Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 9:57-62, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 32
- Date: Sunday, September 21, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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What Jesus Deserves
I know that none of you have ever had to deal with anybody who’s entitled, right? There’s none of that in your world. I heard a deeper-than-expected laugh over there. We all deal with entitled people from time to time. If you work in any kind of retail or food-service setting, you probably deal with that more than most of us do.
I used to run into a lot more entitled people when I was younger and worked at a grocery store. When I worked at Homeland twenty or twenty-five years ago, we used to have sales on Blue Bell ice cream. They probably still do that, but now we just order groceries from Walmart and don’t think about it. The sale paper would come out, and if I saw Blue Bell on sale, I would begin wondering whether it was too late to call in sick or change careers.
They would never order enough. People would come out of the woodwork to stock up. My grandmother was one of them. Sometimes I would forget there was a sale until I saw her at the store and thought, “This is going to be a rough weekend.” Not because of her, but because I knew it was on sale.
They would never order enough to meet the demand. People would arrive expecting their Blue Bell two for six, or whatever the price was. I don’t think you get those days back. Whatever that really cheap price was, we wouldn’t have enough, and people would start throwing a fit. We could write them a rain check so they could come back and still get the sale price, but for one lady in particular, that was not good enough. We were supposed to make it right, as though I had personally wronged her because we had run out of Blue Bell.
I don’t know exactly what she wanted, because everything I suggested and everything the manager suggested was not good enough. I think she wanted us to go into the parking lot, milk the secret herd of cattle we had hidden there, and make her more Blue Bell on the spot.
What makes an entitled person so difficult to deal with is the gap between what that person deserves and what he or she thinks is deserved. When somebody thinks he deserves far more than he actually does, it becomes frustrating for everybody around him. That lady deserved to come in and be able to buy the advertised product. She deserved to be treated with respect, and she was. But she demanded things that were not reasonable.
When somebody makes high demands, we have to ask, “What does this person actually deserve? Is this reasonable?” When we look at Jesus and His demands upon us as His children and followers, His demands are incredibly high. But there is no gap between what He demands and what He deserves.
I want us to look at what Jesus deserves from His followers. What kind of disciples does Jesus deserve? We are going to see high demands, but they are not unreasonable. Nobody looks at this and thinks Jesus is acting entitled, because we understand that He is worth whatever He expects of us and so much more. Even if we fulfilled everything He expected, He would still be worthy of more.
We are going to look at three would-be disciples and where they fell short of what Jesus deserved and expected. Their examples show us what kind of followers He deserves us to be. We need to understand from the beginning that you and I will never do all three of these things perfectly, but these are the things we aim for. We never treat Jesus as though He is expecting too much from us.
Luke records:
“As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, ‘I will follow You wherever You go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.’ And He said to another, ‘Follow Me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.’ But He said to him, ‘Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.’ Another also said, ‘I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say goodbye to those at home.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’”
We are going to look at these three men and exactly where they went wrong. Most of what they proposed to Jesus does not sound unreasonable, at least as we understand it. But when we look at it through the lens of their culture and society and consider what these things would have meant to them, we understand that what they were asking was unreasonable in light of what Jesus deserves.
I don’t think these were evil or especially wicked men. I think they were ordinary people going about their daily lives and trying to work Jesus into their lives as an accessory. You know how there are some things we squeeze into our lives when we have time? That is what they were trying to do with Jesus. That does not make them evil, but it does not make them disciples either.
Jesus used these three men and these events as teachable moments for those around Him and for us as well.
Jesus Deserves Any Sacrifice
The first man came to Jesus seemingly unprompted and said, “I will follow You wherever You go.” Matthew tells us that this man was a scribe. Following Jesus was going to require sacrifice from him. I think he probably knew there would be some sacrifice involved, but I don’t think he understood the depth of the sacrifice Jesus was calling him to make.
As we consider this first man’s story, we see that Jesus deserves any sacrifice we can endure. Anything He puts in front of us and says, “This is the cost of following Me”—any price it costs us—He is worthy of it. For this man, there was going to be a sacrifice, and Jesus was worthy of his enduring it.
Matthew tells us that this man was a scribe, one of the religious leaders. It was unusual for one of these religious leaders to come to Jesus and say, “I want to follow You. I want to go with You.” But follow Him where?
Just a few verses earlier, Luke 9:51 says, “When the days were approaching for His ascension, He was determined to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus had made it clear to everybody who was listening that He was heading to Jerusalem. There would be a few stops along the way, but Jerusalem was His ultimate destination.
Pair that with the rampant misunderstandings throughout Luke chapter 9 about what it meant for Jesus to be their King and Messiah. They knew He was going to Jerusalem, and they thought the Messiah was going there to establish His Kingdom. This scribe believed in Jesus enough to think He was the real thing. But like the disciples, who also believed in Him, he still did not understand what that meant. He thought Jesus was going to Jerusalem to become an earthly king, and he wanted to be part of that.
From their perspective, it was probably an exciting prospect. The Messiah had finally come. He was going to usher in a golden age for Israel. Everything was going to be wonderful, and this man would be there to see it happen. He would be in on the ground floor and perhaps even have a place in the Messiah’s Kingdom, much like the disciples who wanted to sit at His right and left hands.
Everybody wanted to be part of the movement. They were willing to pay a little price to join it. But we know this man misunderstood something because Jesus’ response only makes sense if he misunderstood. The man professed loyalty, and Jesus responded by warning him that sacrifice and cost were involved. The man did not fully understand what following Jesus would cost him.
Jesus said in verse 58:
“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
You have probably read this before and thought Jesus was simply making the point that following Him would be difficult. If you follow Him, you may be deprived of some things. It will not always be easy. That is absolutely true as far as it goes.
But I often find myself asking why when I read the biblical text. Why did He say that? Of all the examples He could have used, why did He talk about foxes and birds? It does not seem to have been a common expression or idiom.
So I started looking at where the Bible mentions these creatures elsewhere, trying to understand why Jesus would use them as examples. The first thing we notice is that foxes were unclean animals under Jewish law. You could not eat them. First of all, Madeleine, good news, right? The fox is her favorite animal.
They were not supposed to handle foxes, and they did not want them around for several reasons. Foxes were unclean scavengers and predators. They attacked chickens and might attack people. They were not animals people were excited to have nearby. They were also regarded as wily or devious, and the term fox was used as an insult.
I believe Jesus even called King Herod a fox. That was not a compliment in the way some people might use the expression today. It meant that he was sneaky and up to something. So the fox represented something unclean, despised, and untrusted.
When we look at what Jesus says about birds elsewhere, He points out in multiple Gospels that they had very little economic value. Later in Luke 12, He talks about buying five birds for a coin. He uses them as an example of things regarded as almost worthless, yet not one falls without the Father noticing. How much more, then, does He care about us?
When we put those two images together—what a fox and a bird would have meant to Jesus’ audience—I cannot help seeing parallels with people who were treated similarly in that society. Gentiles were regarded like foxes. They were unclean and untrusted, and the religious leaders did not want them around. Other people, though Jewish, were also treated as outcasts. The poor, the socially unacceptable, the crippled, and the vulnerable had very little value in the eyes of the elites.
On one level, Jesus was making the clear point that following Him would require sacrifice. If this scribe followed Him, he would not even have the basic expectation of a home of his own. He would wander from place to place as Jesus did, preaching the Kingdom.
But I think the image goes further. Jesus compares His condition to the foxes and birds. Even the unclean animal has its den. Even the seemingly worthless animal has its nesting place. But the Son of Man has nothing.
The scribe came as one of society’s elite—respected, powerful, and part of the inner circle. But Jesus was going to be rejected within those circles as Gentiles, the poor, and the vulnerable were rejected. Jesus was not going to Jerusalem to establish the earthly kingdom they anticipated. He was going to Jerusalem to be rejected by the very people this scribe represented.
We are not only talking about sacrificing the comforts of home. We are talking about sacrificing reputation, social standing, and perhaps even dignity, if that is what following Jesus requires. This scribe was a prominent man, but following Jesus wherever He went would require humility and sacrifice.
Salvation is absolutely free to us. Jesus paid the cost. But there is absolutely a cost to following Him.
When Jesus tells this man that He does not have the kind of home even foxes and birds have, He is not saying Christians cannot own homes. If that were the point, most of us in this room would be in trouble. He means that if we desire to follow Him in the way He deserves, we have to be willing to suffer, be deprived, and be rejected. But He is worth the sacrifice.
Jesus Deserves First Place
Then we come to the second man, and from his account we see that Jesus deserves to be our first priority. Jesus actually approached this man. He is the only one of the three whom Jesus approached about following Him. The other two volunteered. Jesus went to this man and said in verse 59, “Follow Me.”
The man responded, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.” That does not sound unreasonable, does it? I think we would all say, “Yes, go take care of that.” But Jesus did not say that. He said, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead.”
If we do not understand what those words would have meant in that culture, Jesus’ response sounds harsh. But there are several things to consider. If the man’s father were already dead, the man would already have been attending to the burial, unless there were extraordinary circumstances. When somebody died in that culture, the body was buried before sundown.
They did not delay a burial for a week or longer as we sometimes do. They buried the dead that same day before sundown. If a person died at night, the burial took place before the next sundown, unless it was the Sabbath. So if the man’s father were already dead, he would already have been at the funeral.
When the man said, “Let me first go and bury my father,” he was probably looking ahead and thinking, “My father is old. He cannot live forever. Eventually he will die, and I want to be here for that.” In other words, “Eventually I will follow You. Let me put it off until it is convenient.”
Or he may have been referring to something that happened about a year after a person’s death. The family would gather the remaining bones, place them in an ossuary—a bone box—and reinter them. That was also when the inheritance was distributed.
Either he was saying, “Let me wait until my father eventually dies, and then I will follow You,” or, “Let me wait until we have reburied the bones, received the inheritance, and tied up all the loose ends.” He was not simply asking to attend a funeral and return in a few hours while Jesus unreasonably demanded that he come immediately or not at all.
This man was asking, “Can I follow You when it is convenient?” He was attempting to delay discipleship until some future moment when it would fit neatly into his life.
I know from experience, and you probably do too, that if we come to Jesus with the mindset, “I will follow You when it is convenient,” there will always be another reason to delay. If we have one reason to postpone obedience or devotion, another reason will come along.
It’s sort of like me and Weight Watchers. I’ll do well for a month or two and then fall off the wagon. We’ll have something delicious at church, and I’ll say, “I’ll start back tomorrow.” Tomorrow comes, and it’s busy, so I say, “I’ll start back Tuesday.” Then somebody has a birthday. Somebody is always having a birthday at my house.
Or the grandparents are coming to town for the weekend and want to go out to eat. Well, I can’t not have Salas. There is always a reason to put it off until tomorrow. If you are waiting for following Jesus to become convenient, there will always be something that makes you say, “It can wait a little longer. Let me take care of this first.” As soon as you take care of one thing, something else appears on the horizon.
That is what this man was doing. But the excuses are not worth it, because Jesus deserves to be our priority.
That is why Jesus told him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead.” He meant that the spiritually dead—those who did not know Him—could tend to these earthly concerns. All the things we think we have to work out, all the loose ends we have to tie up, all the ducks we have to get in a row, and all the clichés and idioms we use to excuse putting off obedience to Jesus—He says to let those who do not follow Him make those earthly concerns their highest priority. You follow Him.
The time to follow Him is always today. I say that recognizing that it is easy to say and difficult to do consistently. But that is the goal we pursue as believers. We should not consistently say, “Whatever He has called me to do, I’ll do it tomorrow,” or, “I’ll do it when I take care of this or that.”
If He is calling you to do it today, step out and do it today. He deserves to be our first priority.
Jesus Deserves Our Whole Heart
With the third man, we see that Jesus deserves our full devotion. This man came to Jesus offering to follow Him, but only if he could first go home and say goodbye to his family.
Again, that sounds reasonable. But what he was really describing was going home and setting his affairs in order. That was not evil. It was actually responsible. He wanted to go home, tell his family what was happening, make plans for his absence, and then follow Jesus.
All of that sounds reasonable until we look at Jesus’ response and realize that Jesus saw something in the man that we cannot see. Based on His response, Jesus saw that half the man’s heart was committed to serving Him and half remained at home.
Jesus said in verse 62:
“No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
I don’t think Jesus is talking about salvation here, because the subject is following Him and serving in the Kingdom. Nobody who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in that Kingdom. If you want to serve God, your focus needs to be on Him.
That does not mean we should be irresponsible. Balance your checkbook, pay your bills, and do the things you are supposed to do. Jesus is talking about where our hearts and focus are.
The metaphor of looking back from a plow is easy to understand. I’ve gardened enough to know. I’ve even used an old plow. Apparently, you’re supposed to hook it up to horses. It makes the work easier, although you can try to push it yourself if you want. I don’t recommend it.
Whether you use a plow, tiller, or something else, if you are preparing rows for cultivation, you look straight ahead into the distance. You keep moving toward that mark, and that helps you plow a straight line. If you are looking around while you plow or till, you will soon twist and turn all over the place. You will make a mess and fail to do the work properly.
The same thing is true spiritually. If we are trying to serve the Lord while our hearts are everywhere else, we will not plow straight rows. We will make a mess.
When we literally look back from a plow, we lose focus and make a mess. Looking back spiritually shows half-hearted devotion to Jesus. He deserves our full devotion. Jesus deserves more than half our hearts. There is no part of our lives over which Jesus does not deserve to be Lord.
Again, that is extraordinarily easy to say and very difficult to live out. But when I struggle with this, I find it helpful to make a mental list of the parts of my life Jesus does not deserve. When I put it that way, I cannot bring myself to say aloud that He does not deserve to be Lord of this or that. I realize how foolish I have been.
The third man’s problem was not that he wanted to put his affairs in order and act responsibly. His problem was what Jesus saw beyond that: his heart was only halfway committed when Jesus deserved his whole heart.
The Kind of Disciples He Deserves
We look at these three men and see what they had in mind about being disciples. Each had some desire to follow Jesus, but something was lacking in each one. These events truly happened. God’s Word presents them as real events. But we can also see ourselves in one or more of these men—perhaps all three, or different ones at different times.
The question you and I need to ask and answer is this: Are we living as the kind of disciples Jesus deserves?
Some days the answer may be yes. Some days the answer may be no. We do not ask the question merely so that we can answer no, feel bad, and continue feeling bad. We hold up the mirror of Scripture to our lives so we can see where we fall short and let God correct it.
If we come to the point where we say, “Lord, I am trying to hold back from You in this area and not give You my full devotion. Will You help me turn it over to You?” He will.
“Father, I find that I am not willing to count and pay the cost of following Jesus. Will You help me become willing?” He will help us.
“Father, I have been putting my priorities in the wrong order. Will You help me?” He will help us.
Folks, those are prayers God delights to answer—prayers that make us more like Jesus and help us follow Him more effectively. Through these three simple stories, we learn from where these men fell short. We learn to identify the same things in ourselves so that we can become the kind of disciples Jesus deserves.
