Christ’s Full-time Followers [A]

Listen Online:

Transcript:

Mark chapter 8. I thought a lot this week about the passage in Mark chapter 8 we’re going to look at. We’re going to start out with reading it.

It says in Mark chapter 8 verse 34, And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, speaking of Jesus, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospels, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. Now, just to go ahead and sum up the message and what this is going to be about this morning, and we are going to take a second look at this passage tonight in the service.

But what we’re talking about this morning is business as usual, and whether or not that should be the standard operating procedure of the church. Whether or not business as usual is okay. Business as usual is okay.

It’s a good thing in some circumstances. I know when there’s been a tornado at home that happened all too frequently, you know, All we wanted was for everything to get back to normal, have the house put back together, have the streets open, have the businesses back open, and have business as usual. After the oil spills and the hurricanes, we hear things, we see commercials. I noticed this weekend that the Gulf states are doing tourism commercials that are sponsored by BP.

I wonder how they managed to work that deal out. But after the hurricanes and the oil spills, the Gulf Coast states are talking about we’re back open for business. Business as usual. Folks, a lot of times we in our world hear the phrase business as usual, and we think it’s a good thing, and in some circumstances it is.

But there are other circumstances where business as usual is not such a good thing. For instance, how many people do we know that are happy with the direction of our federal government? And folks, this is not a message on politics.

This is not a message on who you need to vote for later this month. I haven’t been here long enough that I’m sure yet of who to vote for at the end of this month, but I’m going to find out. But how many people are happy with the direction of the federal government?

I read somewhere recently that 19% of those surveyed were happy with Congress right now. 19%. And I imagine maybe they called people in the Washington, D.

C. phone book and maybe those 19% were actually members of Congress. Because as I talk to people, I don’t find anybody that’s happy with the direction we’re going.

And one of the reasons that I hear people say, I’m not happy about what Congress is doing. I’m not happy about what the president is doing. I’m not happy about this.

I’m not happy about that. It comes down to being business as usual because we elect these people, whichever end of the spectrum you happen to be on, we elect these people thinking they’re going to go in there and they’re going to make positive changes and it always seems to be business as usual. The same shenanigans that have been going on for 40 years. Wouldn’t you say that’s a fair assessment?

Both sides are just playing a game that they’ve been playing for 40 some odd years, if not longer. And it’s just business as usual. Business as usual is not always what we want. People get tired of business as usual and wonder why things aren’t going the right direction.

I’m not endorsing him, and it wouldn’t matter if I was, because y’all all live about 200 miles from his district, but people got so fed up with business as usual in Congress in Oklahoma’s 5th District two years ago that they had all these choices in an open seat. They had a former lieutenant governor, now governor, leaving the seat, and they had all these legislators and attorneys and media personalities. you know who they elected to Congress instead?

The director of the Baptist youth camp. They were tired of business as usual. Now, I’m not saying everything he’s done is good, but that was a sign there that we want something different. Business as usual is not always what we want, even if we think it is.

Folks, in the church, business as usual is not our business. Our business ought not to be just the routine trappings of dead religion, that we’re just going to come and do what we do because that’s what we’ve always done. its habit, its tradition, if we’re just praying, if we’re just worshiping, if we’re just coming to church because it’s a habit, there’s no point in it.

Christ called us to something more than just business as usual. He called us to something more. He called us in this passage and in so many others, he called us to make being disciples our full-time occupation, that we are to follow him as a full-time occupation. And yet too many times we as American Christians, let’s broaden the scope here a little that Western Christians, we make it our part-time preoccupation.

It’s just a hobby. And ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of business as usual in the churches. And I’m not just calling out Eastside.

Eastside is not the problem. I think we do slip into business as usual sometimes. We do slip into routine more than we should.

But this is not just an Eastside problem. This is almost every church in our country a problem. And some have problems beyond this, doctrinal problems and what have you.

Folks, business as usual is not what we were called to. We were not called to flirt with Christianity and keep it at arm’s length. We were not called to make it a hobby.

We were called that our following of Jesus Christ, our being disciples, is our full-time occupation. Now, I know you have a job outside of that, but whether you go to the construction site, whether you go to the accounting office, whatever you go to on Monday morning, that’s just what God has provided you with to earn a living. Your real job is to be a disciple when you’re there.

Your real job is to be a disciple when you go home. Your real job is to be a disciple when you go out to the grocery store, when you go out to the bank, when you go out to the ballpark. We need to get back to an understanding that our full-time job is being disciples of Christ. If it is not our full-time job, then we are not His disciples, at least not the way He intended us to be.

He says here in verse 34, if you want to understand this, I’m not just talking about, well, we need to come to church more, we need to pray more, we need to do more things. What I’m talking about is a shift in the way we view things, and not a shift to some new idea, but a shift back to what things were like with the disciples. If you look at what this passage says that we’re going to talk about in just the next few minutes, this morning we’re really just going to hit verse 34, and we’ll get the rest of the verses tonight.

But if you look at this passage, if you look at the early churches, you look at the apostles, the disciples, and the way they lived, it was a completely different world that they lived in. This idea that we can be part-time Christians is a very recent invention. Throughout most of history, since the time of Christ to this day, in most times and in most places, because of the circumstances around us, you had to be either all in or all out.

It would have been ridiculous to go back and forth. But we’ve come to a place where we have religious freedom, and thank God we have it. We have religious freedom.

We have prosperity. We live in a country that has some semblance of its basis in Christian ideals. And because of that, it’s very easy to be a Christian until it’s not.

And then it’s very easy to slip out of it and say, well, I’m taking a break from Jesus. I don’t know that we would put it in those exact words. Do we realize, I know we know it up here, but do we really get it that for Jesus, for his disciples, for people over the first few centuries, even up to this day in certain areas of the world, It cost something to follow Jesus Christ. I’m not telling you it cost something for your salvation.

It doesn’t cost you anything. It cost Jesus Christ his life. It cost him death on the cross.

For us, it’s a free gift by grace through faith, according to the book of Ephesians and several other passages. Our salvation doesn’t cost us anything. It’s a free gift that God provided at very high cost to himself.

But as far as being disciples, following Jesus Christ, it costs us something. And if it doesn’t cost us something, we’re not doing it correctly. Folks, at the very least, it ought to cost us our time.

It is a full-time occupation. As I tell you these things, I’m not saying, look at me, I’ve got it all figured out. I can tell you how to make it your full-time occupation like me.

I’m not talking about being a pastor or being a full-time missionary or something like that. I’m talking about in our Christian life, we are Christians 24-7. And I’m not saying I’m perfect at it, that I’ve got it all figured out.

I’m preaching to myself as much as to anybody else. When I say I’m tired of business as usual, I’m not saying I’m tired of you all with business as usual. I’m saying I am tired of business as usual here and here. Verse 34 again says, And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me.

And he’s talking to his disciples because they had literally put their nets down and they had come and gone with him in a physical sense. They had followed after him. They had come after him.

And there were people at the height of Jesus’ ministry that would follow him from town to town, seeing what he was going to do next, seeing what he was going to say next. But the implication here is that there’s something more beyond just physically following him from place to place. If any man will come after me, if anybody will be my disciple, will be my follower, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

There are three statements in there that we’re going to look at this morning and what that means for us as his disciples, as people who should strive to be his disciples. Three new things he gives us here. The first is that we’re given a new owner.

As disciples, we are given a new owner. Now, this passage says, let him deny himself. And we hear about self-denial. I’ve watched movies before where they have nuns in them, and they talk about self-denial, and they have to deny themselves this, they have to deny themselves that, have to deny themselves colorful wardrobes, for one.

Folks, self-denial, when he says deny yourself, he’s not just talking about self-denial. There are times I deny myself things, okay, that, for example, I may deny myself a piece of pie because I’m trying to, I’m hoping to do that half marathon next year, and before I can even start running, I’ve got to lose a little bit of weight by walking and eating better so that I can even run because right now I don’t know that I’d have the energy to run very far, to even start practicing. Not practicing, rehearsing. What is the word here?

Working out. Training. There you go.

You can tell I’m new at this. I’m going to start rehearsing for the half marathon. And so I may choose to not have another piece of pie.

I may choose not to go sit down in my big comfy green chair. I may choose to go walk instead. Self-denial means I’m not going to let myself have things at certain times because there’s something else I want more.

Folks, when it says deny himself, he’s not talking about self-denial and we make choices and say, well, I’m going to have this or not have this and I’m calling the shot here about what I’m going to have and not have. When I looked at Young’s literal translation, based off the same text as the King James, and so I love the translation for study, but it’s so literal that it wouldn’t lend itself to reading out loud and preaching from. You know, word order matches the Greek and it’s out of line some places.

but I love looking and seeing what it says sometimes. And the word it uses here and the word it uses in the Greek is disown. Now, that’s not to say the King James is wrong here, but the word deny meant something different 400 years ago than what we take it to mean today.

I think we can understand a little more fully today the word disown. Let him disown himself. What’s it mean to disown somebody?

Anybody? Okay. I’m sure you know, but you may just be tired or shy to tell me.

To disown somebody in our day means to write them out of the wheel. that they’re not getting any money when I die. At this date and time, to disown somebody meant that I am no longer your father.

You’re no longer my son. You’re no longer my child. And you’re no longer under my protection, and I no longer have any authority over you.

You’re not part of me anymore. And what he’s telling us here is to disown ourselves. If any man will come after me, let him disown himself.

Let him give up any authority he has over himself. Let him give up any say that he has. Folks, Christ’s disciples disown themselves because we realize that we belong to God.

We belong to God. We are, when we come after Him to be His disciples, we are His friends, but even more so, we are His slaves. We belong to Jesus Christ. He is the master, and we work for Him.

See, business as usual says, I call the shots in my life, and it matters what I want and what I prefer, and that’s how we are as Americans, isn’t it? It’s okay to agree with that. I love America too, but we’re a very spoiled country.

We’re a great country because of what we’ve been built on and what previous generations have handed us, but we’re a spoiled country, especially my generation. I’ll own up to that, especially my generation. We’re a spoiled country.

We want what we want, we want it how we want it, and we want it when we want it, which is now, if not yesterday. It all matters what we want because we call the shots in our own lives. That’s business as usual to say, I call the shots.

I rule the roost in my own life. It’s a very different thing to say I disown myself and I give up any authority I have in my own life. I give up the right.

It’s not just that I won’t call the shots. I give up the right to call the shots in my own life. We are called to disown ourselves.

It no longer matters what I want. It matters what Christ commands. It no matter, I keep saying it no matter.

It no matter. It no longer matters where I want to go. It matters where he sends me.

Is that an easy thing to do? No. If it was easy, we’d be doing it all along and he wouldn’t have had to point it out to him.

We’re called on to disown ourselves, take on a new owner. I don’t belong to myself anymore, and I give up the right to call the shots in my own life. That’s discipleship.

And there’s no, when you’ve got, I run things versus I give up the right to run things, there’s no way of putting those together. They’re complete opposites. And we can’t say, well, I’m going to run things a little bit, but let Christ rule me.

Folks, it doesn’t work that way. If we’re his disciples, we’re called to give up the right to rule ourselves. Secondly, we are expected not only to have a new owner, but a new commitment as well.

And that’s that Christ’s disciples are willing to endure with him through difficulties. He not only says, whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, but he says, and take up his cross. Folks, this phrase has also lost a lot of meaning in modern days.

I hear people say all the time, oh, so-and-so’s annoying you, well, we all have our cross to bear. Maybe you’ve said that. I’m not picking on you.

I’ve said it too. Well, we all have our cross to bear. Oh, well, you’re sick.

I’m sorry to hear that. We all have our cross to bear. How much more can we marginalize the cross that Jesus died on, shed his blood and died on for your sins and for mine than to equate it with somebody that annoys me next door, that they’re my cross to bear?

Now, they might be the thorn in your side, but they are not your cross to bear. The cross is not, The cross is so much more important and meaningful than what we’ve made it out to be today. I’m not against wearing it as jewelry.

If you want to express your commitment to Christ, I’m not against you having a cross around your neck. I’m not against you putting one up on the crucifix. He’s a little Catholic for me.

But if you want to put a cross on your wall as a reminder of what Christ did for you, that’s fine. It does bother me when it becomes a status symbol for Hollywood people that have no sense of what Christ did for them, and it’s just, as my wife would say, it’s just bling. It’s just jewelry.

Or people use it as a decoration because they think it’s pretty. Folks, take up your cross doesn’t mean that we deck ourselves out in the cross, wear it, draw it all over everything. It doesn’t mean that we put up with that person who irritates us, that we deal with our sickness.

Folks, the cross is so much more meaningful than that. The cross is literally the thing that Jesus Christ died on. It was his implement of execution.

I don’t know why, but we watched a show yesterday on the Discovery Channel about the last 24 hours on death row. And they were interviewing prison chaplains and wardens and all these people. And they talked about the different execution methods that we have in this country.

And how with the electric chair they use these natural sponges soaked in salt water so they get a good connection. It was actually frightening to hear what they were talking about. But to say, take up your cross, is not a trivial thing to say.

It’s like telling that man on death row in Florida and other places where they use the electric chair, take up that sponge with you. Take up those straps with you and go. I don’t know what you use here in Arkansas.

At home, we use lethal injection. It’s like telling one of those men, take up your IV and go on down the road. Carry it with you.

It’s like telling the men in Utah that choose the firing squad. Paint the target on your chest. I don’t know if they literally paint a target, but paint the target on your chest and go. Folks, to say take up your cross is a daily reminder of the suffering.

It’s a daily reminder of his death for us and the suffering that we identify ourselves with, we are literally, I shouldn’t say literally, in a non-physical sense, we are literally being asked to die. Now, Jesus is not telling you, go get crucified. Go to the gas chamber.

Go to the firing squad. What he’s saying is that as a disciple, we have a responsibility to die to ourselves, to our desires, to our wants. It kind of ties in with denying or disowning ourselves.

But we are to die to ourselves. You know, the natural inclination is that the people are just going to do what feels good, what benefits them. I’m going to do whatever I can to benefit me as long as it’s not too costly, not too painful, not too difficult.

That’s business as usual. That didn’t work for a Christian. Because for a Christian to say, I’m going to live business as usual, is to say that I’m going to be a Christian for the benefits, the fire insurance. But as soon as things get hard, I’m more than willing to deny my Savior.

I’m more than willing to rat out the others and save my own skin. No, no. We’re called to hang with Him through the good times and through the bad times. We’re called to suffer with Him.

We’re called to endure afflictions as Christians. And I don’t mean to say that everything about Christianity is suffering and that the more we suffer, the more spiritual we are. Nobody likes to suffer.

As I’m telling you this, I think I don’t want to suffer. None of us want to suffer. And folks, the Christian life, he tells us that he came that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

But we cannot just assume that that means, as Christians, everything is going to be lovely and wonderful all the time. It just doesn’t happen that way. And we need to know before the difficult times come, we need to have a commitment before the difficult times come, that when they do come, we are with Christ regardless of what happens.

That that’s our commitment. Now, will we always be able to perfectly follow through with that? Probably not.

Peter didn’t follow through perfectly. But the commitment should be there, that that is our goal, not to just turn tail and run, not to just abandon Christ when things get difficult, but to be committed and to endure with Him. Because there’s nothing we can endure that He hasn’t already endured in times harder.

Now, what I’m telling you today is not, I’m not asking that we be martyred. I don’t want that to happen. But folks, we will endure persecution.

We will endure trouble. It may be minor. It may seem major to us when we’re in the middle of it.

Somebody in our family doesn’t want to have anything to do with us anymore because we’re Christians. Folks, that’s happened to my, I don’t know if I should say this or not, that’s happened to my wife. One of her brothers has kind of written her off because he knows she’s going to try to point him in the right direction.

And that hurts her. And it’d be very easy to say, well, I’m just going to go along with what you want to do. Forget about Jesus.

She’s had to make some hard decisions in her own family. We may be called names. That still happens even after we get out of high school.

We may be called names. We may lose out on business opportunities. Folks, we’re called to hang with Christ. if we’re going to be His disciples, we’re going to take up our cross and follow Him.

As I said, this was written in a day when it was not possible to be just a part-time follower of Jesus Christ. These disciples, these early Christians, these people that we put on a pedestal, had hard lives, ladies and gentlemen, because they lived in a day when it was at times illegal to be a Christian. It was at some times so wildly unpopular that it could get you killed by a mob to be a Christian. If you said, I’m a disciple of Christ, it was a major commitment, and not something you took lightly and not something you went back on lightly.

We’ve got examples from the Bible. Stephen was stoned by a mob, an angry mob. The members of the Jerusalem church were persecuted and murdered by Saul of Tarsus before his conversion.

James, the son of Zebedee, was beheaded by Herod Agrippa. And then looking at the other apostles and some of the other early Christians, the historical ideas about what happened to them don’t come from the Bible. So as far as I’m concerned, they’re not as reliable as the Bible, but there’s still good information in them.

Simon Peter was crucified. Some traditions say upside down. Andrew was crucified.

James, the son of Alphaeus, was crucified. John, the lucky one maybe, died in exile. He was sent away to a remote island by himself.

Philip was crucified. Bartholomew was skinned and then crucified. Matthew was killed.

We don’t know how, but we know he was killed. Thomas was speared through. Jude was crucified, as was Simon the zealot.

Barnabas, we talked about a few weeks ago, he was stoned to death. Paul was beheaded. Timothy was beaten and then stoned.

Mark was dragged until he died from it. Polycarp, an early follower of John, was burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense to the Roman emperor, as were his friends. Numerous Roman Christians were killed in the arenas, either eaten by lions, used as torches by Nero, simply because they were followers of Christ. And we could go on and on.

It doesn’t stop there. Believers, after that, people in history think, oh, the persecution stopped and the Christians became the persecutors. Wrong.

After the time of Constantine, it wasn’t that Christians became the persecutors, it became that real Christians were persecuted by the Roman state and the Roman church for the next millennium up to this day. And even today in different parts of the world, I read reports where believers in Pakistan are kept illiterate because the Muslim extremists in the area don’t want them to learn how to read because they don’t want them to be able to have jobs and feed themselves. And they’re kept illiterate and kept in the background economically so hopefully they’ll starve and die out.

Today, people have to sneak in and out of North Korea under threat of immediate death, if not being caught and tortured and then killed, to tell others about Christ. I read a story a couple years ago about a believer in Vietnam, just in the last decade, who was found with Bibles and forced to drink boiling water. Folks, what we have today where we’re able to jump into Christianity and jump out of it is a relatively new and relatively rare phenomenon, and it’s not the way it was intended to be. As much as I don’t want persecution, I think we have it far too easy.

Because we take the commitment to Christ far too easy, and we take abandoning Him far too easy. And Jesus asked, not asked, He told His disciples, If you will come after me, take up your cross. Folks, whether the persecution is unto death or whether it’s just inconvenience, we’re called to take up our cross for the cause of Christ. And third, this morning, we not only have a new owner and a new commitment, but we have a new pattern to follow.

Christ’s disciples follow Christ as their example. We no longer follow the world. We no longer follow other people.

We’re called to follow Christ as our example, he says, and follow me. He’s not talking about the physical act of following him from town to town because there were numerous, numerous people who got up and went and heard him preach, followed him from place to place, and they were never one of his. What he says is follow me.

Do as I do. Folks, business as usual. Says that our biggest concern is to be happy, successful, well-liked, etc. You fill in the blank. Discipleship means I want to be like Christ. There’s nothing wrong with wealth, with success, with happiness, with being well-liked, but our goal as disciples is no longer I’m going to do whatever I must do to have those things.

Business as usual says whatever you have to do, whoever you have to step on to get there, those are the things you want. Discipleship says whatever the cost, I want to be like Christ. I want to be like Christ. We are called to be faithful. We are called to be faithful to Him and to the example that He set for us.

Folks, as individuals and as a church, we are called to be faithful. Faithfulness is the highest calling of disciples because it encompasses everything. And we need to model faithfulness.

We need to expect faithfulness from one another and from ourselves. We need to teach others to be faithful. We wonder why so many churches are in disarray, why so many Christians’ lives are falling apart.

is because they’ve not been taught to be faithful disciples. I want to read you just a brief excerpt of an article that I found when I was studying for this. I shared it with the deacons this morning because I thought it was good.

It was originally published in the Huffington Post. Occasionally they print something that makes sense. That’s not where I found it, though. The article is called How to Shrink Your Church.

That’s not something we want to do, is it? How to Shrink Your Church. It says, Pastors and churches spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year attending conferences, buying books, hiring consultants, advertisers, and marketers, all to try to accomplish one thing, to increase attendance to be a bigger church.

I’m absolutely convinced, the author says, I’m absolutely convinced this is the wrong tack. Success is a slippery subject when it comes to the church. That our ultimate picture of success is a crucified Messiah means any conversation about success will be incompatible with a bigger is better mentality.

Yet bigger and better is exactly what most churches seem to be pursuing these days, a pursuit which typically comes in the form of sentimentality and pragmatism. Sentimentality and pragmatism are the one-two punch which has the American church on the ropes while a generation of church leaders acquiesces to the demands of our consumer culture. The demands are simple.

Tell me something that will make me feel better, sentimentality for the churchgoer, and tell me something that will work, pragmatism for the church leader. Yet it is not clear how either one of these are part of what it means to be the church. Instead of pursuing faithfulness, the sentimental church must provide a place where people can come and hear a comforting message from an effusive pastor spouting fervent one-liners, which are intended only to make us feel good about the decisions we’ve already made with our lives.

Perhaps more than sentimentality, pragmatism is ravaging the church. Pragmatism has led to a fairly new niche industry I call the church leadership culture. Taking their cues from business, church leadership manuals are more than willing to instruct the interested pastor in how to gain market share.

I once heard church consultant and leadership guru Don Cousins say that you can grow a church without God if you have good preaching, great music, killer children’s ministry, and an engaging youth minister. Does that terrify anybody else? You can grow a big church, you can grow a good church without God as long as you have these things.

By the way, I’d be afraid to use the word, I know people today use it, but I’d be afraid to use the word killer in relation to children’s ministry, but that’s just me. He should know he helped build Willow Creek Community Church and the church leadership culture. In the pragmatic church, there’s only one question that matters.

What will work to grow my church? We’re almost through. The fundamental problem with the one-two punch of sentimentality and pragmatism is, of course, the church’s job is not to affirm people’s lives.

Do you hear that? The job of the church is not to affirm people’s lives, but to allow the gospel to continually call our lives into question. The church’s job is not to grow, not even to survive.

The church’s job is to die continually on behalf of the world, believing that with every death there is a resurrection. God’s part is to grow whatever God wishes to