Many people pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ, but their actions don’t back up their allegiance. I don’t know about you, but I believe the mark of a great leader is to state very clearly the conditions that must be met by those who follow him.
You can’t join the army and just expect to do your own thing; you have to do what the commanding officer asks of you. You wouldn’t accept a job until you’ve had a job interview to find out exactly what the terms and conditions of your contract are, and if you didn’t agree with the contract, then you wouldn’t take the job.
Jesus was that type of a leader. He very clearly laid out the conditions that must be met by anyone who wants to follow Him. Great multitudes of people had been following Jesus, and many people were excited about Him, Luke 14:25.
Some of them thought that as a Messiah, He would drive out the Roman mass. Others in the crowd were fascinated with His strange teaching and His mighty works, and many others were just curious.
But to this motley crowd of people who were turning the whole thing into a playful extravaganza. Jesus tells the crowd that if you want to follow Him, then here are some terms and conditions.
1. Hate your father, mother, wife, and kids and even your own life, Luke 14:26.
Before we get into the text, we need to look at what Jesus means when He tells the crowd to hate their families and their lives. We need to understand just what kind of hate Jesus is looking for from His followers. Did Jesus literally mean that we should hate our families and our own lives?
If you believe that He meant these words to be taken literally, then you come into some problems with some of Jesus’ other teachings. And we know that Jesus doesn’t contradict Himself; the problem usually lies in our understanding of what we’re reading. Jesus didn’t seek to crush the tender relationships of human friendships and love. He taught His followers in Matthew 5:43-48 to ‘love even their enemies.’
In Mark 7:9-13, He taught His followers to ‘Honour their parents’. On the cross, He committed the care of His mother to a trusted friend in John 19:26-27. In Matthew 5:21-26, He spoke against anger and hatred of one’s brother and said that it was a kind of murder. Little children, He gathered in His arms and blessed in Mark 10:13-16.
His whole life and His teachings made it quite clear that people were to be loved. Jesus isn’t contradicting Himself, no! The way to understand what He means is in the word ‘hate’. For example, it doesn’t mean that we’re to love our relatives with a diminished love, because this would be opposed to the heart and soul of Christianity, Ephesians 5:25 / 1 Peter 1:22.
We may indeed love the Lord too little, but we cannot love any human being too much. And we will never love the Lord more by loving our human friends less. And so, what does Jesus mean when He says that ‘we are to hate our own life’? Luke 14:26. In what sense are we to hate ourselves, like we’re to hate our relatives and friends?
It’s an awareness of sin in our own lives and the lives of our friends and family. A Christian must hate whatever is in himself, which is low and biased; he must hate everything which is greedy and selfish. Anything which drags him away from Christ and robs him of his real self and true values.
A Christian ought to love his relatives and friends as they love themselves and hate them as he hates himself. In other words, whatever is in them, which is pure and right, he’s to love. Whatever is in them, which is unclean and self-indulgent, he’s to hate. That’s why Jesus said that the second greatest commandment was to ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ Mark 12:30-31.
Remember when Jesus was telling the disciples that the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, and be killed, and after three days He will be resurrected? The Bible says that Peter rebuked Jesus, but then Jesus went on to rebuke him, Mark 8:32-33.
What’s the point? Well, the point is that even if a person’s friend comes to stand between him and his Lord, then a choice needs to be made. A choice between the natural affection of a friend and a devotion to their Saviour Jesus Christ.
And sadly, that’s where many a Christian falls, where friends and family give us a choice sometimes daily. We’re faced with choices every day, and the way to deal with those choices is to ask ourselves a simple question.
Which choice has in mind the things of God? And which choice has in mind the things of men? Too many Christians choose wrongly; that’s why they have abandoned the faith, 1 Timothy 6:21, and you never see them anymore.
But the true followers of Christ will always be and must be ready to treat their dearest friends and family as enemies. So that’s what Jesus means when He asks His followers to hate their families and friends.