easy for us to get wrapped up in patterns where we allow offenses to divide us, to separate us from one another, the patterns of brokenness in the world around us run deep, they affect us, they influence us. Our feet walk on the ground of brokenness. The scriptures talk about the curse that is upon creation. The world is broken, and we live in it. And that brokenness, like everything else, gets on the bottom of your shoes. If it's a rainy day or a dusty day, it gets up on your pants, your legs, you know, you get in the dirt, it gets on your face.

It is all over us. And it is easy for us to get co-opted in the ways of brokenness, in the patterns of brokenness. And it is easy for us, when we are clinging tightly to these ways, to make them the main thing. And instead of seeking the Holy Spirit to work in us and lead us on a better way, we hold tightly and learn to love, and sometimes even make religious the broken ways. And Jesus is calling us here to have a strong reaction against that. He's saying, you have to hate it all if you are going to be my disciple. He continues, suppose one of you wants to build a tower.

Won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying this person began to build and wasn't able to finish. Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won't he first sit down and consider whether he is able, with 10,000 men, to oppose the one commanding, coming against him with 20,000? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a calf, and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those who do not come, who do not give up everything you have, cannot be my disciples. Now the key to understand what Jesus is saying here is in the parables that he uses to explain his teaching.

And he touches on two things that are corrosive elements in our lives and in the world around us. Whether you're talking about ancient Israel, or you're talking about us here today in this context. And those are being led by the powers of the pursuit of more and bigger and better, and then an expanding empire, right? He talks about a construction project in which they're going to build a great tower. Do you have enough money to complete the project? And he talks about a king who's ready to go to war, right? And what he's doing here is he's highlighting these two patterns as things that are appealing to us.

Things that move us from the kingdom of heaven and entrench us into the kingdoms of brokenness. And we learn these patterns more and bigger and better, and expanding empires. We learn these patterns, maybe not perhaps from our literal mothers and fathers, but we learn them from the culture around us. We learn them from the media around us. We learn them from living and existing in the world that we live in. And so when Jesus is calling us to hate father and mother, first of all, this idea of hate can be understood as love something else rather than, right? So not just all out like hate, but here's something to love rather than.

And he's calling us to these patterns that we have to learn to identify and resist and to love the way of Jesus over them. So with that in mind, if you were here last week or you caught up online, Jeremy read the parable of the great banquet. And in that parable, Jesus identifies a pattern of brokenness. He says, when you host a banquet, normally people will invite their friends that they are impressed with, their friends that they want to connect with, make connections with, their friends who they want whatever power they have to be an advantage for them. So they invite them to a fancy banquet. And also in return, those friends generally will invite you to the banquet that they hold. And it's this, as Jeremy said, quid pro quo, say that 10 times fast.

And it's this thing where you're scratching somebody's back with the hope that they will scratch your back. And that's a way that we are tempted to live through our lives. Jesus said, don't do that. No matter how much that might make sense to you, no matter what advantages that might give you, don't live that way. Instead, when you throw a banquet, go out and find people who haven't been invited to any banquet and invite them to come and sit at your table and eat with you. And Jesus commonly focuses on areas of status and greed and the pursuits of them and their corrosive element that they have in our lives. And if we live in this sort of blurred line way, if we are not clear as to what patterns are sourced and brokenness and what patterns are sourced in the kingdom of God, then we will be entrenched in brokenness.

So Jesus draws these clear lines from brokenness and the kingdom of God from greed and status seeking and judgment and bitterness and frustration with joy and peace and love and grace. And instead of chasing down these patterns of brokenness, Jesus invites us to live sourced by God's love and joy and active in hospitality. Know what forms you, know what shapes you. And instead of just loving what feels good, what makes the most sense, loving the kingdom of God rather than that. Now, for all of us, no matter if this is your first time at church or your thousandth time in church, it is important for us to know that there is always a next step for us. And if you're sitting there today, maybe your wheels are turning. And when you have these kinds of conversations, some of the objectives that pop up, the objections that pop up, people might be saying, so are you just saying there's no standards, right?

Just go and do whatever you want and say a prayer. I've told you this story before. When I was in high school, I was sowing some wild oats as many people do in their young age. And me and one of my friends were sitting on a couch eating Cool Ranch Doritos, playing James Bond on Nintendo. And we were talking about some of the unsavory things that we had done. And I grew up in church and I had decided that, you know, I was taught that if you did bad things and you died, you were going down south, right? And so in our in-depth theological conversation, he said to me, you know, if I died tonight, I am going to heaven.

And I said, no, you're not. You do bad things just like I do bad things. And he said, yeah, but I repent, right? And so we, some of us, we might have this idea. It's even an objection in scripture that you can just do whatever you want. And then as long as you say a fancy prayer, then you're good to go. And we might say, are there no standards?

Is that what you're saying? Well, according to the teachings of Jesus, there are very clear standards. The standards might not be always what the church emphasizes. The standards are against greed and selfishness and using what you have for your advantage and creating animosity towards you and your neighbor, sexual impurity, and all things like that. Jesus draws clear boundaries around those, but he also, at the same time, invites us to what, if we allow it to be, will be a very compelling narrative for us moving forward. He invites us to love people more than we love standards. And that is the invitation to the kingdom of heaven.

Learn to love people more than you love your standards. As we close, I wanna offer a warning to us, though. The table of Jesus is open to whomever will come and take a seat. But there is something that you cannot be when you sit at Jesus's table. When you sit at Jesus's table, the one thing that you can no longer be is the same. And that is good news for those of us who sit here often and those of us who have never taken a seat.

Would you pray with me? Jesus, it's easy in your teaching when you talk about receiving blessings and experiencing eternal life and peace that passes understanding. I think it's safe to say, though, for all of us, these last couple of weeks, there have been some moments that have been a little difficult. First of all, we thank you for that. We know that nothing easy is worthwhile. But also, Lord, we need your grace now more than ever. Lord, if there is anything in us that we are holding on too tightly to, I pray that you would identify that in us through your Holy Spirit.

If there's anything as a church that we are holding on too tightly to, identify that to us. And Lord, replace that with an unwavering trust in your kingdom, in your ways, for the glory and sake of your name. God, give us the strength to serve you faithfully.

We pray, amen.