This sermon was preached to Grace Church Guildford on 18 September 2022. The full video recording of the service can be found below along with the transcript.
Sometimes people do strange things for good reasons. If you think about it, a lot of odd things happened this week. In London, for the last few days, people have spent hours standing in a queue stretching from Westminster past Tower Bridge. Even in a nation famous for its ability to queue patiently, that is rather remarkable! Likewise, it is strange that while tomorrow is a Monday, many of you will not go to work. And yet, these strange events both begin to make sense when you realise Queen Elizabeth II has died and will be buried tomorrow. Sometimes, that, which at first appears strange, makes perfect sense when you understand the motivation, rationale, behind it.
If you are here this evening and you are not a Christian, a follower of Jesus, then what we are doing may seem rather strange to you. A large crowd watching someone being immersed in a giant pool of water. Me standing up to talk to you about what was written 2000 years ago. It can all seem rather strange, odd. Well, if that is how you feel right now, can I take this opportunity to assure you that from one angle, it is all a little peculiar. And yet, remember that sometimes people do strange things for good reasons. That when you being to understand the motivation, the rationale, it may start to make sense.
That is true not only for our church service this evening, but for Christianity as a whole. From the outside, Christianity can seem a rather strange set of beliefs to live by, the Christian life can seem rather irrational. And yet, here at Grace Church, we believe that if you take the time to look inside Christianity, to investigate the reasons why Christians believe and behave as they do, it will start to make sense.
That is exactly what we see in our passage tonight, where what at first seems strange, even ludicrous, becomes perfectly rational when we read of the reason behind it. On Sunday evenings since the start of the year, we have slowly been working our way through Matthew’s Gospel, this record of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was written by an eyewitness called Matthew, one of Jesus’ 12 disciples. This evening we are looking at 8:18-34, where we find ourselves in the middle of Jesus’ earthly ministry, hearing how he travelled around Israel, interacting with individuals and performing many miracles.
In our text tonight, we are told about two men and two miracles. We meet these two men in 8:18-22, where we see that each of them want to become followers of Jesus. Then, in 8:23-34, we are told of two miracles, as Jesus calms a violent storm and then casts out evil spirits. And from these two parts of our passage, these two men and these two miracles, we see that while following Jesus at first may seem strange, a bizarre decision for anyone to make (including Nicole here tonight), it all starts to make sense once you look a little closer, realise the reason for doing so. We are going to see this in our two points this evening, each covering a part of our passage: (1) The Cost of Following Jesus (8:18-22); (2) The Reason for Following Jesus (8:23-34).
1. THE COST OF FOLLOWING JESUS (8:18-22)
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it is becoming increasingly important to count costs right now. The current energy crisis has caused us all to keep a closer eye on our bills, and unfortunately is forcing many to make difficult decisions about what they can and can’t afford. However, our passage begins by Jesus calling us to count a different kind cost: to consider the consequences of becoming a Christian, to weigh up the price we must pay to follow him.
In 8:18, at the beginning of our passage, we are told Jesus ‘gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake’. That is, he instructed his followers to pack up and get ready to move on, to load the boat up and accompany him to a new location. And in 8:19-22 we are introduced to two individuals who are keen to come along for the ride, who volunteer to go on this journey with Jesus. The first, we read in 8:19, tells Jesus, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’ His offer of accompanying Jesus seems to be an open-ended, unlimited one. ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ It sounds great, it seems like Jesus has found himself a willing recruit, an enthusiastic volunteer. Sign him up Jesus! And yet, do you see that rather than gratefully accept this offer, Jesus almost seems to discourage him from coming along. In 8:20, we read: [READ].
He is ready to sign up. And yet, see here that Jesus first wants him to consider the cost of doing so. ‘O yes, you say you will follow me wherever I go. But you need to realise that that ‘wherever’ really must mean ‘wherever’, for though even animals have somewhere to call home, I do not. Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man (that is me, Jesus), I have nowhere to lay my head at night.’ Now of course, Jesus doesn’t mean he literally has nowhere to sleep. In Matthew, we see him stay with various individuals. In the very next story, he lays his head down on the boat to sleep! No, what Jesus means is that he has no settled stability, no ultimate home. Jesus’ life is that of a traveller, a sojourner. He has left his home behind. And so, following him means doing the same. Uprooting yourself at his command and travelling to wherever he orders you to go. This man says he is willing to sign up. But Jesus tells him to first stop and count the cost before he gets in that boat. For to go with Jesus isn’t like going on a two-week holiday, for it is starting a lifelong pilgrimage, going on a journey from which you may never come back home.
Jesus’ response here is a good reminder to us that to be a Christian, to follow Jesus, is ultimately to be a stranger, sojourner in this world. If, like my wife Sarah and I, you have moved home recently, you will have experienced the disorientation that uprooting your life can cause and will likely long to settle down. Perhaps when people ask how you are, you find yourself saying things like: ‘We are still settling in.’ Or ‘we seem to be settling well.’ And of course, there is something good and right about this. We should seek to build strong relationships with those around us. It is right to enjoy the good gifts of houses and the comforts of home. And yet, see here that we must also take great care. For ultimately, the Christian life is not about settling, it is about sojourning. About obeying that command we thought about this morning: ‘Go’. From the very beginning, see here that to follow Jesus, to be a Christian, means to be going, going wherever he sends us, following wherever he leads. To have a house on this earth, yes, yet ultimately to have no home. Or rather, to ultimately be at home, to make a home, wherever Jesus calls us to go. To be as content laying our head down to sleep on a boat in the middle of a storm, heading to some far away shore for his sake, as we are to lie down to sleep tucked up nice and cosy and safe in our own beds.
If you are here tonight and consider yourself to be a Christian, but you are not yet baptised, can I encourage you to go back and read Matthew 28:18-20, the passage we looked at this morning, again. For you will see there, that the first step in going is doing what Nicole has done this evening, publicly confessing your faith through the waters of baptism. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.’ The first step of obedience in the Christian life, the first step on that mission of going, is going down into the waters of baptism. And until you take that step, you are not following Jesus, for that is the first place he calls you to go. If you have trusted in Jesus as your Saviour and would like to take that first step of obedience by being baptised, like Nicole this evening, then can I encourage you to come talk to me or any of the elders. We would love to have a conversation with you about that!
If the first volunteer teaches us that the cost of following Jesus is going wherever he calls us, the second teaches us that it is also going whenever he calls. The first is wherever, the second is whenever. In 8:21 we read of another volunteer who says, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ It is likely the man’s father had recently died, and so he was just asking to delay the start of his journey for a few days. It seems like a perfectly reasonable request. And yet, in 8:22 Jesus responds, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’ I hope you find Jesus’ response there striking, shocking. Because it is. We all realise that when a death takes place, for a few days, perhaps weeks, it is right and proper that life grinds to a halt and we take time to make arrangements for the dead and care for the living. [...] It is hard to think of a better reason for this man to delay his discipleship than burying his late father. And yet, that is the very point Matthew is trying to make. Even the most reasonable request, the most legitimate concern cannot keep you from following, from obeying Jesus. When Jesus says, ‘Follow me’, there is no excuse in earth or heaven that permits you to do otherwise, allows you to even delay for a single day. To be a Christian, follow Jesus, means to make him your absolute priority, indisputable master. For a Christian, obedience is not an option. It is the only option. When Jesus tells us to go, there can be no delay. Under no circumstances can we stay.
Now, it’s important to remember that following Jesus does not cancel responsibilities to family and friends. Indeed, Scripture expressly calls us to love both in radically self-sacrificial ways. As we will continue to see from Jamie’s sermons in Ephesians 5-6: children are to honour their parents; parents to nurture their children; husbands to love their wives; wives to submit to their husbands. Part of what it means to follow Jesus is to love and care for others. Nowhere is love for family and friends elevated to a higher plane, caring for others commanded more strongly, than in Christianity. And yet, see even this great love for others, cannot, must not, come before greater love for God. For while no one elevates love of others higher than Christians. Our love for Jesus must be put even higher than that. It is Jesus who must be our priority. It is our relationship with Jesus that must govern all other relationships in our lives.
Do you see how this second man reveals Jesus is not first in his life? Jesus said come, let us go to the other side, and he responds, ‘first, let me go...’. For this man, it was his earthly, not his heavenly father, that was first in his life. And so, Jesus points this out to him. As he explains more fully in 10:37, ‘Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’ See here that to be a Christian means: to disappoint your spouse or child, if that’s what you really must do to please Jesus. To disobey your parents, if that is what you really must do to obey Jesus. To be distanced by friends, if that is what you must suffer to follow Jesus. Yes, if Jesus is our lord, then he orders us to love others, calls us to be the best child, spouse, parent, friend that anyone could ever be. And yet, our first priority, our final loyalty must always be to him.
Friends, see here the cost of following Jesus. To be a Christian means saying to Jesus: ‘Wherever and whenever you tell me to go, Lord, whatever you call me to do, I will go, I will do it.’ Brothers and sisters, having listened to this morning’s sermon, and looked at this passage this evening, why don’t you pray that prayer before you go to bed tonight. If you are married to a Christian, why don’t you pray it together before you fall asleep? ‘Wherever and whenever you tell me to go, whatever you call me to do, I will go, I will do it.’ Friends, are you willing to say those words to Jesus? To pray that prayer? To leave the comforts of your home? To see relationships with family and friends broken, if that is what following Jesus does? Because see here that is the cost of being a Christian.
If you’re here tonight and you are not a Christian, do you see that for you to start following Jesus would be costly? It is not a hobby or part-time interest, a fad or a phase, an upbringing or something you inherit from Christian parents. As we have heard Nicole is an all-encompassing, lifelong, personal commitment to love and obey Jesus. To be a Christian is costly it means: dying to self, denying sinful desires, defying the expectation of family and friends. And yet, as anyone following Jesus will tell you, Jesus is more than worth that price. As we have sung, ‘Our Jesus can repay, from his own fullness all he takes away.’ O, being a Christian may seem strange at first, it is costly, and yet there are good reasons for it.
2. THE REASON FOR FOLLOWING JESUS (8:23-34)
In fact, we see two reasons highlighted to us in our passage. Despite the great cost of following Jesus, we see that we should follow Jesus because of: (i) who he is; and (ii) what he does. We see the first of these in the first miracle in 8:23-27, where Jesus calms the storm.
If you are familiar with the works of Shakespeare, you will know one of the last plays he penned was called ‘The Tempest’. It is a kind of desert island story, where some Italian nobles are stranded after their ship is wrecked in a storm. The play opens in the middle of this storm, where we hear of the King of Naples coming on deck to see what he can do to help. The King has great authority over his servants, who obey his every command. And yet, he has no authority or ability to still the wind and waves. As Shakespeare has one of the sailors put it, ‘What care these [waves] for the name of king?’ And so the King is spent back down below deck. The point is clear, isn’t it? There are some forces in this world that mankind, even our kings, cannot control. O we can build bigger boats, forge tougher steel, develop more intelligent technology to help us deal with the consequences of the weather, but we cannot cancel the wind and waves, cannot call them to cease their raging. To stand before a raging sea and shout into the wind is usually the sign of a madman. And yet, here in 8:23-27 we see that it is the sign of the Godman. For when Jesus speaks to the storm, it not only listens to him, it obeys him.
It’s a famous story, if you are not familiar with it, the details are relatively simple. In 8:23 Jesus begins the journey across the lake that he mentioned back in 8:18. However, rather than a smooth crossing, in 8:24 we hear of a storm descending. In 8:25, the terrified disciples go to find Jesus, who has somehow managed to lay his head down for some sleep, and they plead with him to intervene and do something to save them. And so in 8:26, after commenting on both their great fear and little faith, we read: ‘Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.’
The story is simple, and yet even if you have heard it many times, is there not still something stunning about it? Matthew helps us capture that amazement by including the conclusion in 8:27, where we read: [READ]. What kind of man is this? It was a good question, the right question to ask. What kind of man can silence a storm? As Shakespeare explains, the waves do not care even for the name of king! No earthly authority is able to perform such a miracle. And so, we are left with only one answer. What kind of man is this? Well, the demons let it slip later in the passage, for in 8:29 they cry out, ‘What do you want with us, Son of God?’ What kind of man is this? Well see here, that he is the Son of God. He is not only man, he is also God. Indeed, as Matthew goes on to make clear time and time again, as Jesus himself claims again and again, he is the divine deliverer, the king of heaven who has come to establish his kingdom on earth. As we sung earlier, he is the one who hold the very oceans in his hand. O, what is stilling a storm on a little lake in Galilee, to the one who holds all the waters of the world in the palm of his hand?
If you are here tonight and not a Christian, not following Jesus, then can I draw your attention to that question of the disciples in 8:27: ‘What kind of man is this?’ Or put more simply, ‘Who is Jesus?’ Friend, that is the most important question you could ever ask, it is the great question that you cannot fail to answer. It is on this question that all the claims of Christianity depend. And it is because of how we answer it that Christians are willing to pay the price, count the cost, suffer whatever loss is needed, to go and follow Jesus.
If Jesus is who the Bible says he is, if he is who he himself claimed to be, then however strange Christianity may first seem, it ultimately makes perfect sense. For if the wind and the waves obey him, should we not do so as well? If all of creation is at his command, if this whole world responds to his word, how can we reject him as our ruler? How can we justify refusing him as our king? It would be like a toddler telling their parents that despite living under their roof, eating at their table, enjoying all the good things their parents give them, they don’t accept their parents are in charge. They are actually autonomous, under their own authority, part of their own little toddler kingdom, get to set their own bedtime, live by their own rules. That is of course ridiculous! But friends, if Jesus is who the Bible says he is, if he really does have all authority, then he has authority over you and me. ‘Who is Jesus?’ Do you see how you answer that question will determine the direction of your life. If you want to think more about that question, on the way out you can take one of these books.
However, that question is not only a good one to reflect on if you are not yet a Christian, but see here that it is also a good one to think about if you are already following Jesus. These disciples had enough faith to follow Jesus into the boat, and yet when the storm struck, it was great fear, not faith, that they displayed. This mixture of fear and faith continues throughout the Christian life, as different outward circumstances press in and unsettle us, as we sail through different storms. Yet here we see that reminding ourselves who Jesus is, remembering that it is the one who has all authority who has promised to be with us to the end of the age, that helps to fuel our faith and fight our fear.
Focusing on who Jesus is, gives us comfort and confidence during the storms of life. It is realising who we have in the boat that will keep us from fearing the wind and waves. In one of his sermons, Spurgeon considered this and pointed out how ridiculous it is to have little faith in a great God. If God is great, why would our faith in him only be little? If he can still the storm with a single word, then why do we worry about the sea? Brothers and sisters, the next time you are feeling battered by the winds and waves of life, see that no matter what storm is raging, like Jesus, you can lie down and sleep, knowing the Lord will sustain you. As you toss and turn in bed at night, you can say to yourself those words we sung this evening, ‘Be still, my soul: the waves and wind still know. His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below.’
That’s the first reason for following Jesus: who he is. However, there is a second one in our text too. In the final miracle in 8:28-34 Jesus arrives on the other side of the lake and casts evil spirits, demons, out of two men. We again see here who Jesus is, for he is the one who has such great authority, that these workers of darkness flee before him. However, Matthew also points to what Jesus does for these two men, these two humans under demonic control. When we first meet them in 8:28, we are told that they are ‘coming from the tombs’, that is they live among the dead, and that ‘they were so violent that no one could pass that way.’ They were so ferocious and wild, it wasn’t safe to travel near or approach them. In 8:29 we hear how the demons are afraid that Jesus has come to torture them, but we see so clearly don’t we that is actually these demons who are the tormentors. The fate of the pigs illustrates what the demons were slowly doing to these two men, driving them towards total destruction. And so, when Jesus casts them out, the two men are restored, released, made whole, given peace. The calming of the wind and waves is replicated in the lives of these men. There the disciples needed saved from what was around them. Here these men need saved from what is within them. And Jesus saves them. Salvation is what Jesus does. And it is another reason why we should follow him.
The rest of the Bible makes clear, that even if we are not possessed by Satanic forces like these men, are not under the direct control of demons, we are all possessed in another way. That is, we are owned, enslaved to sin, to disobeying and defying God’s rule over our life. We may not be controlled by demons, but we are controlled by sinful desires, which are in the same way driving us towards destruction. The Bible makes clear that while God made this world good, humanity has turned away from him. Like that ridiculous toddler we have rejected his good authority and tried to set up our own little kingdoms. And for this act of divine disloyalty, betrayal, treason, we deserve punishment, judgment, condemnation, we deserve destruction. The Bible makes clear our sin is driving us to eternal suffering, which far outstrips even what these two men experienced at the hands of these demons. And yet, while Satan and sin, while death and demons, all come to kill, steal and destroy us. As we read in John 10:10, Jesus comes that we might have life, and life to the full.
The good news of Christianity, the Gospel, the central truth at the heart of what we believe at Grace Church, is that Jesus came to earth not only to calm the storm and cast out these spirits, but as the Gospel of Matthew goes on to record, he came to suffer on a cross for sin, to take the punishment that we deserve for our rebellion against God, to die in the place of all who will repent, turn from their sin, and trust in him, all who will take him to be their Lord and King. And he rose again 3 days later to demonstrate that brings indestructible life. O yes, to follow Jesus comes at a great cost, it may cost us our homes, our friends, even our lives. And yet, we see that ultimately the greatest cost was paid by Jesus, covered by our King. So that like these men, we can be released and restored, at peace with God. That is what Jesus does, that is what he will do for all who turn from their sin and trust in him, who follow him as their King.
If you are here tonight, and you are not a Christian, having seen who Jesus is and what Jesus can do, having read about the reason why Nicole and all of us here at Grace Church follow him, will you come along as well? Will you count the cost and see that Jesus is more than worth the price? That however strange following Jesus may seem, it ultimately makes senses because of who he is and what he has done. Do you see that because of who Jesus is (the king with all authority) and what he has done (saved all who will follow him), that it is in fact the Christian life that is the only life that it makes sense for anyone to live.
ALEXANDER ARRELL