(7.12.26) Sermon | The Formation | Patrick Hardy

Sermon 7.12.2026

Title: The Formation

Series: Follow Me

In the second message of the Follow Me series, Pastor Patrick Hardy explores what it truly means to follow Jesus by looking at Luke 14:25–33, where Jesus challenges the crowds following him to count the cost of discipleship. Using the idea of counting the cost before making a major purchase, Patrick explains that while God’s grace is freely given, following Jesus is not cheap. Jesus calls his disciples to carry their cross, surrender their lives, and place their allegiance to him above every other loyalty.

Patrick focuses on three practical areas where disciples are called to “die to themselves”: dying to our need for control, dying to our excused sin, and dying to our old identity. Discipleship is not merely a dramatic decision made at conversion or baptism, but a daily surrender in which we trust Jesus with our plans, repent of the sins we have grown comfortable with, and embrace the new identity he gives us. Yet the cost of following Jesus must be understood alongside the cost of refusing him. Jesus himself counted the cost and went to the cross because he considered us worth it. The invitation to follow Jesus is ultimately an invitation to surrender our lives—and to discover that on the other side of that surrender is the true life God created us to live.

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Men, men. Well, good morning. Man, we've already had church today, didn't we? I don't need to say anything. May the Lord bl no, I'm kidding. All right. I've worked too hard to just send you off. But uh hey, well, it's a good day to be here. Um, it's awesome to be with you. Uh before today is a it's a celebratory day. It's awesome, but it's also a sad day because the Bitson family uh are moving to Michigan tomorrow morning. Uh they are off, they're out of here. I mean, what a great last day. If you're gonna have a last day, it's gotta be with your daughter being baptized. So we're so thankful for that. Uh, Kristen, you're gonna hate me for this, but would you just come up here for like two seconds? Uh, Kristen, if you don't know, Kristen has worked in our church office for what, the last five years? Is that about how long? So, Kristen has if you've called the church, you've emailed the church, you've uh needed to get in the building. Uh, she's been the person to handle all of that. She keeps a lot of this stuff running behind the scenes. Um, so we're one, we're gonna miss you a lot. We'll miss your family, obviously. We'll miss all of you guys, but we're we're losing a part of our team. Um, so we're we're really sad about that. But we want to make sure that you don't forget us. All right, we can't be a stranger. We want you to come back and visit. So we did put together uh a little gift bag for you. I take zero credit for this, other than saying to do this, but uh they're just some little things just to say, we love you. Thank you so much for all you do, we're gonna miss you. So the best part is she's only seven hours away, and she said she'd still come and babysit my kids, so that's really cool. Um actually, next Tuesday I could need you, so uh make the trip back. But uh so this past week for the Hardy family has been uh a stressful one. It's been a little bit overwhelming uh because we decided that what we needed to do was we were selling Alyssa's car and we were buying a new car. Um to all my families out there who have kids. Why is it that anytime you leave the house with your kids, you have to pack your entire house up in order to be able to go? You know what I'm talking about? Like, you gotta bring the stroller, you got the car seats, you got the bags, you got the snacks, you got the diapers, the sound machine, the toys, and so much more. You need all of it in order to just go to the park of all places. Like, you gotta pack up your entire house. What Kristen and Josh did for their house, we do just on a daily basis. So I don't feel that bad for you. But so we decided we Alyssa's car was this Chevy Equinox, we'd owned it for a long time, and it was just too small. We couldn't fit all of our stuff in it because we had to move every day to go anywhere. So it was to the point also where our car felt like it had this weird feeling when you drive it, where you felt like at any moment it would just stop. You you have a car like that. That's what our car uh kind of was like. So we had even made the decision if we were going anywhere longer than like 45 minutes to an hour away, we were not taking this car because there was there was a chance that it wasn't gonna get back. But cars, they are are big purchases. Um, they come with a big price tag. So you can't just show up and just purchase per purchase it on a whim like you can, maybe like a Chick-fil-A sandwich. So I searched, I researched, I studied, I figured out what cars were valued at, what was in our price range, what was it that we could afford. Uh and sure, we would have loved to buy a luxury SUV, brand new, decked out all of the things, uh, but we had to count the cost. We couldn't just get what we wanted, but we had to factor in the cost that the car would bring to our lives. If you've ever bought a car before, you have to count the cost. If you've ever gone to buy a house or rent an apartment, you'll go in, you'll look, you'll search, you'll weigh the cost of the purchase, and then you'll have to decide if it's worth it or not. You have to count the cost. To all my teens and kids out there, when you save up all your allowance and your birthday money to buy the Nintendo Switch or the PS5 or whatever else it is that you want that's expensive, you have to determine in your head if it's worth it for you to give up all of your savings that you worked so hard for in order to buy this thing. You have to count the cost. Or when you go out to dinner and you look at the menu and you look at all the items that you could order for yourself and you see they got a steak and lobster, and you're like, oh yeah. Then you look at the tag and you go, you know what? I want the burger. You have to count the cost to determine if that's something that you want to purchase. But it's not just purchases, is it? You have to count the cost when it comes to what you're going to spend your time on, the job you're going to accept, the relationships that you are going to invest in in your life. There is a cost that needs to be factored into every decision that we make. Because oftentimes when we say yes to one thing, we're also saying no to another. And last week we started this new series called Follow Me, and we were looking at Jesus as he was standing at the Sea of Galilee, and he calls his very first disciples to leave their livelihood, to leave their families, and to leave the life that they know behind in order to follow him. You see, discipleship is not the classes that we take, it's not the knowledge that we gain or the programs that we're a part of. No, discipleship is getting out of your boat and following Jesus and then inviting others to do the same. Peter, Andrew, James, and John, they heard the words of Jesus and they abandoned everything in order to follow him. But I wonder, in that moment, did they count the cost? Did they count what they were giving up in order to follow Jesus, or was it not till later on that they realized what they had gotten themselves into? We count the cost before we buy the house. We count the cost before we finance the car. We count the cost before we say yes or no to the events that we're invited to. Yet many of us, when it comes to following Jesus, when we gave our lives to him, we never counted the cost. We've been conditioned to thinking that following Jesus means going to church, thinking the right things, being nice to people around us. But in Luke 14, we see Jesus lay out very clearly that there is a cost that we pay to follow him. We actually have this group chat, uh, some of our men in our in our church, and you know, it's a spot where we we talk about like stupid questions. Seth has stupid questions that he likes to send that we all answer. They're not stupid, they're great questions. We send encouragement, we send prayer requests to one another. It's just a way for us to to kind of connect with each other during the week. And and Matt Barber actually sent a uh a quote from a book called The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And when he he sent that book, I went, wait a second, I have that book sitting on my desk. I bought it to read it for the series, and I hadn't opened it yet. Um actually, Matt, you're the inspiration of today's message, so thank you. Um but that whole group chat has really uh really directed some of this conversation. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he was a German theologian, and he says this about God's grace. He says, cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. That's how many of us treat the free gift of grace that we've accepted from Jesus. We accept him as our Savior, uh, we pray the prayer, and then we take the grace that he's given to us and we continue to live our lives with no change. You see, God's grace, it's free to every single one of us. There's nothing that you have to do to earn it, there's nothing that you've done to deserve it. No, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a cost. Cheap grace says that we want Jesus, but not our lives to change. We want heaven without him. And God's grace is free, but it is also costly. The price that was paid was Jesus, the Son of God, dying on the cross, and although the gift is free, it requires us to follow Jesus with our whole lives. Before we purchase anything, we count the cost. But have we ever counted the cost for what it means to follow Jesus with our whole lives? Today we're gonna take the next step of discipleship by counting the cost and seeing the standard that Jesus sets for our lives. So if you've got your Bible this morning, open it up to Luke chapter 14. We're gonna be in verses 25 through 23 in just a moment. If you don't have your Bible, no worries. All of our scripture texts will be up on the screen. But at this point in the story, Jesus, he's traveling and he's traveling with his disciples, but he isn't just traveling around aimlessly from city to city. No, he is headed to Jerusalem, which is actually the place where he will eventually be crucified on the cross. And as he's traveling with his disciples, there's been this crowd that's begun to form. They started to follow them around. Think of like Taylor Swift and all the Swifties following her everywhere she goes. That's like Jesus. He's like reached rock star status at this point. And on the outside, it looks like a huge success. Large numbers were following Jesus, the crowds were growing, people were gathering, and more and more people were wanting to be around him. But although Jesus knew that these people were following him, he also knew that they weren't his disciples. In order to be a disciple of Jesus, they must count the cost. So Jesus turns, turns and addresses the crowd, and this is what he says. So stand with me out of the respect of the reading of God's word. We're going to read Luke 14, verses 25 through 33 this morning. It says this large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said, If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, yes, even their own life, such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower, won't you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and you are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, This person began to build and wasn't able to finish. Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king, won't he first sit down and consider whether he is able with 10,000 men to oppose the one coming against him with 20,000? 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. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. This is the word of God for the people of God. You may be seated this morning. So Jesus, he addresses this large crowd that has begun to follow him and his disciples, and he says to them, If you don't hate your father, mother, children, and even yourself, then you cannot be my disciple. First off, Jesus needs to hire a new PR manager, doesn't he? I mean, whoever told him that this was a good idea was not doing a good job. They should have said to him, Look, Jesus, I know you go on and say this, but let's hold on here. We got some good momentum going. This crowd is brought in. Let's capitalize on this moment. But instead, Jesus calls the crowd to count the cost. What does it mean when Jesus says to hate? Jesus is not commanding them, his disciples, to despise their families. He is using intentionally shocking language to talk about where our allegiance lies. Our devotion to Jesus must be so great that every other loyalty comes second to him. And I know some of you in this room are actually here and your family doesn't approve of it. And what Jesus is telling you is not that you have to hate them, that you need to leave them in the dust, that you can't pray for them. Jesus' call to hate is the call for you to choose who's first in your life, where your allegiance lies. Then Jesus goes on to say that whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciples. And this isn't the first time that Jesus has said something along these lines. Back in Luke 9, 23, Jesus calls his disciples to take up their cross and do follow him. And again, Jesus in this moment, He said, he mentions the cross again. And although he's on this journey to Jerusalem, which is a which is heading eventually to his crucifixion on the cross, the disciples in this moment they don't realize all of the foreshadowing that Jesus is doing here, that he would one day go to the cross and be crucified for their sins. There is a cost to the grace that Jesus is offering to every one of us. The gift of the cross is free, but our only response to that grace that we've received is to lay down our lives at Jesus' feet. The invitation to follow Jesus is the invitation to come and die. And this morning we had three young people who came up here and they publicly declared that they were putting their faith in Jesus for the rest of their lives. And we celebrated, we cheered, it was awesome. It's the greatest decision that you will ever make in your life. But let's not get lost in the weight of that decision and all the emotions of a service like this. When a person is baptized and they are dunked under the water, it's representing them dying to themselves. And then when they come out of the water, it represents them being raised to new life in Jesus. The same way that Jesus died on the cross and was placed in a tomb for three days, he rose again and walked out of that tomb into new life. The act of baptism is the public declaration of death to self. And Paul writes in Romans 6, 3 through 4, he says, Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. When I was designing new baptism shirts, what I wanted to put on the shirt was I died in this shirt. And I was told very quickly that's a little bit too morbid, Patrick. I still disagree, but I listened. Jesus calls us to die to ourselves, to leave our former loyalties behind, and to follow him with everything that we have. That's what it means to follow Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus means to die to yourself. You're not going to grow a movement or a church by telling people that they have to give up what they like in order to follow Jesus to die to their own desires. But Jesus isn't after crowds. He's after your heart. He wants to set you free from your sin and give you new life, but it requires you to lay your old life down in order to do so. What if a surgeon looked at you and saw that there was cancer inside of you that was killing you? And he said to you, I could remove it. But the surgery's painful. Recovery is difficult. You'll have to make sacrifices. So I'm just gonna leave it there for you. You wouldn't call that doctor very compassionate, would you? Because sometimes the most loving thing that a doctor can do is to cut away what's killing you. Jesus' call to die to yourself. It's not a call of cruelty. No, Jesus is the great physician who sees the sin that's inside of you that's killing you in your life, and he has the medicine to heal you from it all. It's free, but it comes at a cost. It's painful and oftentimes difficult, but ultimately it's what you need to be healed, to be set free, to experience the fullness of life in perfect relationship with your heavenly father. Costly grace doesn't take life from you, it gives you the only true life. But what does this actually look like? What does it mean for you to die to yourself on a Monday morning when you're living your just busy daily life? Because most of us will never be asked to actually die for Jesus physically. And I want to draw us back to Luke 9.23, where Jesus says, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. The key word here that I need us to focus on is this word daily. Jesus isn't just saying that when you're confronted with denying him or that you're persecuted, that you'll stand up for your faith. No, we are to take up our cross daily and to follow him. Dying to ourselves is not merely just a dramatic decision that happens at the altar on a Sunday morning. It's not just what happens before you get baptized. No, it's the small everyday decisions that we make where we choose to put Jesus first and put ourselves second. So the first thing you need to do is you need to die to your need for control. When I was working on my driver's license, I grew up in Maryland, and one of the things that I had to do was I had to take three driving uh instructor sessions with an instructor, and I had to drive around town, and I showed up and they had this modified car that I was to drive, and I would sit in the driver's seat, and my instructor was in the passenger seat, but they had rigged it up so that he also had a brake pedal on his side. So in case I started to go off the road or go in the wrong direction, he could pump the brakes at any moment. When we die to ourselves, we it means that we must release all control in our lives over to Jesus. We don't get to keep a modified brake pedal on our passenger seat in case Jesus starts taking us somewhere that we don't want to go. Following Jesus means surrendering your right to be in control, surrendering your plans, your future, your kids' future, your finances, your career, what you thought life would look like. You have to lay it all down at his feet. You gotta let him be the one who's in control. So, what are you trying to control that Jesus is calling you to surrender today? Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 says, Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to him, and he will make your path straight. When we choose to surrender control to God, we're exchanging our control for trust in him. The costly grace of Jesus is not just a ticket into heaven for you, but when you respond to his grace, you are changed from the inside out. You might be here and be a total control freak in your life. But by the grace of God, every time you just give him a little bit, you give him control over your life, you release it over to him, and you let him be the one who's in charge. You begin to grow from his grace in trust of him. So that the next time when you have to hand something over, it becomes a little bit easier. Becomes a little bit easier, you become more trusting, you're able to release control more and more. It's through God's grace that we are transformed. But it comes from us surrendering to him. The second thing you need to do is you need to die to your excused sin. You know, there is no more dangerous place in your life than to be deliberately sinning, knowing that it's wrong, and feeling no conviction about it. We excuse the sin because if God wanted us to change, then he would just convict me of it and I would feel bad. But every time that you felt that conviction and you've pushed it down, you've ignored it, what you've been doing is you've been hardening your heart and closing your ears off to even when God convicts you, you don't even notice it anymore. Hebrews 10, 26 says, if we deliberately keep on sinning after we've received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left. This isn't saying that God hits a point where he runs out of grace for you. He's not like running out of gas with no gas station. That's not what's happening. God has more than enough grace for us, but God's forgiveness does call us to repent, to turn from our ways, to change, to become more like Jesus, to lay down and surrender our ways for his ways. So, in order for us to die to ourselves, it means that we have to die to our sins. Even the ones that we've long excused, the ones that have become normal and just a part of our everyday lives. Let me ask you this what do you feel after you sin? Like when you know you've done something wrong, what's the feeling you have inside of you? And if your feeling is whoops, whatever, that is a dangerous place to live. When you sin, if you feel conviction, that's actually a sign that the Holy Spirit resides in you. You being convicted from the Holy Spirit means that you belong to the Holy Spirit. The conviction is not a sign that God is far from you, it's actually a sign that God is near to you. I want the Holy Spirit to convict me when I go astray. I want him to set me back on his paths and his plans for my life. You see, conviction is evidence of God's God's grace at work in our lives. When the Holy Spirit exposes our sin, he isn't pushing us away from him. No, he's actually inviting us back to a place of surrender in our lives. And so many times we confuse conviction as God hates me or God doesn't. Don't want me, or I'm a disappointment. But really, when God convicts us, He's saying, Come back to me. I have a plan and purpose for your life. I have something better for you. In order for you to die to your excused sins, it requires you to take a serious look in the mirror and ask the Holy Spirit to convict you again, to reveal the areas in your life that you need to surrender over to Him. We all like praying to God, God help me. God be near to me. God be in this conversation. You know the prayer that we really don't like to pray? Is God convict me of where I fall short. But remember, it's in our surrender that we are formed. It's in our surrender that we come to know Him and we experience His grace. So what have you been asking Jesus to forgive? That He's actually been asking you to surrender. When you surrender your sin, what you receive is freedom. Lastly, what you need to do is you need to die to your old identity. Hear me. You can't follow Jesus and just keep constantly climbing back into the grave that he's trying to pull you out of. When you give your life to Jesus, he gives you a new name. No longer are you called sinner, but instead you are called saved by grace. You are called a child of God. You are called set free. And in order for you to follow Jesus, you have to die to your old identity and put on a new identity and walk in who Jesus has called you to be. Paul gives this illustration many times in his epistles where he talks about clothing yourself with Christ, clothing yourself in godly things. And this is what he writes in Colossians 3. He says, Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator. Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. You know, every day when you wake up, you have a choice to pick out what it is that you're gonna wear that day. Even my three-year-old, Savannah, she picks out what clothes she's gonna wear, and it's terrifying sometimes. But even at three years old, she has enough autonomy to be able to pick out what it is that she's going to wear that day. Have you ever heard the expression, don't dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want? When we choose to die to our old identity, we're choosing to put on the clothes daily for the identity, the identity that Christ has given to us. And I think for many of us, this identity feels uncomfortable. We feel unworthy. It feels like we're wearing the wrong set of clothes. But when we do that, we experience his grace. And from there, he transforms us to look more like him. As we choose to follow him every day of our lives. Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. When you surrender who you are, you receive a new identity in Jesus. So as we get ready to close this morning and the band comes on up, I want to remind you to count the cost. That's what Jesus did. He had this crowd that was following to him, and he turned to them and he said, Count the cost. Before you say you will follow me, count the cost. Before you're following Jesus, you have to count the cost of releasing your control over to him. Following Jesus will cost you the sin that you've grown comfortable with. Following Jesus will cost you the old identity that you've been carrying for years, the comfortable clothes that you've been wearing. Following Jesus will cost you your life. Bonhoeffer said, when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. Those are some really heavy words. But here's what I don't want you to miss this morning. Jesus is not asking you to go somewhere that he didn't go first for you. As Jesus stood in front of this crowd in Luke 14 and he told them to carry their cross, he was already on his way to Jerusalem. He was already on his journey to the cross. Jesus had counted the cost and he continued moving forward. Why did he do that? Because he looked at the cost and he decided that you were worth it. God's grace is free. There's nothing you can do to earn it. You do not deserve it. But it was never cheap. It cost Jesus his life so that you could have free grace. Bonhoeffer writes, Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his son. And what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. You see, Jesus gave his life for you, and now he invites you to give your life to him. Not to earn his grace, not to convince him that you love him, not to somehow pay him back, but because when you truly encounter the grace of Jesus, it transforms you. And the only response is to surrender it all over to him. So today I want to ask you: have you counted the cost? What are you holding on to? What are you trying to control? What sin have you continued to excuse? What old identity do you keep climbing back into? What is Jesus calling you to lay down at his feet, but you keep reaching to pick it back up in your life? Count the cost. But as you count the cost of following Jesus, I want you to know that there is a cost for you to stay right where you are as well. What's your need of control costing you? What is the sin costing you in your life? What is your old life costing you? Because there is a cost to following Jesus, but there is also a cost to refusing to follow him. Jesus, he looked at the crowd and he said, Count the cost. Not because he was trying to get something from them, but because in order for them to truly experience all of the grace that he had for them, they needed to lay it down at his feet. And today he gives us the same invitation that he gave to Peter, Andrew, James, and John out on that Sea of Galilee when they're out fishing, and he says, Hey, come, follow me. They didn't know it. He was inviting them to come and die. Many of them died for their faith. Die to your control, die to your sin, die to your old self, and discover that on the other side of surrender, on the other side of dying to yourself, is the life that you were created to live. Bonhoeffer said it's costly because it cost a man his life. And it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. You see, costly grace doesn't take life from you, it gives you the only true life. To follow Jesus, to be his disciple, is to give him your life, to die to yourself. There's no other response that's worthy of the grace that he's poured out for you. So as the band leads us and we get ready to close this morning, I want you to know that to be a follower of Jesus is to respond when he speaks to you. When he says come, you come. When he says move, you move. And today, maybe Jesus is speaking to you in your life. There is something that he's calling you to lay down at his feet. And my encouragement to you is do some work with Jesus right now. It's more than just a song that we're singing for entertainment. This is a space where you can come, be close to the living God, who wants to change you from the inside out, wants you to experience his grace so that you can be transformed to live the life that you were created to live. So this morning, as always, our altars are always open, but Jesus can meet you right in your seat, right where you are. But don't just sing these words and go to lunch. Would you listen? Would you let him convict you? Would you let him draw you closer to him so that you can experience the life that he truly has for you? Your story matters when it's a part of God's story. You have the opportunity to lay your life down and to join God's story this morning. Would you pray with me?