Luke 14:25-27 :

Now great multitudes were going with him. He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple. Whoever doesn’t bear his own cross, and come after me, can’t be my disciple.

In this passage, Jesus painstakingly describes the relationship that He expects His disciples to have with Him. Since Jesus expects all believers to be His disciples, this describes the relationship that you must have if you want to live the way that Jesus wants you to live when you become a Christian. So, it makes sense for us to take a serious look at what is said here. This is definitely not a passage that makes sense when taken out of context.

If you were to take it out of context, you could justify mistreating your family. We know that Jesus isn’t advocating bad relationships with family here because He also says that we must disregard our own lives as disciples too. As I mentioned before, Jesus has also said that we are more important than the birds so it can’t mean that we are to treat ourselves or our families like the birds. Clearly, this passage describes the relative relationship between a disciple and His Lord by comparing it, relatively, to relatives.

Jesus clearly says that He isn’t to be our buddy, or a nice guy that we want to be like. He expects His disciples to call Him “Lord.” He is to take a place higher than every family member, including ourselves. The will of a mother or spouse is not to have a higher place than the will of “The Lord.” The will of children, or siblings doesn’t matter when it comes up against the will of Jesus. By using these close relationships, Jesus explains just what “Lord” means and it isn’t a small thing. To have a Lord like that should make us be most concerned with what He wants over the desires of anyone else during our daily lives. What the Lord wants should be on the top of our minds, not the desires of our family members, wives, husbands, or even our own. I like how James puts it:

James 4:13-16 :

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city, and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” Whereas you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor, that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away. For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that.” But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil.

The Lord decides whether we live anyway so it isn’t really that big of a leap to decide to live by the truth and make Him our Lord. Jesus is the Lord of our lives in so many clear ways when we live by faith in His word. It is the truth that Jesus saved us from sin by buying our lives back from Satan and we really do belong to Jesus because of that alone. The amazing thing is that He gives us the freedom to choose to live our lives for Him. This is not a difficult thing to do when we consider what Jesus has done as the Holy Spirit makes it clear to our minds.