It is wonderful to look into the Word and love it, and to see the pictures the Lord is trying to present. I want you to notice the difference between the words about the Kingdom and the words about the Church. Jesus presented a rather triumphant picture of the Church: “On this rock I shall build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). In Matthew 18:15–17, Jesus gave instructions concerning church discipline. “If your brother sins, go and reprove him privately. If he will not listen to you, then go to him with another witness or two. If he still refuses to listen, then tell it to the church. If he will not listen to the church, let him be as a publican.” These two passages about the Church more or less constitute the main references in the New Testament where Christ speaks specifically about the Church.
The references He made to the Kingdom were entirely different. For instance, the difference between the simple message of salvation and that of discipleship as a citizen of the Kingdom is as great as that between day and night. It is not very difficult to become a Christian. You are asked, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died and rose again, that He is your Savior?” And you reply, “Yes, I do, and I take Him as my Savior.” That is simple. It does not hurt very much, does it? But if you would like to be a citizen of the Kingdom, the requirements are quite different.
And as they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow You wherever You go.” And Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” And He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Permit me first to go and bury my father.” But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.” And another also said, “I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:57–62. This is a different kind of picture than that of just a simple Christian. This means no withdrawal and no looking back. In the message of the Kingdom that is presented in Luke 17, Jesus said, “Remember Lot’s wife.” (She looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.) “As it was in the days of Lot, so is it going to be in the days of the Son of Man.”
God has started to lead His people out and to preserve them for the Kingdom. But do not look back. Put your hand to the plow, and do not look back! You are believing for the Lord to give you deliverance in this day, and I am too. I am expecting to go through this fiasco that is coming upon the world, and to come out smelling like a rose. How about you? In fact, I cannot wait for it to happen. Does that sound like a bloodthirsty attitude? Actually, the quicker we get it over with, the better. I am looking forward to a date with a fig tree down the road—a fig tree that I am supposed to sit under. I am going to look out there and see people taking those ex-swords that are now plowshares, ex-spears that are now pruning hooks, and tilling the glorious vineyards (Micah 4:3, 4). How do we get there? There is no way you can go around it, and you cannot go back. You cannot even look back. There is only one way: walk with Him for a little while through this present time. Put your hand to the plow and do not look back. Do not turn around. Remember Lot’s wife.
The days of the Kingdom are coming. What has God been teaching you in your spirit over and over again? Have you found that He deals with your rebellion? Have you found that He deals with your withdrawal? You do not dare to look back, do you? Do you find that He keeps dealing with you about your submission to Him and about the simple faith required to trust Him with all of your heart? This is a walk with the Lord with a specific purpose.
Other people have walked with God, knowing that one day they would drop over dead or die in their sleep. Something would happen, and that would be the end of them. They would go to be with the Lord, and their bodies would be buried. We have no such promise. Before you are through, some of you may wonder if you were born in the wrong generation. You may be thinking that it would be wonderful if you could just go to be with the Lord and rest from your labors, and get resurrected about ten years from now when this hard part is over. There is no way to avoid it. You are not going to be so fortunate as to be able to withdraw or work around it. Perhaps you are afraid that you are going to die. Times may get so difficult that you will be afraid you are not going to die, as you are called upon to walk with the Lord right through this day. Is that too much to ask? What a privilege it is to be a part of the turning point in the history of God’s dealings upon the whole world. What a privilege to walk with Him now!
I am getting further and further away from those old-fashioned sermons. I hope we can come to the day when sermons are the proclamation of a word of God, when we will come to the house of God and say, “What is the news of the Kingdom? How is it coming forth?” Not that you are building your faith upon it, but it becomes the central focus of your life, as you watch with expectation what God is bringing forth in the earth and rejoice in that above everything else. The vision has been burned in our hearts and etched in our minds. The vision is very great for us; that is why we are in this walk. Look around, little flock. It is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom (Luke 12:32). Fear not, little flock. Set your heart upon the Lord.
A man in our text comes to Jesus and he says, “Lord, I’ll follow You wherever You go.” The Lord looks at him and says, “Well, the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight. Are you sure you want to follow Me?” What happened after that? Wouldn’t you like to know? I would too, but the fact that there is no answer to it shows that he was one man who just disappeared from the scene. He probably thought, “Well, I was prepared to serve Him. I wasn’t going to ask for much of a guaranteed salary, but after all, a good disciple is worth quite a bit these days, and here He doesn’t even have a place for me to sleep tonight. Man—with His ability, and yet He has no finances and no organization behind Him? Ah, that’s not for me.” And off he went.
And He said to another, “Follow Me.” The Lord came up to him and said very simply, “Follow Me.” What are you going to do with a request like that? What are you going to do with any word that God gives? The Lord gives you a word, and you want to start reasoning around it. You say, “Well, I’ve got this word; what am I going to do with it now? Well, let’s see. The brother who gave me this word doesn’t like me anyway. I’m going over there. Hey! Do one of you brothers want to interpret my word for me?” So another gives you the same word, and you think, “I don’t like that either. I think I’ll go shop around and see if I can find a better interpretation of the word.”
What are you going to do when the Lord says one simple thing to you, “Follow Me?” How are you going to get an elder to interpret it any other way but “Follow Me?” Who will you get to twist that word around so it is something of delight to you? “Oh, He doesn’t mean, ‘Follow Me,’ literally, He means, ‘Follow along with what I’m saying,’ or something.” No, He means, “Follow Me!”
Jesus said to another, “Follow Me,” and the man responded, “Only an emergency will get me out of this. What will I do? Now the Lord will never deny me this. After all, He Himself gave the commandment that says, ‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ and He says in one place that you are to take care of your parents. O Lord, I would like to follow You, but first permit me to go and bury my father.” It is possible that his father was not even dead yet. It was only an excuse. Jesus told him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” We do not hear about that man anymore. He was probably thinking, “What would our neighbors think if they came home from the funeral and found me standing on the street corner, talking about the Kingdom of God? What if I were conducting a service someplace, and I wasn’t even at my own daddy’s funeral. This thing is weird, and it is not for me.”
The Kingdom has a more rigid demand than the Church, in that it says, “Follow Me.” If you think this walk is just play, then take a little pencil and cross out Luke 9, because if you keep reading, you will find that He goes into some of the most vigorous, rigid requirements of what it means to be in the Kingdom; and they are not easy. I believe that God is going to send those days to us again.
Right now we are not living that way. It is true that we were sent out as lambs in the midst of wolves. But do you think that carrying no purse, no bag, no shoes, and greeting no one on the way will ever happen again (Luke 10:4)? I believe it will. There will be undistracted people who are set on one course: to preach the gospel of the Kingdom and to go to the ends of the world with it. Then the Lord is going to return. But it will take that same kind of devotion and dedicated discipleship that He is talking about here in Luke or it will never happen.
You see, there has to be a priority over all other loyalties, over all the demands of your life, over all other interests. It still boils down to this: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). The claims of God are so great that God will test you, not with the things that are illegal, for as far as I know, it is not illegal to sleep in a bed. Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but this man left because he did not have a bed. It is perfectly permissible to sleep in a bed, or to bury your father, is it not? There is nothing in the Word that says you cannot bury your father. I am trying to point out that these were all legitimate activities, and not negative disobediences to the Word of God. It is a matter of establishing what is to have first priority.
That is where you get your head together in this walk, and decide what is really important. You decide what is going to be more important to you than anything else in the whole world. You decide what you will do with all these other interests that have taken over your life. They were probably good things, and there is nothing wrong with them, except this—you happen to be on a certain schedule which requires you to live a day within twenty-four hours, to live a week within seven days, and to live a year within three hundred and sixty-five days. It is one of those strange things that has never been broken. You are on a budget, and you are living your life now. You are going to have time for just so much, and if you do the will of God in this day of harassment and distraction, you will have to put the Lord first. There will be a lot of good things—things that are as reasonable and legitimate and demanding as anything could be, but you have to come to the place where the Lord is first.
Would the Lord be more important than my own father? That question disturbs me. My father and mother are getting older, and I love to be with them every minute I can, talking with them or ministering to them and praying with them. It is easy to think, “Yes, I don’t blame that fellow who wanted to go bury his father.” I know there is nothing closer to us than these deep ties of family. Yet there comes a time in your thinking when you learn that regardless of what the Lord demands, the Kingdom of God comes first! Nothing can take its place.
It is in this conflict of loyalties and interests that God put His finger on one man and said, “Now, let’s see—you have a good business going here, boys, selling all those fish over in Capernaum. Now you come and follow Me and I’ll make you fishers of men. Throw the nets down and leave. Don’t even look back.” Would you do it, even though you knew it was impractical? The days of the Kingdom are on us again, and I am wondering if they are not going to see the same demands. Does this bother you? It is supposed to bother you. You cannot say, “Lord, I’ll follow You, but first just let me go back and have a little party, and say goodbye to all the folks at home.” No one putting his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God. Forget about saying goodbye to them.
After this the Lord looked around and picked out seventy men.… The Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them two and two ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come. Luke 10:1. Do you want to go and preach this word? We do not want you to give up in a day of battle or back away when it gets difficult. First we want you to be sure that you love the Lord. Notice how the Holy Spirit has put Luke 10 together: It goes on to talk about what the seventy did, how they preached the word, how it was received, and how devils were cast out.
And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?” And he answered and said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Luke 10:25–27. This is what the Kingdom is all about, and this is why we read Luke 9 and observed all those prospective disciples. Under reasonable circumstances and after they had met other commitments that had priority in their lives, they would have given the Lord the leftovers. But the Lord said, “You are going to put Me first. You are going to seek the Kingdom first.”
Sooner or later, you and I must face this: To walk with God means that this Kingdom of God will be ahead of everything else in your life and in your thinking. You may not be able to say yes to it all at once. It may be just by inches that you seem to take the ground, but sooner or later you will say a yes to God that is unconditional, with no reservations, with nothing else rivaling your affections for Him. You will be able to say, “I’m dead to the world, and the world is dead to me, and I’m living for You, Lord.”
If this word does not mean much to you, pick up the latest newspaper. Read the financial section and see what is happening on the various levels. Read about the crime and corruption. Read the real estate section and see how the construction industry has fallen apart. When you get all through with it, ask yourself a few questions: “Is there anything here that is of any significance compared to the Kingdom of God? Is there anything as important as this gospel of the Kingdom that He has committed to us? Is there anything more important than the Living Word? Where could I go, what could I do, that would be more important to me than to stand here and worship God in the Spirit and to be a part of the Living Word, to receive it, to become an oracle of it and send it out to the ends of the world? Is there anything that I could be dedicated to that would even rival it?” Can you understand what the Lord is saying? Seek first the Kingdom of God.
When the disciples went out and preached, they did not even carry a purse with them; they just trusted in the Lord. There was nothing else they could lean on: they did not have a wallet with ten thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, in case they had some problems. They did not have some good credit cards so they could stop at a restaurant some place in case they got hungry. Remember that these things were not even thought of in those days. He told them to go into a city and speak peace to it. (This was the first real peace movement in the world.) “Go into the house, let them feed you (the laborer is worthy of his hire), and stay there until you leave. If they will not have anything to do with you, come out to the edge of the town and wipe your shoes off. They will know one thing, that the Kingdom of God has come near” (Luke 10:5–11).
This message is something you should think about, because it is impossible that its first impression will have a deep enough significance in your life. As you read this in a few moments time, it is impossible for you to delve down into all the hidden regions in your thinking, and to be able to say, “Yes, Lord, there is nothing in my mind or heart that rivals You.” It takes a little while before you can give an honest answer to that. Maybe there truly is nothing, but it would pay to have a good look and see.
Lord, we pray that You bless this word to our hearts, that it will be written on our minds and on our spirits. Can we ask You, Lord, that our memory shall not be frail, that we should soon dismiss it from our minds? Write it on our hearts, Lord, and let the Holy Spirit call to mind that which Thou hast spoken to us this day. Bring it again and again, that we might walk as true disciples of the Kingdom. Amen.