Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Jesus was a master teacher. He frequently used hard sayings to provide intense, searching truth. To the crowds that followed Him, Jesus said:
“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.” (Luke 14:26–27)
This is hard to understand. Why would Jesus tell us to love our enemies who mistreat us and to hate those who are closest to us? These words teach us four things about discipleship.
Discipleship is necessary. Jesus is saying: “I must be first, before your family or even your life. Nothing, not even the dearest relationships, can come before Me.” In difficult situations, whenever and wherever loyalty is demanded, Christ must come first. Full discipleship is not optional; it is necessary.
Discipleship is unmanageable. You cannot manage the outcomes of discipleship. You must lose control and go where discipleship takes you. The radical nature of Christ’s words is lost on us in our individualistic Western culture. But for Jesus’ hearers, one’s life and sense of identity were organized around family. Jesus is saying: “Being My disciple will restructure your life. When you come to Me, you must put Me ahead of everything that is most dear to you.”
Discipleship is passionate. Jesus uses the word “hate” in this teaching. We know that Jesus says that we should love our enemies, so clearly, He is not calling His disciples to animosity toward family members. He is saying that our passion for Him must be more profound, more life-shaping, more urgent, more pressing, and of greater priority than any other relationship, so much so that ordinary loves seem like hatred by comparison. Discipleship reorders everything; our love and loyalty must be His.
Discipleship is unlimited. Discipleship means taking up your cross daily. When a man is carrying his cross, his life is over. The disciple is not an independent person with independent prerogative over his life. He is called to hate even his own life—to live as someone condemned to die. Jesus is telling us that it is all or nothing. If you fix limits on how far you will go, you cannot be His disciple.
We cannot take up the cross daily apart from His grace. We cannot love Him well enough. We cannot seek Him faithfully enough. We must remind ourselves that Christ took the cross in the place of condemned people such as you and me and everyone else who would ever call on the name of the Lord. As Paul reminds us in his epistles, we have been united to Him in His death.
Life for us is lived in the shadow of the cross. We can live with confidence and joy, free from guilt. He took the cross for us so that through Christ we might daily take up the cross as His disciples.