This is my way of meditatively reflecting and praying the lesson that I will preach on.
I offer it for you meditation and reflection and comment if you so desire.
Gracious Savior, I hear you speaking to those whom the Holy Spirit has turned by the Gospel to You as their Lord and Savior. In turning these people to you, the Holy Spirit has turned them to you as their source of life and salvation, their sole source of truth, their sole source of good, their sole source of God’s divine favor, forgiveness, comfort, consolation and hope.
In turning the believer to you alone for these things and much more, the Holy Spirit has turned the believer away from all other sources of such things. To live the faith is to live the daily repentance, the daily turning away from all other sources of such things and turning unto you. So desperate is our need to turn away from things worldly to you through whom all things were made that it requires a hatred, that is a rejection, of all things earthly as the true and sure source of our salvation and eternal life.
I give thanks to you that you have not prohibited me from loving my family, caring for them and doing the good you would have me do for them. Sure I may love them as you loved your mother and provided for her earthly and spiritual needs. Yet in your entire ministry and in even in your passion and death, you did not look to or cry out to your earthly mother but it was to your heavenly Father from whom you were begotten and from whom you had received all good things. It was not to your earthly mother, but your heavenly Father that you commended your spirit in death. And surely it was not your mother who raised you from the dead or seated you at the Father’s right hand, but God the Father himself.
As you received all things from the Father for the purpose of using and sharing all things to accomplish the good He had given you, so I as a believer, having received you and all good things in you, am to use these to accomplish the good that God has given me to do at home, at church, etc. Here is where my cross is to be found and it is here that I am to take it up and share in the work that is yours.
To refuse to bear this cross, that is suffer for doing the good given me, is to prevent myself from being your disciple. Surely bearing the cross does not make me a disciple, but inasmuch as I refuse to let Christ live through me, I have refused to follow and thus cut myself off from Christ who makes and keeps me his disciple.
In the desiring to build a tower, you set before me the baptismal desire to work out of the salvation you have given to me with fear and trembling. I can count the cost by the daily and hourly collapse of my own righteousness.
I see that the good that I would build, I have not built. I also see that the very thing I do not desire to work and build, that I have worked and built. In this I find that I have nothing with which to begin, to work or to complete this tower. Truly the building and the completion of this tower is as wholly dependent upon your grace as is the desire to build it. Build in me as you have built me into your holy house that I may be your tower, your servant.
I can make no fight for my failure to build, to carry the cross you have given me. The legions of my sins and your law against me are too great for me. By my sins I have removed myself a great way off, I therefore send before your throne that which you sent to make peace for me, your only begotten Son. He, with the delegation of his passion and death met your terms and asked your forgiveness for my peace.
Again, you remind me that as a disciple, there can be no building or completion in the faith, and there will be no peace giving rescue for me in my failures to meet your divine building codes, unless I give up everything else as the source of these wondrous blessings.
In speaking of the salt, you speak of be me as the baptized living by the grace of God through faith. Here you clarify the reality of what happens when I or any other believer turns elsewhere for these blessed gifts that are freely given through your Word and Sacraments.
Lord, by your grace I hear, help my hearing that I may hear and rightly believe that you alone are my tower and my peace. Amen.
Now great crowds accompanied [Jesus], and he turned and said to them, “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. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
“Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Luke 14:25-35 (ESV)
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