Some Essential Teachings

“Now large crowds were going along with 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.'” (Luke 14:25-27, ESV)

Notice the setting. Large crowds are following Jesus — He is popular, likely drawn by the healings and miracles of the preceding chapters. And what does He do with an enthusiastic crowd? The opposite of what any modern church-growth strategy would recommend. He turns and thins the herd. This is a consistent pattern in Luke’s Gospel: whenever the crowds swell, Jesus raises the bar rather than lowering it (see also Luke 9:57-62, where three would-be followers meet three increasingly demanding replies, and John 6:60-66, where “many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” after a hard teaching, and Jesus lets them go rather than soften His words). He is not interested in numbers for their own sake. He is interested in genuine disciples, even if that means walking away with twelve men instead of twelve hundred.

 

“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 it” (Matthew 16:24-25, ESV).

This is where verse 27 lands the full weight of the demand: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” We have domesticated that phrase into a metaphor for minor inconvenience — a difficult coworker, a bad commute. That is not what a first-century Jewish crowd standing in Roman-occupied Palestine heard. They had watched condemned men carry the crossbeam to their own execution through a jeering crowd. To take up a cross was not a figure of speech for enduring hardship. It was a picture of a person who had already died to his right to himself — the same reality Paul later states as settled fact for every believer: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20, ESV).

 

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? … Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” (Luke 14:28, 31, ESV)

Jesus does not merely make a demand; He explains, with two brief parables, why the demand must be counted before it is accepted. A wise builder assesses what a project will cost before laying the first stone. A wise king assesses whether he can win before he commits his army. Jesus is not discouraging discipleship — He is dignifying it, insisting that it is significant and costly enough to deserve sober, clear-eyed consideration rather than impulsive emotional enthusiasm.

 

“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.'” (Matthew 28:18-20, ESV)

A grammatical detail changes how this familiar text should be read. In the Greek, there is only one main imperative verb in the entire Great Commission: mathēteusate, “make disciples.” “Go,” “baptizing,” and “teaching” are participles that describe how that single command is to be carried out. The Great Commission was never primarily about accumulating decisions or counting baptisms as ends in themselves. Baptizing and teaching are the method; disciple-making is the mission. And the teaching in view is not merely informational — believers are to be taught “to observe,” to actually practice, everything Christ commanded. Knowledge divorced from obedience is not discipleship; it is religious education. Jesus makes the same point about His own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24, ESV) — hearing without doing builds on sand.

 

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away … I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:1-2, 5, ESV)

This passage reframes everything said so far. Jesus does not say, “bear fruit, and thereby become my disciples.” He says the reverse: abiding is the means, and fruit is the evidence. “Apart from me you can do nothing” — this is not human effort straining toward spiritual output but a branch drawing life from a vine it did not create and cannot survive without. This is precisely where discipleship and grace meet without contradiction in Reformed theology: sanctification, no less than justification, flows from union with Christ rather than from unaided human striving. A grapevine does not strain to produce grapes; it simply stays connected to the vine.