Beginning with Luke chapter 14 Verses 25 through 30 and then Matthew 16 verses 24 through 26 Now great crowds accompanying him that would be Jesus now great crowds accompanying him And he turned and said to them if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters yes and even his own life he cannot be my disciple Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple For which of you desiring to build a tower does not sit down and count the cost Whether he has enough to complete it Otherwise when he is laid a foundation and is not able to finish all who see it begin to mock him Saying this man began to build and was not able to finish Then Jesus told his disciples if anyone would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me For whoever would save his life will lose it But whoever loses his life for my sake will find him For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and Forfeits his soul Or what shall a man give and return for his soul? This father reading of God's word when I was 18 years old I I was a late bloomer and so I was convinced of the age of 18 that I had bloomed and I hadn't we know that now. I was still about 110 pounds, but in my mind I was had bloomed I had a nice little Peach fuzz mustache going there. I had my feathered hair parted down the middle I knew how to look good and One time I was out on the date And the girl I was with had a little side ponytail popping out there as we did as she did in the 80s and I was self-confident An unhealthy amount of self-confidence actually, but on this particular night it was clear that I was looking good and The reason why it was clear that I was looking good was because wherever we went People turned to look at me When I went into the movie theater people were looking at me when we Drove down the strip as we cruised people were looking at me as I walked into McDonald's to get our after movie ice cream People were looking at me and I was feeling very very good until Until I walked up to get our ice cream and the the columns there and that McDonald's had mirrors on them And I caught myself in the mirror and I was able to see why everybody was turning to look at me Right here. I still remember it very well. I had a big bloody tissue From where I had cut myself shaving that day and I put the tissue on it to stop the bleeding and never removed it And so that's what everybody was looking at it would have been nice to have known that I broke up with that girl because she didn't tell me Now you know, I usually don't care about me if you can't tell me I have a bloody tissues tucked in my face. So You know anyway My point is this mirrors are your friends Even when a mirror real or reveal something to you that is ugly that is Embarrassing it's your friend you need to know and When we think about work as we think about work as we see kind of how we view work and decisions that we have made and What we have based these these enormous decisions upon they weren't can become a mirror for us and And as we look at those decisions we can kind of see ourselves more clearly and And understand something about ourselves that we might just miss the problem is What is what is overwhelmingly obvious to God and to other cultures is completely missed by us We can't see ourselves objectively. It's impossible by definition of the word And so what we have to do is we have to take glimpses Okay, how do we view work? We know how we view work? Well, what would how would Jesus criticize that which write about that and what's wrong about that? And that's what we're gonna do today and I think what we're gonna see what I hope that we will see as we as we use work as a mirror And to view ourselves what we're going to see is that Jesus calls us To love him more than anything in our life make to make him our most precious treasure And he tells us that he knows that that's a scary thing He knows it's it's frightening for us to leave everything behind and follow after him But he promises us that in doing that we find life We only find life By turning away from our life and following after him. That's If you want to sum it up. That's the that's the point tweet that if you want You're supposed to laugh and you didn't It's a rough start. Okay, so we're gonna look at three kind of different parts of our culture and see how they view work And then identify how Jesus would criticize or Or confirm confirm them and the first thing the first group we're gonna look at is our traditionalists Traditionalists tend to idolize the past now a traditionalist as a culture. There's not a ton of them around where we are Americans weren't traditionalists. That's why we moved to America a traditionalist Belize at the old ways of the best ways and they want to hang on to family and To commitment. They want to bless loyalty just as much as they possibly can There is you know traditional cultures Which would be kind of the older European cultures. It would have been American culture really more before World War 2 And there's just and then there's different kind of Segments within society that are more traditional than others, right? So like the South Mississippi is a very traditional culture You go to an Ole Miss football game. You feel like you're a family reunion You know, I had a friend who went to a supper club in Mississippi and he was in South Carolina But he married into this supper club and he realized that all the everybody just at this dinner table Hey, all gone to high school together. They had all gone to college together They had all been in fraternity together. They had all moved back to Jackson, Mississippi together and everybody at the table of this 12 couple I'm sorry six couple 12 persons supper club except him Everybody at that table had dated everybody else at the table That's kind of the traditionalist culture like it's about us It's about us If you want to see kind of you know the ultimate example of a traditionalist culture, you know right now Everybody's watching the Downton Abbey Many series and and that's that's all that that it's about. It's kind of traditionalist culture Faithfulness loyalty to people who've been loyal to you coming into the modern century, right and the modern era You know and in the last week, you know the big question was you had this guy whose family had been farming this piece of property since the Napoleonic Wars Are we gonna let him stay on his family's land? We did we let him stay, you know the traditionalist won this time That that's that's kind of an mentality toward work. You see it About the only thing you really you can point to an America where you see that clearly would be when General Motors 70 years ago 50 years ago They promised to take care of their employees forever Right, they put together this this medical pension plan where they were gonna take care of their employees forever Now that's a very noble purpose. That's a noble idea Financially it was a failure nobody knew how long forever was gonna be right and we didn't know you know How expensive medical care was gonna be and how long people were gonna live and almost bankrupted the company But it's a noble idea you work for us. We're gonna take care of you Um, and that's that's kind of where you see this traditionalist mentality What is Jesus I'm gonna spend a ton of time talking to this. We're gonna get over this one the quickest because None of your traditionalists, you know how I know this if you are a true traditionalist you wouldn't be here Where an eight-year-old church you would be sitting in church next to your parents on the pew that your grandparents bought But I do need to bring it out because even though you're not truly traditionalist We're in a very conservative part of the country and and there's some there's some overlap there and I want to I want to at least give it up Give it a nod What does Jesus say to the traditionalist? He says if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters Yes, and even his own life. He cannot be my disciple He says you can't follow me out of tradition Now I want you to think just a minute about the the radical nature of that statement He was speaking to first-century Jews to a culture that had lost everything They had been persecuted I persecuted minority for Hundreds of years at this point the Babylonians the Persians the Greeks and the Romans had all occupied their territory It had taken much of their culture and all these people had left to be proud of was their tradition their family and Jesus is looking at these people who idolize their family who value their family more than anything else and says You have to love me more than your family being part of your family is not enough and There's a few applications we need to make from that the first one is this Following Jesus will not cannot be a simple tradition You just can't follow him out of tradition Just because your parents Went to church doesn't mean it's a tradition that you can pass down and and we have firm Beliefs about traditions And we need to to clarify that following Jesus is not one. For instance, what do I mean when I say that? And we'll talk about something that's very near and dear to some of your hearts Why do you love the college football team that you love? Well, you know overwhelmingly everybody in this room most of the people in this room Have a football team that they believe deep in their hearts is the best team and You believe it you have you have statistics to back that up you have experiences to back that up and you honestly believe That is that is true and anybody who is an unbiased observer would know that your team is clearly the best team But the fact of the matter is You believe that Oklahoma is the sooner so the best team because you grew up in an Oklahoma sooner family And you grew up near Oklahoma sooners or you believe that Texas is the best team because you grew up in a Texas family or Or you if you lived in Alabama, you would be absolutely convinced that Alabama was the best team and you would have statistics and experiences to back that up and You think it's something that you really believe you think it's something that is an objective Fact and truth of your life and it is not It's not it's just Something you just kind of inherited Christianity has a lot of similarity to that a Lot of us grew up going to church It was obviously important to somebody in our family. Maybe our parents. Maybe our grandparents. It was very important Right my mom started going to church when the man next door to her started taking her to church when she was 12 years old She's still a member of that church today. My brother is sitting right next to her right now in church today It's important to the family, but he can't be had handed down in the family You have to make the decision you have to actually have this experience with a very personal Jesus and you have to Decide what you really love him more than you like your wife and your children and your father and your mother And you have to follow him. He can't be a tradition He's got to be a personal commitment. He is a person He's a real person and he asks you to follow him Not just stay in the stream of your family's tradition The first place where Jesus Challenges the traditionalists is when he says you have to follow me on your own outside of your tradition the second thing He plays he challenges a traditionalist and those of us who are just conservative more broadly Is he calls us to leave and follow he calls us to see life as going somewhere what I mean by this is this
traditionalists and conservatives are typically firmly convinced that The nation's best days that your best days are all behind us And if we could just go back to the way things were in the 80s Everything would be perfect Yeah, we really do believe that even the music was better We really do believe that And and and those those feelings come up every time you look at a photo album if we could just go back to where our kids were small It those feelings come out when we're every time we read the news if we could just go back to life Before abortion was legal if we could just go back to life before whatever and the Bible tells us very clearly a that that is a human error It's all that we've always had Even the Israelites when they were coming out of slavery when they faced the hardships of life in the wilderness said If we could just go back to when we were slaves There's always this idea that if we could just go back everything would be better When God cast Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden he put a sword there and he said you can't go back and When God created the world he created the world with potential that need to be just needed to be discovered and refined and Both because of redemption and because of the way God created the world He has made it clear to us that our best days are in front of us That glory is in front of us and we have to keep that in mind The best our hopes our dreams are not behind us God is with us and he is calling us to follow him He's calling us to go somewhere And we need to be very conscious Sometimes it's extremely conscious sometimes I just I refuse to let myself pull down photo albums. There are certain news sites and things that I know we're going to discourage me that I just refuse to look at or listen to because I am not putting my hopes behind me Our best days are in front of us and we have to convince ourselves of that. We have to believe that because The Bible promises that we're going to a city. We're not going back to the Garden of Eden. We are going to a beautiful city They got it provided for us and Hebrews We're told of all the faithful saints in the Old Testament who left their home and he says this It's a beautiful way to say it. He says they as it is they desire a better country That is a heavenly one Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God For he is prepared for them a city and he talks about he's talking about their Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all those who were called to leave behind everything they had Because they believe that what God was providing for them was better And we cannot give up on that hope What God has put out in front of us is better The traditional Adilized the past but that's not the only people we're going to talk about actually that was supposed to be the shortest part of my sermon It didn't work out that way. Secondly Now boomers and generation Xers that is me. This is me. This is I'm preaching to me Uh, we idolized progress We and we should idolize progress because that government we made a lot of progress Uh, we were the generation the century of progress and you there's no way of denying that the 20th century Has some awful things happen, but it was an amazing century of progress. I mean by any standard Look at communication before the 20th century started if you want to send a message to somebody in Africa You wrote a letter and it might or might not get there Now you can pick up your iPhone untethered And face chat with somebody in Africa That's progress I mean before before the 20th century began if you were born poor you died poor I mean now anybody any human with a computer can so a product advertise it on Facebook for almost free and elevate themselves You're not stuck poor rednecks from country towns and Tennessee can go to colleges at like Vanderbilt And become wealthy pastors I know for a fact it can happen That that's progress I mean before eating at the beginning of the 20th century millions of people died from the flu From smallpox From polio When was the do you remember that cholera epidemic a couple years ago? Of course you don't because it didn't happen You know why it didn't happen because we have sewers That's progress That's progress and it's very cool to criticize progress But the people who are most critical of it like to write their criticisms on iPad and post them on Twitter and the the irony is thick That's progress The problem is We idolize it Produces progress is right In the way we produce progress is required two things one is required mobility We can go to where the jobs are we can go to where the opportunities are unlike anybody else in the world history We can pick up and move like that The other idea that's produced progress is interchangeable parts Fascinating idea really We're able to break machines and things down into parts and then if we could improve the part we can improve the whole machine When Jesus tells us this he comes to us He comes to me And he says What does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your soul and he says that And two or three issues Um We have made progress. I believe that the gospel is more clearly proclaimed over the entire world now that it has ever been before But it's a huge issue in America today that our children are not adopting our faith Um, it has been a huge issue for at least 20 years 15 years And pretty much any week you can you feel just do a Google search on Millennials and church you'll see that they're not going Millennials our children have are not adopting Christianity Why not? Well, there's two reasons That I think are very clear and we have to ask ourselves these questions The first rate the first clear reason comes from what was called the national Survey of youth and religion the enormous survey multi-denominational and the message that came back was The question was why are children not adopting the faith of their parents and the answer that came back was they are They have adopted the faith of the parents and the faith of the parents is progress The faith of the parents is whatever produces Financial gain is what matters whatever makes you a better person is what matters When you're selecting a college you don't look for a college where you know there's going to be a Ministry and and a place where your faith is going to grow you go to the best college you can get into When a job offer comes along you don't ask yourself is this job all for going to really calls my family to grow spiritually You take the promotion and once you get there you find out if there's a church you like or not Our number one commitment and I'm talking about me okay I've moved I moved six times between the time I've turned 18 and 36 I'm talking about me Never saw an opportunity. I didn't say yes to With the consequences fall where they may and I have to ask myself where those correct decisions How can I teach my children to value Jesus the person of Jesus Christ more than anything else when I have valued progress more than anything else
That's the question we have to ask Because not only are we worshiping an idol But we're also have a complete misunderstanding of community We tend to see ourselves as interchangeable parts We can just move Get lifted out of this car Put into this car and it'll all be fine We see ourselves like interchangeable parts, but we're not God tells us we're members of a body and every move is not a taking of a carburetor out of one car and putting in another Every move is a transplant of an organ and it takes a long time For those organs to get healthy again You don't just do it like that and it stunts our growth more than we want to admit And it stunts the growth of everybody We Love it stunts the growth of everybody we bring with us. I was Shocked I can talk about this a little bit more now because my family's not here I was shocked and angry by how hard it was for my family to adjust to my our last move and that's why we don't plan to move again I was mad at them Why aren't don't you love it here? This better here than it was and Mrs. Zabik It's done to their growth. I took them out of their body. It's hard For us to move. It's also affects the culture that you leave If you take an organ out of a body that body misses it and You know, it's not just they're not just cars that can have another part put in And I think our churches culture wide our churches the growth and our churches have been stunted has been stunted Because we can't establish good communities when I was first Interviewing to leave our UF and become a church planner the question I kept getting was Why would you want why do you want to leave our UF and become a pastor? And I would say well, I want I'm tired of having my friends graduate and leave every four years Every time I said that I had a pastor look at me and say that will never change People don't stay put anymore anymore That affects your churches that affects our communities And it's part of the reason why the fastest growing churches right now are the ones that expect no community Just go plug in go to church check that box Because we don't even we don't even expect to hold each other accountable. You don't even expect to know each other And it hurts us and affects us What is it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?
Our mobility has affected us Okay, that's us. Let's move along. Let's talk to the young people now. Let's get off him Let me get off my own back. That's good Thirdly, the millennials Millennials for those you don't know the term are the young folks. We don't have a name for them yet And we you know it's part of the problem with the whole change of the name We can't really call them the zeros or you know like we did the 80s. So we chose the name of millennials millennials Don't analyze family and they don't analyze a progress because they've really begun to be critical of progress and this is really Generally generationally, I would say it hits everybody about the age of 35 and down maybe 30 and down are much more critical of progress And are the thing they tend to idolize is passion The millennial view of work is you do what you enjoy You know Steve jobs advice to to Stanford do do work that you love and you'll never have to go to work a single day do what you love and you'll never work a single day um You can't even say that to Stanford people, but he did um and and and the the millennials the great contribution that I think that the new generation is made is two things One is they um They brought it to they brought to the workplace a much greater sense of awareness of our responsibility You know On one level it's a little bit funny how pie as like Starbucks is You read their cup and you're like come on really Trying to change the world through coffee, but on the other hand at least they're aware of it right? I they're trying to elevate the communities that they're buying these coffee beans from That's much better than just exploiting them taking their stuff and leaving them poor I mean at least they're aware of it. I was not a way. I'm not aware of that I don't even ask myself the question You know where was this coat made was that person of paid a fair wage? I appreciate the fact that millennials are at least aware of the question And the second thing that the second big contribution is this contribution of passion this idea that it's not good enough Just go get a job where you're miserable 40 hours a week so you can be happy on weekends It's good to seek out work that you love That's a good thing You're actually more aware of kind of finding your gifts and plugging in in a place where your gifts fit and that's a good thing It's sometimes a little bit comical Right you watch my family used to watch America's got talent before they made Howard Stern into a judge and um That's just who I am okay, there's some people I just cannot watch but it was always fun Because in the later rounds they would ask the candidates You know why should we choose you why should the judges pick you Without fail they would all say because we're passionate about it I wanted to crawl through the television to go that doesn't mean you're good You know Simon Cowell is doing some of you people a favor because they would say on on you know The idol show You've got to send me on to the next round because I'm passionate and occasionally who look at them and say get a new passion You're not good. You're wasting your time And there is a tendency to go way too far on that I do want you to know this Everything that is worthwhile is gonna be hard Jesus says whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple And that this this idea that if you do what you love you'll never work a single day. It's just it's just false And that's a false view of work but more importantly, it's a very false view of Christianity Just because you love Jesus and Jesus loves you does not mean that this relationship this following after him is gonna be painless quite the opposite There are gonna be days when it is hard If it is never hard to follow after Jesus then you really need to ask yourself am I actually following Jesus or am I just following my own desires? And doing what I want And that's a big problem Tim Keller in New York talks a lot about people who he is baptized and who were growing in the church and then after a year or so They just completely disappear and when he finds them he says what happened. I thought you know You were really plugged into the church and he said you know that they'll say to him You know church was really working for me then And then I met this new girl or this new guy and and we moved in together and this is working for me Now and this idea that Following kind of what works for you now What feels good now what feels normal and natural now what you're passionate about now That's all that matters That doesn't work in the real world and in work If you're a if you're a pianist and you love to play piano You're gonna have to learn how to hold your fingers You're gonna have to learn the work of it if you really want to be free to play the most beautiful works that have ever been written If you are If you're passionate about a language, you know Greek mythology you're gonna have to sit down and do the work of learning Verve conjugations if you ever want to be truly free to read Homer If you're passionate about following Jesus And there are gonna be times when he leads you through great long periods of doubt and despair and sadness To make you strong To convince you that he is real he is more real than how you feel he is more real than Your circumstances And there's no other way to convince you of that then to have you walk through periods When you don't feel him at all When when when King David writes in the 23rd Psalm You lead me now Paz of righteousness for your own namesake even though I walk through the valley of great darkness you are with me
And there's a tendency of young Christians to believe that it's it's wrong There's no there's no joy there if there's no freedom if there's no joy if there's no passion to the Christianity That is not real and I want you to know if your Christianity is real There will come great times when there's no passion Just like if your love for your spouse is real You'll be faithful and gracious Even when they're sick Even when they're poor Even when there's no passion And walking through those times brings freedom
Keller is known to say as long as you're only willing to use Christianity as If you're only willing to use Christianity because it works Then it will never be true and it will never actually make your life better. It won't work But when you come to Christianity and you believe it because it is true Just because it's true Then it will transform your life and ultimately it'll work But you can't believe it because it works You have to believe it because it's true It's true even when it doesn't feel like it and in Following him we find freedom Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him If you abide in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free And they answered him we are all spring of Abraham where we've never been enslaved to anyone How is it that you say you will become free but Jesus answered them? Truly truly I say to you every one who practices sin is a slave to sin Following Jesus makes you truly free not free in the sense that you're able to do whatever feels right and good It makes you truly free in the sense And you find life And you find true life um I guess there's two ways of looking at a fish and a fish bowl We could say while he's awfully restricted you can only go You know in this bowl he would be much more free if we took him out of the ball and threw him in the floor You'd have more room He would have more room to die Sometimes you have to Accept your restrictions so that you can live Following Jesus is restrictive There are places where you can't go There are things that you can't do there are things you have to say no to you have to say no to yourself There are things that you're not going to enjoy passion about But within those restrictions is life he knows you he knows how he created you to live
And to all of us to the most conservative traditionalist in the room and to the most progressive Millennial in the room and everyone in between he calls us To find life My following him. Please pray with me I father in heaven we pray that you would Uh make Jesus better to us I pray that you'd make him appear beautiful I pray that we would see and feel the reality of the true of the freedom that he offers Father I pray that we would follow him and find life
And all of us are going to have to find something to say no to Say no to their tendency to find life in the past Say no to find to their tendency to find life in in progress and change Or saying no to the tendency to find life in just untethered freedom
I pray that you would Give us the grace To find life following Jesus And Jesus name I pray amen that's a rule