The Cost of Following Christ

Let’s turn to Luke chapter 14, verses 25 through 33. I’m not going to read all of them, but verses 25 through 27, and then verse 33. In my Bible, the title of this passage is: ‘The Cost of Following Christ,’ the cost of following Christ.

Did you know that being a legitimate, genuine Christian has a cost, has a price? Well, we can say: obviously, it cost the Father His only begotten Son. It cost Christ His life; it cost Him the greatest suffering that a man, a human being, could ever experience. Your salvation, your identity as a child of God, has cost an infinite price, but does being Christians also cost us something? What is the cost of discipleship, what is the cost of following Jesus, of being able to enjoy the benefits and privileges of being an authentic, legitimate child of God?

The Lord Jesus Christ spoke in this way. Luke chapter 14, verse 25, says: ‘Great crowds were traveling with Him, and turning to them, He said’—that is, He was walking, and there were people, many people; that was the time when Jesus Christ’s ministry was popular. There was a time in Jesus’ ministry when He was extremely popular, and many people followed Him because they did not know the cost. They thought: This is the deliverer we have been waiting for; He is going to put us in first place among all the nations, He is going to restore to us all the glory Israel had in the days of King David, He is going to get the boot of the Roman Empire off our necks, He gives us food, multiplies the loaves and the fish, performs miracles of healing, casts out demons; wow, who wouldn’t like that? As Dominican merengue says.

So great crowds followed Him: ‘And turning toward them’—turning around toward them—‘He said: If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.’ Listen, it almost seems as though the Lord did not want anyone to follow Him, doesn’t it?

What prompted the Lord to turn around, suddenly stop the people, and face them? It is as though, in a sense, it bothered Him—and I believe it did, but I am going to explain why—it is as though that whole mass of people following Him bothered Him and He wanted to reduce their number. Why? Because He knew what was in their hearts. They were seeking Him for the loaves and the fish, as He once told them: You seek Me because you want the food I give, not because you seek Me, what I represent, what I truly have to offer you: the bread of life.

And I believe the Lord discerned that these people were seeking Him simply because He was the political candidate who was going to put them in power, not because they truly wanted a place in the Kingdom of Heaven, with its identity and its claims and its distinctive marks. So when the Lord discerned what was in their hearts, when He discerned that their minds and spirits had not been dealt with by God, and that those who were there were merely seeking their own benefit in a carnal way, He resented that and turned toward them because He knew their hearts; He did not need anyone to tell Him what they were thinking—He discerned it.

He turned toward them and said: You know what? If you do not hate your entire family and even your own life, you cannot be My disciples. Stop following Me if you are not going to follow Me for the right reasons. ‘And whoever does not carry his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.’

You know what? This morning I was thinking about that verse again, and it had never occurred to me before because we have said it so many times; I know that verse by heart. But when the Lord said, ‘And whoever does not carry his cross,’ He was implicitly pointing to the fact that He was going to die on the cross and that He was the one who would carry the main, the primary cross. Isn’t the text up there—sorry? A button just fell off; forgive me. If someone wants to help me with that later so the Pastor here doesn’t lose his ‘fashion sense.’ Please leave the text up there, okay?

So, ‘Whoever does not carry his cross and come after Me’—He was saying there: ‘I am going to die on the cross.’ I had never seen it that way. And so He is saying: You know what? I am going to carry My cross. Notice that He already knew what was going to happen to Him. One of the things it says is that when He was on His way to the cross, they made Him carry, bear His own cross. So He is saying: If you are not willing to undergo a process similar to the one I am going to undergo, you do not deserve to be My disciple. And so I think we are going to need a lot of time to see: okay, what is the cross that we have to carry?

It does not necessarily mean going around like some—I don’t know—martyr your whole life with your cross: Oh Lord, help me carry this cross, as so many people do. No, but it does refer to the yoke of Christ. There is a cross that we have to—there is a death that we have to experience. There is a death to self, to a whole host of things we love, that we like. There is a cross that we have to experience in our lives.

For the Son of God, it took a literal cross; for us, it means a personal, intimate cross, and that is—I was looking at something over here. By the way, what do you think of my new toy here? I look like Michael Jackson with this thing here. The only thing I can’t do is that moon dance he does, but this—we are experimenting with this new microphone to see how well it works because it is less cumbersome, and sometimes you get that thumping sound when you speak too close to it. I have already forgotten what I was saying, and so have you.

The point is, brothers and sisters, that something does indeed have to happen in our own lives, just as it also happened in the life of Jesus Christ. And notice that He is saying that if you do not go through those things, you cannot be His disciple—the one who does not take up his own cross and come after Him. Then verse 33 says: ‘So likewise, any one of you who does not renounce everything he possesses cannot be My disciple.’ Think about that for a moment.

It says: ‘Any one of you.’ Who is ‘any one of you’? Everyone. Me, yes or no? Me, you, the person beside you, your spouse, your companion, any member of this congregation. Because sometimes, brothers and sisters, there is this thing where we believe that, yes, such a consecrated, devoted lifestyle is only for a small group.

Someone from the Catholic tradition asked me about that some time ago: Who is a saint? And I told that person: Well, every Christian is a saint, because saint means set apart, consecrated, and devoted, and that is why the Bible always refers to the saints who are—

If Paul were writing a letter here to the church in Boston, he would say: ‘To the saints in the city of Boston.’ Being a disciple is not for a chosen, select, small group of people; it is for every person who considers himself or herself a Christian. There is a level of total surrender. So Christ is saying that any one of us who does not renounce everything we possess simply cannot be His disciple.

Over the next few months, from time to time we will revisit our congregation’s core values, as we said at the beginning of the year: this is a year of consolidation in which we want to emphasize the things we believe, the things we preach, the things we have said over the years. And one of our congregation’s distinctive marks, one of the goals we have as a church, one of our objectives, is to produce people who are radically committed to the Kingdom of God. That is written in our mission as a church.

The mission of León de Judá, if you look for it anywhere—for example, if you look on our website—the mission of Congregation León de Judá is, listen to this: ‘To promote the formation of disciples who are radically committed to the Kingdom of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, equipped to evangelize, disciple, and serve others through a church of excellence founded on the principles of the Word of God.’ But notice that it begins with: promoting the formation of disciples who are radically committed to the Kingdom of God.

That is why one of the things we have to do as a church is help each one of you—all of us—acquire the mindset of a disciple. A mindset of radical commitment, that is, fundamental, down to the root. Not Sunday-only people, not people who are merely evangelical and carry an evangelical membership card, but people thoroughly colored and saturated with the mindset of a disciple, because anything less than that is self-deception and an attempt to deceive God. It is being something we are not supposed to be.

So we want to create a church of people who are truly committed to the Kingdom of God, who understand what it means to be a true disciple, a true Christian. That is why we offer those classes we call Discipleship Classes, because through that process, one of the things that is supposed to happen is that you gain knowledge of the identity of a true believer. What does a true believer believe? How does a true believer live? What is the level of commitment of a true disciple of Jesus Christ?

The vision the Scriptures give us of a true follower, a true female follower of Jesus, is a person who has left everything behind—write that in your Bible—who has left everything behind to follow Jesus throughout his or her entire life. I have to ask myself: Lord, have I left everything behind for You? Am I willing to leave everything behind for You? Ask yourself that question one day and spend a couple of hours thinking about the implications of that question. Have I left everything behind for Jesus? Am I willing to surrender everything? Have I divorced myself completely from everything I love and everything I consider important and valuable, out of love for my Christ and in order to have the true identity of a disciple?

That vision of leaving everything behind to follow Jesus is very different from the vision of the Gospel that has often been projected throughout history, very different from the vision Jesus Christ presents to us. The Gospel has sometimes been presented as a mere religion that prepares us to go to heaven, and that is all. With all due respect to our Catholic brothers and sisters, have you noticed, for example, when I pass by a Catholic church? Again, this is not a criticism of the Catholic Church, because we evangelicals have many things to learn and improve among ourselves. Don’t worry, we have plenty of skeletons in our own closet, but it is something interesting.

I pass by a fairly large church there in Somerville on my way home; we always pass by there. And when I look during the day, for example, almost all the people coming out of that place are elderly people, couples who are already elderly, old people. And I imagine that what they are thinking is: I do not have much time left, so I had better get everything right with God. Where are the young people? Where are the young couples taking the time to go? And that happens with many churches—don’t kid yourself—even evangelical churches filled with elderly people. Glory to God for the elderly, amen for them, how beautiful—but wow, where are the young people? Where are the middle-aged couples or young-adult couples, and so forth?

It is because we think that the Gospel, the Church, is a factory for souls that go to heaven when they have nothing left, when nothing but the dregs remain, and then I start seeking God. That idea is terrible. May the Lord rebuke the devil, as Yiye Ávila would say—he does not say much here on this earth anymore; he is in heaven. But people believe that the Church is a place to prepare us to go to heaven, so that when the time comes, all our cards will have been punched and we will go to heaven.

Another view people sometimes have of the Gospel is this: a religion that is an appendage to life, one part of life as a whole alongside one’s career, marriage, trips to Europe on vacation, parties, and everything else. Well, we also go to church from time to time, especially on Easter Sunday, Christmas, when we get married and when we are buried, and for the baptism of some relative, some baby, or something like that.

So in that case religion, the Christian life, is like an appendage, but it is not the whole, it is not the center, it is not the foundation, it is not everything; it is not the framework that frames everything we do and think and feel. It is not the point of reference for all of life; it is simply one more object or one more essence among many other things that have equal importance or even greater importance.

Or what do you think of this view of the Gospel? An easy gospel of cheap grace, as that German theologian would say—I cannot remember his name right now. A gospel of cheap grace, of a God who simply wants us to live the best life possible and is committed solely to our having successful and happy lives, but who demands nothing in return. There is a lot of that gospel on television and in other places nowadays, and there are pastors who have adopted that theology and that way of preaching and those ethics because we think that this way people will listen to us, watch us, or come to our church, because if we present people with many demands, they will leave. They will say: Oh no, that is a negative gospel, a gospel of works, a Pharisaical gospel, or whatever.

So the idea is to present people with a Gospel in which God is the Sugar Daddy, the one who gives you everything you need; He wants you to be happy, to be successful, to have a big house, a handsome husband, beautiful children, two cars in the carport, a chicken every Friday night and on Sunday after church—a chicken to eat, sister, not the other kind of chick (laughter), right? And that is all.

The God who wants you to be happy and successful, and all the sermons are about success, a successful life, a good life, a powerful life, health, prosperity, power to acquire things; a God who is too loving to deny us anything we want or need, or a God incapable of allowing us to go to hell because of our unacknowledged or unconfessed sins, because what loving God would allow someone to go to hell? That is a truncated Gospel, a false Gospel, a hacked-up, partial Gospel. It is truly a distorted and grotesque Gospel. It is not the Gospel of the Christ who turned to the crowd and said: Hey, anyone who does not despise mother, father, son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife for My sake is not worthy, so if you want to follow, know what you are getting into.

Brothers and sisters, I hope that somehow I can unsettle you and unsettle myself this morning. There are many good things; you know that we also preach the God of love, mercy, grace, provision, power, authority, victory, and abundant life. We will talk about all those things, but there are times when we must preach about the God who demands a radical commitment.

The first disciples had to make a great sacrifice. They had to leave their jobs, their families, and their homes to follow Jesus in His itinerant ministry and to be trained by Him as He ministered in the places where He went. That is what they had to do, as you continually see; for example, you see the passage about the calling of Levi and others. For example, look at Matthew, I think it is—Luke, or Mark 8:34, I think it is; do not worry. The point is that I put the different passages here, but I forgot to include the specific reference.

But it says the following about those who wanted to follow Jesus: “And as they were going along the road, someone said to Him: Lord, I will follow You wherever You go. And the Lord said to him: Foxes have dens, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. And He said to another: Follow Me. And he said to Him: Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

Listen, what a legitimate request. My father has just died, Lord; You are asking me to follow You. You know what? Give me three hours, give me half a day, and I will follow You for the rest of my life, but first let me bury my father, and then I will follow You. Do you know what the Lord Jesus Christ answered? He said: Look, let the dead bury their dead, and you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.

The Lord was being somewhat extreme there, in a sense, but He was telling him: Look, nothing is more important than My claim. That dovetails with what He told them: If you do not despise your father and your mother, you cannot be My disciple. “And another also said to Him: I will follow You, Lord, but first let me say goodbye to those at my home. And Jesus said to him: No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.”

The Lord was a consummate teacher, and He always took advantage of opportunities to say shocking things, things that would provoke and intrigue people, things that would make them think. So what He wanted to point out there was not so much that this man could not go and properly say goodbye to his family, no; what He wanted was to set an even greater truth against that and to remind all of us that when we commit our lives to the Lord, we cannot look back at what we left behind.

Oh, if only I had done this; oh, if only I had continued with that promising career. No. When you give your life to Jesus, you look forward, toward the high calling, as the Bible says. “Leaving behind what lies behind,” Paul said, “and looking forward, I press on toward the goal.” You cannot be looking back or looking sideways at how the world lives, at what people who do not know the Lord enjoy: Oh, look at that man, how he has everything—a house, two cars, a great job—and here I am serving the Lord and I have nothing. No.

You have to look toward the high calling of Christ Jesus. You have to look at what God has called you to be and to do. You cannot keep looking back; you cannot keep thinking: Oh, I am going to do this first, I am going to do that other thing, and when I have achieved all my goals, paid all the bills, and found a husband or wife, then I will consecrate myself to the Lord. No. You have to receive Christ and His call wherever you are and not look back. You have to leave everything behind, forget it, and keep moving forward.

So this is what those first disciples did: they had to leave their jobs, families, and homes to follow Jesus in His itinerant ministry and to be ministered to by Him as He ministered throughout the places where He went. That is what we continually see in the Gospels. The disciples followed Him; these close followers whom He was going to use later to serve the Kingdom of God went wherever He went. They had left behind the places where they belonged, and then they watched how He healed a sick person, how He set a demon-possessed person free, how He performed a miracle, how He answered the Pharisees’ trick questions. They watched with an eagle eye to learn from the Master, and they had left everything behind.

And we have to do the same, though not necessarily in the literal way in which these men and women had to do it. But there are some elements from those first disciples that we do have to reproduce if you want to be a true follower of Jesus Christ, whether a man or a woman.

Many of you are new to the faith; you are visiting the church to learn more about the Gospel. Now, while you are in that young and fresh stage of the Christian life, I call you to dive in completely. Do not settle for that easy Gospel that comes to church as though it were simply a transfer from one membership to another. Come into a life, come into a way of life, come into an immersion, come into a baptism; do not come merely into membership in an organization.

What does it mean to be a disciple, and how can we reproduce the same habits they exemplified? Number one, we have to accept Christ as Lord of our lives.

Say it: Lord. Say, “Lord.” What does that word mean? Kurios was the word for the owner of a house, of a family. Kurios, translated into English as “Lord,” was the master, the owner of the slaves, the head of the household, the one who had the power of life and death over the slaves, the person who commanded the entire household and the whole house. And that means that when we say, “Jesus is my Lord,” it means that He owns everything we have; nothing is ours. Jesus has complete command over every dimension of our lives.

As Brother Isaiah was saying, right? When you serve Christ, you cannot be thinking about convenience; you are bound by an ethic, a commitment, a covenant that you have made with the Lord. You are not there picking and choosing, no; you do not have the right to choose. You have to do what the Word of the Lord says. Jesus Christ is your Lord, He is your owner; you must obey Him in every area of life. We cannot deny the Lord any area of our inner being; this is about radical surrender.

Do you remember the case of Abram and Isaac, when God says to Abram: Sacrifice your son to Me, your only son, that son whom he had waited a hundred years to have, and when he is already a teenager, God tells him: Now kill him and sacrifice him to Me? You see that the call to radical surrender is not only for these times or for the days of Jesus. God has always chosen and demanded radical surrender, and when He asked Abram to sacrifice his only son, He was testing him to see whether Abram had gone through the internal process of accepting God as his Lord and owner and of withholding nothing from Him or questioning anything He asked of him. And then Abram had to choose: What do I love more, my son or this scandalous God who is asking me to do something truly grotesque and terrible? And Abram had to go through that experience.

That is how radical you must be, how radical I must be in our surrender. As a church, we want to produce a church that is even throughout, in the sense that we do not have cold and hot areas in the congregation. My desire is for all of us to embrace Christ’s radical call to that life of total surrender.

We have to leave everything behind; that is, first, receive Christ as Lord, and second, we have to leave everything to follow Him. A radical operation has to take place in our hearts. In light of our surrender and loyalty to Him, everything else will have to seem insignificant.

That is why He said: If you do not hate your father and your mother, you are not worthy to be—He does not mean that now you should start hating your father and mother, or that you should hate your children and your wife. No. That is not the idea. What the Lord meant was: Look, your commitment to Me, your surrender to the Kingdom, your loyalty to Me, the value you place on the claims and values of the Kingdom of God and on My life as the Son of God and your Lord must be so great, so radical, so powerful, so intense that, in comparison with the regard you have for your father and mother, your wife and children, the difference is so great that it appears as though you hate them. Do you understand? That is what He meant. The one who does not deny them.

Because if you look at Jesus, you always see that the Lord downplayed Mary, His mother, and His brothers. It is not that He did not value them, but rather that, in light of the Kingdom of God, they were—well, when they told Him, “Your mother and Your brothers are looking for You,” what did He say? Well: “Who are My mother and My brothers? My mother and My brothers are those who hear the will of My Father and do it; those are My mother and My brothers.” Because when you are in the Kingdom of God, the values are different now. It is no longer so much even your biological family; honestly, it is your family of faith that matters most.

Now, your biological family—yes, you are going to love them, you are going to be very responsible toward them, you are going to take care of them, of course you are, and you are going to value them. The Bible also speaks a great deal about that, about widows, for example, and children. It says: First take care of your family before placing the burden on the church and also on the family of faith. But the idea is that first and foremost, your number-one loyalty is to the family of faith, to the Kingdom of God, to the values of the Kingdom of God. Listen, I know that right now you are shifting uncomfortably in your seats because this is something very, very difficult to understand, but it is what the Word of the Lord says.

We have to be disciples and not merely people affiliated with a church. What is a disciple? A live-in apprentice, a live-in apprentice. What does a disciple do? What did the disciples of Jesus Christ do? Or what does a disciple who, for example, is being mentored by someone do? Number one: a disciple is someone who is being mentored by someone.

Number one: a disciple is someone who lives in his mentor’s house and has left his own house. In the Middle Ages, for example, there were apprentices to a trade, and when a person became an apprentice, he left his house and went to live in his master’s house. If he wanted to be an apprentice artist or an apprentice in something else, he left his house and moved into his mentor’s house; he lived there. And we have to do something like that as well. We have to leave our own house, our own culture, even the physical, personal house of our emotions, and we have to move into the House, into the Kingdom of God; there has to be a mental transfer.

Second, a disciple, an apprentice, acquired and still acquires his mentor’s DNA and imitates him in everything. When a person is being trained in a discipline, a profession, or a trade, in the Middle Ages and throughout all ages, another aspect is that, by the end of his apprenticeship, his mentor’s life is supposed to have passed into him. His style, his way of seeing things, his way of processing the world—everything comes through his mentor. In the same way, throughout our Christian lives, we are supposed to become more like Christ and to have more of the values of the Kingdom of God within us.

Third: a disciple obeys everything he is commanded to do. It is not a matter of selectively obeying some things, as many people do today. Many people are selectively seeking a Gospel. And today people have options that perhaps did not exist before, where it is like this: Look, if you believe something, you are going to look for a church that believes what you believe; if you do not like what your church preaches, do not worry, there are many churches in the city, and you are going to find one that preaches what you want—one that is softer, lighter. If you do not like what they preach about morality, sexuality, money, or whatever it may be, people seek out the people who suit them best. Today there is—it is like a tremendous marketplace.

But what the Word says is that we obey. If the Word says it, I have to obey. If Christ says it, if the Word of the Lord says it, I simply salute and obey the Lord; I am not looking for convenience.

Fourth: a person who is a disciple always carefully observes what his mentor would do; he is always watching: How would Christ do it? What did Jesus do at this moment? He reads the Word and examines: What does the Word say in this situation, in such a case? And so one learns how the Word brings life together, and the question is: How would Jesus behave in this situation? Whenever you find yourself in a situation in your life, as you observe Him you have to ask yourself: Okay, what did Jesus do in such a situation, and what would He do? And then you imitate Him, right?

Fifth: a disciple, an apprentice, treats his mentor with the utmost reverence, with the utmost reverence. Many of us have lost that sense of holy fear toward Jesus Christ, and we see Jesus more as a little buddy—the proverbial Lord from pious paintings, generally blond and blue-eyed, tenderly holding a little sheep in His hand, right? That is the Jesus many of us have in mind, but what about that stern Jesus whom I sometimes see in Scripture?

The Jesus Christ who said to the rich young man: Look, do you want to be happy? Well, all right, do you want to enter eternal life? Sell everything you possess, give it to the poor, and then come and follow Me. He preferred to let this young man go away sad rather than say to him: No, you know what? Look, it’s all right; if you don’t want to do that, keep everything, and then come and follow Me. That’s fine. No, the Lord said: This is what is required; if you want it, fine. That stern Christ whom we see in the Book of Revelation, with eyes of fire, a tongue like a sword, gleaming white hair, like burnished bronze, and a voice like the sound of many waters; that Christ who comes on a white horse, whose robe, it says, is covered with blood, reflecting His battles against the powers of hell. That mighty Christ—that is the Jesus I follow; that is the Jesus I know to be the true and definitive one, and I have to have reverent fear of Him, because otherwise He’ll crack my head open too, you know? He loves me, but He is also a Christ who disciplines, and we have to regard Christ with reverence, with holy fear.

Another thing: a disciple is in a perpetual state of training, a perpetual state of training; there is no time off. Everything that happens in your life, you have to examine in light of the God who is training you and teaching you things. How many of us see our lives as a process of continual learning? I don’t know about you, but I am always reading and interpreting every event in my life in light of these questions: What does God want to teach me through this? What lesson can I learn? And how can I improve in my life and become more powerful, wiser, more understanding, and more effective in my service to the Lord? Everything must be seen as a learning process.

If you look at how the Lord treated His disciples in the pages of the Gospels, you see that He was always taking advantage of every opportunity to teach them a lesson, right? Right there He stood before the crowd and said to them: You know what? Do not follow Me because of the loaves and the fish; follow Me for this reason and that reason. The disciples said: Oh Lord, You sent us, and we saw that even the demons submitted to us! Ah! An opportunity: here I see a little pride in them, an infatuation with the power they have and all of that.

You know what? He told them: Do not rejoice so much in the power; rejoice that your names are written in the Book of Life—that is more important. How many people are dazzled by someone’s power, right? There are many Christians who say: Oh, so-and-so, who is really something; oh, so-and-so performs those miracles; oh, let’s follow them! But what about character? What about the teaching? What about the soundness of the Gospel being preached? So the Bible says: No, do not be dazzled; do not get so puffed up because God uses you. Strive for God to be pleased with your life—yes, strive for that. So the Lord always used every opportunity.

I invite you to see your life as a process of continual training. When you are in the factory, when you are at your workplace, in your business, your company, at school, washing dishes, there are always opportunities, and the Lord will want to take advantage of them to teach you something. If you see your life as a perpetual process of learning, God will continually educate you, and the Holy Spirit is always at work to make us more and more like Christ Jesus. God does not waste a single opportunity to do that.

And finally: a disciple is preparing for the day when he will have to put everything he has learned into practice. That learning process through which God puts you is meant to prepare you to serve Him. The Gospel and discipleship are about serving and doing the works of the Master—works of power, works of service. It is not mere theory. That is why the Lord is always preparing you, always teaching you.

And before I finish, I would like to invite the musicians to come up here, please, and prepare that chorus they sang, “Give Me Your Life,” because I want us to sing in light of what we have just said. I am going to end this meditation here and continue it next Sunday. But I want to invite you, my brothers and sisters, to see yourselves as people who are in perpetual training and formation so that you will be prepared to serve the Lord and do His works.

If you are a disciple, the Lord expects you to do the works of your Master, and again, there are many different works. There are works of righteousness, which means works of holiness, works that show that the fruit we bear is different from the fruit of the world. I would call those works of righteousness. There are also works of power, which are the works we are supposed to do when praying for a sick person, when praying for a demon-possessed person. If you have the power of Christ in your life, you are supposed to be able, in the name of Jesus, to do the works He did as well—works of power—and that is why God is training you, so that you can do those works.

There are also works of evangelism: sharing the Word of God with others and bringing others to the knowledge of Jesus Christ. And there are also what I would call works of generosity in your life: sharing your possessions with others, being generous, giving someone a word of counsel, or giving a person a word of encouragement. But for all of that, you have to keep training and allow the Holy Spirit to go on forming you, breaking you, crucifying you. He has to place the yoke of Jesus Christ upon your shoulders. “Learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble,” He says. “Take My yoke upon you, and you will find rest for your souls.”

My brothers and sisters, this morning the Lord calls us to assume a genuine identity—thank you, brothers—a genuine identity as disciples. Read that while we are singing, while we are listening to the music. The Lord wants to form us; the Lord wants to form the León de Judá Congregation into a congregation radically committed to the Kingdom of God. Ask the Lord this morning to truly make you one of His own.

I also want to invite anyone who has not yet made a profession of faith in the Lord, who has not surrendered his or her life to Jesus and who senses the call of the Holy Spirit this morning. While we are singing, I want to give an opportunity to anyone here who wants to surrender his or her life to Jesus, who wants to begin the path of a disciple, the journey of a disciple.

If you feel that God is touching you, that He has called you in recent weeks or this very morning, I invite you to raise your hand. You can do so right now, or you can come forward while we sing that chorus, and we will be attentive to pray for you, place your life in Jesus’ hands, bless you, and initiate you into that process of following the Lord. So this altar is open to anyone.

Or if you simply want to say: You know what, Lord? I now understand what it means to be a disciple, and I want to consecrate myself to You—I also invite you to come forward or stand up as a way of underscoring what you have heard, accepting it, and making it part of your heart and your life, because those actions matter too.

But let us bow our heads for a moment, then: Father, we say amen to the demand of Your Word, and we renounce a mediocre life. We renounce an average life, and we hear Jesus’ call to surrender ourselves completely to Him and to walk in true discipleship. Lord, we consecrate ourselves to that life of radical surrender. Truly give us Your life, Lord; give us Your DNA, Your identity. May this church never compromise, Lord, or dilute the radical content of Your Word. We know that this is Your Word, Lord, and we will never seek to water it down in any way. Thank You for Your presence among us. In the name of Jesus, amen.