A Tower & A War
Monday, August 17, 2009 at 11:55PM 
I was invited by a Pastor friend of mine to speak at Foothill Covenant Church in Los Altos yesterday. They have been spending the summer focusing upon various parables of Jesus. I chose to speak on Luke 14:25-35 in which Jesus provides two cautionary tales to his increasing crowds of followers about the danger of building a tower or fighting a war without first counting the cost. The passage is below:
25 Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-- yes, even his own life-- he cannot be my disciple. 27 And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28 "Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? 29 For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, 30 saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.'
31 "Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.
34 "Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? 35 It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
In the text Jesus draws parallels of a tower that is unable to be completed and a war that should not be fought, to those who ought to count the cost of being one of his disciples. The insight I found from my exploration of this passage is that Jesus here is not primarily warning disciples to count the cost of following him, and coming to a final decision about whether they will try harder as spiritual performers, but rather is warning them to count the cost of not following him in light of their current and eternal existence.
For each of us we can tend to build up our own towers to defend ourselves from threats (spiritual, emotional, physical, psychological, financial), and in the process lose sight of our need for God. In response, Jesus is challenges his followers to count the cost of doing this, because in the end one will discover that they will eventually run out of the resources necessary to complete such a task. In response, I challenged all of us to consider "structuring" our lives for intimacy with God in Christ, in order that we might have the proper supports in place to overcome our threats.
Similarly, we also can tend to live to be our own king, content with the territory we have control over (family, friends, possessions, etc.), and not concerned with God's desires for its use. Surprisingly, in this passage, Jesus is referring to himself as the advancing king with 20K men who is invading the land of the king with 10K men. The point then for us, is that there is already a battle underweigh and Christ is on the offensive. The decision we are to make is if we will allow his love and grace to invade our lives or if we will resist his advances. In response to this, I encouraged those present to surrender all things in their lives to Christ.
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