December 29 – Luke 9:23-24

Main Focus: Jesus invites us to follow him more deeply and fully in the year ahead.

It’s the last Sunday of the year, and most of our groups take the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. For those of you who will be meeting, we’ll run things just a little different. Our text for this week is Luke 9:23-24, the banner text for our 2025 theme, Follow Me, so we’ll read it multiple times in discussion to let it wash over us and start to sink down in us. Logistically, you can pick one person to be the repeat reader, if that saves some time doling out the responsibility.

In Luke 9 we find Jesus between the feeding of the 5000 and his Transfiguration. The parallel texts for this are Matthew 16-17 and Mark 8-9, though Mark and Matthew record more of the following scene than Luke does. After the miraculous feeding of the multitudes, Jesus asks his disciples an important question: who do you think I am? At this moment Peter gets it right and declares Jesus to be the Messiah, after which Jesus makes sure it’s clear for his disciples what kind of Messiah he is, the kind who will go to a cross. At this moment Peter gets it wrong and tries to persuade Jesus from such a gruesome end, and in turn receives Jesus’s rebuke for not understanding his mission or kingdom.

All this is the background music to Jesus’s invitation to follow him in Luke 9:23-24. In discussion we’ll first read the text, ask what stands out to us, then start to talk about the massive cost Jesus describes for following him: nothing short than your entire life. In this you’ll hear an echo of our 2024 theme, A Lived Amen, taken from Romans 11:36-12:1 where God invites us to devote ourselves as a “living sacrifice” to him. On one level it makes sense for a Creator, who designed us, created us, and holds all things together by his power (Col 1:17), to ask for nothing short of every atom he put within our bodies.

But on another level it makes sense for him to ask us to lose our lives for his sake when we see the kind of Messiah we’re following. We’ll back up and read verses 18-22 to see Jesus’s explanation, in particular to see that Jesus doesn’t ask anything of us that he himself was unwilling to give to us. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that, if we want to follow Jesus and go where he is going, we might find his path leads to a mount of crucifixion. However, because Jesus went before us we know we’re not alone; this encourages us and strengthens us for what Jesus asks of us. Though giving up our lives to him is the most precious, scariest thing imaginable, we can grow to trust him by remembering that he already gave himself up for us.

We’ll then read move through two more questions, each following another reading out loud of the passage (I’d encourage you to not skip that part, to let the word do its work in us). These questions will help us look back at the year behind us and look ahead to the year before us. Jesus is always laying opportunities before us to follow him, whether for the first time or the thousandth. Many of us went through struggles and loss this past year in which Jesus invited us to trust him more deeply; others of us had sin exposed in which Jesus invited us to repent and follow him more fully. Whatever the case, this is an opportunity for us to recognize that Christ is always at work in our lives and to look ahead towards a year in which, God willing, we’ll have more of Christ in our lives day by day.

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