This isn’t the message I planned to deliver at the conclusion of my last sermon (The Unnamed Sermon) but I believe it’s the one the Lord wants you folks to hear today. We’ve all heard about Gods incredible love for poor lost sinners such as you and me.

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (ESV)

Now let’s consider the following teachings of Jesus.

24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Matthew 6:24 (ESV)

Chip Brogdem of The School of Christ explains: “The context of this passage is talking about mammon (the love of, and the endless pursuit of, wealth). But the principal applies to everything else. There can only be one master in your life. You can only serve one thing at a time. You are not free to do as you please. Even if you say you serve no one, you are still serving SELF. So which will it be? Jesus says that if you love Him them you will hate everything else. What does that mean? It means that you will allow nothing and no one to take the place of the One you love-not for a day, not for an hour, not for a minute. If our love for the Lord is strong then we will learn to hate everything which competes against Him. We will despise anything that seeks to hinder our relationship with Christ.” “You cannot serve two masters. You cannot give yourself completely to more than one person. You cannot hold on to one thing and have the other thing too. You can do whatever you want, but you cannot do everything you want. At some point you have to make a choice. If you choose the Lord then you must reject everything that is not of the Lord. If you serve Him then you cannot serve anything else. If you hold on to anything else then He says you are hating and despising Him.”

“There is no middle ground. Friend, I would never question your love for the Lord. But I would question your hatred of everything else. What you love is a clue to what you hate, and what you hate is a clue to what you love. Do you hate sin? Do you hate evil? Do you hate every false way? Someone who hates sin long enough will eventually cry out to God for deliverance. Someone who hates evil long enough will eventually learn how to overcome it. Someone who hates every false way will eventually find the right way.” At this point I would like us to focus on something else Jesus taught:

26 “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. Luke 14:26 (ESV)

The ESV Study Bible Explains: If anyone comes to me. Cf. 9:23-24. Those who would be Christ’s disciples must (1) Love their family less than they love Christ (14:26); (2) bear the cross and follow Christ. (v. 27); and (3) relinquish everything (v. 33). These are complementary ways of describing complete commitment. The first condition for discipleship is to hate one’s father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, and life (cf. 18:29; see 6: 20-22). “Hating is a Semitic word expression for loving less (cf. Gen. 29: 30-31; Deut. 21: 15-17; Matt. 10: 37).

14:27. The second condition for discipleship, bear his own cross and come after me.

Matt. 10:38 take his cross (cf. 16:24).  Crucifixion is a shocking metaphor for discipleship. A disciple must deny himself (die to self-will), take up his cross (embrace God’s will, no matter the cost), and follow Christ.

Mark 8:34-9:1. Call to discipleship. The cost of discipleship includes being able to follow Jesus and to confess Him courageously.

Chip Brogdem continues, “Imagine Jesus standing at the altar of a church on Sunday morning as people come forward to “make a decision” for Christ. Jesus looks at them and says, “I’m sorry, you cannot be my disciple.” They would be shocked. The church staff would be horrified. The congregation would be aghast. But that is exactly what Luke 14:26 describes. Someone comes to Jesus, Hallelujah! Do we have a disciple? Maybe we do, or maybe we don’t. Because in addition to coming to Jesus, that person must hate their parents, spouse, brothers and sisters. They must hate their own life, and they must take up their cross and die so they can live. Do you want to know the real problem? We do not want to be disciples; we just want to be saved. We just want to get to heaven with as little discomfort as possible. That is why we call it “getting saved” instead of “getting discipled.” We have made an artificial distinction between the two, as if the first is mandatory and the second is only optional. Can you really be saved and go to heaven and not actually be a disciple? Millions of people are betting that they can.”

“I have seen a lot of alter calls in my life, but never in my life have I ever seen an alter call based on Luke 14:26. Why not! Because no one would respond! What is Jesus talking about? He is talking about a holy hatred. Becoming a disciple means Jesus will have preeminence in my life from this moment forward.”Preeminence means the first, the highest, the best, the supreme, the most favored place. It means putting Him before everyone and everything else, even those most dearest to me. It means giving up all my rights and demands, hating my own life and giving it over to Him. It is the death of SELF.. Jesus will not be thrust in a corner, or relegated to a couple of hours on Sunday morning, while we live any way we please under the delusion that we are “saved.” Either He is Lord OF all, or He is not the Lord AT all.”

As I look at you folks sitting in those uncomfortable pews listening to my sermon; I know that combined you have literally attended thousands of church services over the years. Now allow me to ask this question: How many times have you heard the gospel invitation based on Luke 14:26? That’s exactly what I thought. NEVER!

“But holy hatred is not just for disciples. The Lord is quite capable of holy hatred too. For so long people have assumed that since God loves you no matter what you do, then God loves everything you do. That is simply untrue. God is love, as we have already pointed out, holy love produces holy hatred. The Lord loves us. And because He loves us so passionately, His holy hatred can be quite searing.”

11 “I am sick of your sacrifices. Don’t bring me any more of them. I don’t want your fat rams; I don’t want to see the blood from your offerings. 12 Who wants your sacrifices when you have no sorrow for your sins? The incense you bring me is a stench in my nostrils. Your holy celebrations of the new moon and the Sabbath, and your special days for fasting—even your most pious meetings—all are frauds! I want nothing more to do with them. 13 14 I hate them all; I can’t stand the sight of them. 15 From now on, when you pray with your hands stretched out to heaven, I won’t look or listen. Even though you make many prayers, I will not hear, for your hands are those of murderers; they are covered with the blood of your innocent victims. Isaiah 1:11-15 (TLB)

21 “I hate your show and pretense—your hypocrisy of ’honoring’ me with your religious feasts and solemn assemblies. 22 I will not accept your burnt offerings and thank offerings. I will not look at your offerings of peace. 23 Away with your hymns of praise—they are mere noise to my ears. I will not listen to your music, no matter how lovely it is. Amos 5:21-23 (TLB)

Peter Barnes wrote in the summer 2012 issue of Free Grace Broadcaster that author, “John Joseph Powell has referred to the widespread practice of abortion in our own day as “the Silent Holocaust.” This description is tragically apt, as the treatment of unborn children in the Western democracies can indeed be compared to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. Most significantly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer the Lutheran pastor whom Hitler sent to the scaffold in 1945, spoke as strongly against abortion as ever he did against Nazism. His words are worthy of quotation: “Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this Nascent [the beginning to develop] life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. As early as 1933, as Nazi persecution of the Jews gathered momentum, Bonhoeffer saw clearly the duty of the Christian. He turned to the Word of God, and Proverbs 31:8 was often on his lips: open your mouth for the dumb.” This same duty rests upon the Christian in our own day as increasingly abortion is practiced and accepted.”

“An age of slogans and deadened moral sensibilities inevitably has many depressing features, but two of the more serious are a lack of clear thinking and the debasement [reducing in quality] of language. In many places, girls as young as eleven have had abortions; and fourteen-year-olds have returned for their second operation. Yet they would not be allowed to buy liquor and usually would require parental consent before having their ears pierced (this consent is not always required in abortion cases). There are government-sponsored campaigns against smoking by pregnant woman because the practice could harm the infant. And unborn children in automobile accidents have even secured compensation through the law courts. Yet no action has been taken against the practice of killing the unborn child. In fact, there has been a subtle  and pervasive assumption that pro-abortionists are sensitive, liberal, and humane people who are articulate, intelligent, and in touch with the needs of modern living, while the pro-life side has often been portrayed as a group of dogmatic hard-liners who may even have leanings toward fascism.”

“In addition, the unborn child has been labeled as a “protoplasmic mass” of “fetal tissue,” while abortion itself has been called “a method of post-conceptive fertility control” or, more simply the termination of pregnancy.”

“Abortion has…become so much accepted in places like Britain, the United States, and Australia, that one child out of every three or four conceived is deliberately put to death in the womb. The statistics have indeed become horrifying. In the United States, for example, perhaps as many as fifteen million died in the ten years following 1973 (Roe vs. Wade). Based on these figures, it is calculated that the number of babies killed through abortion in four months is approximately equal to the number of Americans killed during the whole of World War II. The womb has become more deadly that the battlefield.“

“Yet all this has taken place in the name of care and compassion, complete with the touching catch-cry, “Every child a wanted child.” (This phrase appears on the Planned Parenthood web site). (Christian apologist Greg Koukl replies to this kind of thinking: “Life might not be as beautiful for an unwanted child-I’ll grant that-but why isn’t it?–The initial answer is, ‘the unwanted child’s life is not beautiful because she’s not wanted.’ But it goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? No child’s life is miserable simply by the bare fact that she is unwanted. Being unwanted doesn’t make her life miserable. In this case, it isn’t a WHAT that makes the child’s life miserable (being unwanted), but rather a WHO that makes the child’s life miserable (the people, the adults, the parents who don’t want the child). You see, people are miserable not because of the conditions of their conception, but rather because of the way others treat them afterwards…Yes, many unwanted children lead miserable lives. But whose fault is that? It is not the babies fault. It’s the fault of parents who would rather kill their children than be obliged to love and care for them.”

“Modern humanists no longer deviate from an accepted standard from which to deviate…The Prophet Amos had a plumb line by which to judge Israel “The Lord, the Pride of Israel, has sworn: “I won’t forget your deeds! 8 The land will tremble as it awaits its doom, and everyone will mourn. It will rise up like the river Nile at flood time, toss about, and sink again. 9 At that time I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in the daytime. Amos 8:7-9 (TLB)] but modern secular man has been left without any plumb line. As a result, in the abortion debate, he has not simply come up with the wrong answers; he has been unable even to frame the right questions…”

Writing in the same issue of Free Grace Broadcaster, Joel Beeke asks: “What is the justification for legal abortion? Let us examine the arguments used by those who promote abortion to determine how strong of a foundation this practice is based. Argument 1: The fetus is not a human life, therefore it may be killed. While the fetus will eventually become a human child, this argument says it is not yet so. But science indicates otherwise. First, the words embryo and fetus are Greek and Latin words that simply mean “young one.” When scientists speak of a human embryo or fetus, they are not putting it in the category of another species, but are simply using technical terminology for a stage of development, like the words infant, child, adolescent, and adult. A human fetus is a young human person in the womb. It is natural and correct for mothers to speak of the fetus as “my baby” and for pregnancy books to say “your child.”

Second, from conception, the child has its own genetic code that clearly identifies it as homo sapiens-part of the human race. The child’s DNA also has a distinct code from the mother showing that he or she is not a part of her body, but a distinct individual living temporally within her.”

“Third, ultrasound imaging shows shows that very early in the process of development the embryo grows into a recognizable human form. The child is a blob of tissue, but a highly complex, though tiny, baby. At three weeks after conception, a baby’s heart begins and pumping blood through the body. At six weeks, a baby’s brain waves are traceable. Virtually all surgical abortions silence a beating heart and a functioning brain. At eight weeks, the arms, hands, legs, and feet are well developed and the child’s fingerprints are starting to form. At eleven weeks after conception, all of the baby’s internal organs are present and functioning. By the end of the first trimester, the baby kicks, spins, somersaults, opens and closes hands, and makes facial expressions.”

“By any reasonable standard, a human fetus is a young human being. To kill an innocent baby is murder. That is why the products of abortion are so ugly: severed hands, feet, and heads, wrapped up in bags and discarded. On an intuitive level, we know this. People can shrug off the image of a side of beef or a chicken drumstick, but images of abortion horrify and grieve us because they are images of a dismembered human body. Unborn children are precious human beings and must be protected.”

“Argument 2: The fetus is not fully human because it is dependent on another. Is a baby kangaroo not a kangaroo because it lives in its mothers pouch? Of course not! The location and situation of a human being does not make him or her any less human. Arguments for abortion based on dependence tread on dangerous ground. If dependence makes a person less human, then on that ground we would have the right to kill infants outside the womb, people on dialysis, handicapped people, and the elderly. May we kill all dependant people?”

“Consider two mothers several months into their pregnancies. One child is born prematurely, and the other remains in the womb. The first is utterly dependant on medical intervention to survive, and the other on the mother’s body. Is it right to kill the prematurely born baby? How would the hospital staff react if the mother entered the neonatal ward with a knife to attack her child? If it is not right to kill the premature child, then why is it right to kill the child in the womb? Both are dependant. Both are children. Both must have legal protection.”

Argument 3: A woman has a right to do with her body as she desires. We affirm a woman’s authority over her body. But there are limits to what we can rightfully do with our bodies, including causing harm to another human being. Abortion involves the death of her child. To argue that a human fetus is part of the mother’s body defies reason: which organ of her body is it? When the unborn child’s heart beats, whose heart is it? When the fetus brain waves can be traced, whose brain is it” Every pregnancy involves two people: a mother and a child; the rights of both must be considered.”

“Whenever we speak of the rights of two human beings, we must guard against the more powerful person taking advantage of the weaker person. It is the responsibility of the powerful to protest the weak. It is especially the responsibility of a mother to protect her child. Does any mother have the right to do whatever she pleases with her children? On the contrary, she has the responsibility of caring for them. Certainly, motherhood calls for sacrifice. We should expect adults to make sacrifices of their resources and freedoms necessary to preserve the lives of children.”

In this election year we will soon be encouraged to exercise our right to vote. This morning I want to encourage you folks to exercise your right to hate.