The passage in Luke 14 is one of the comprehensive passages where Jesus challenges men to become His disciples [“25 Now there went with Him great multitudes: and He turned, and said unto them, 26 If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. 27 Whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple…33 So therefore whosoever he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple,” Luke 14:25-27, 33].

But there isone statement from the lips of our Lord that encapsulates in just one verse the real challenge of discipleship, in my judgment. It’s in Luke 9, verse 23, and it will serve as the basis of our study from here on tonight. Luke writes, “And He [Jesus] said unto all, If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” Now, that’s not very many words, but, my! What a powerful challenge lies within them!

Before we start examining this passage, statement by statement, I think we would do well to look at a definition of the word “disciple” itself. The world “disciple” basically means “a learner or a student,” but with the connotation of one who is a very serious student, an avid learner, an ambitious student. He is not who just dabbles in what he is studying. He’s not a “C” or a “D” or maybe even a “B” student. This is an “A” and an “A+” student. A disciple is one who has really gotten serious about what he’s trying to learn and what he’s studying.

We get the essence of it in one of Jesus’ beatitudes, I think. In Matthew 5, and verse 6, He said, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” The “hunger” in this passage and the “thirst” in this passage are really stronger terms in the Greek language than they are in those English terms. They mean the hunger of a man who is mal-nourished to the degree that he’s about to starve to death. And the thirst is of a person who is perishing for lack of moisture for his system. Such a person as that does not have to be begged to eat or to drink. They would almost do anything to find nourishment; to find moisture. That is what the term “disciple” implies, and the kind of student one should be as a disciple.

This morning, we talked a little bit about Martin Luther, the 16^th Century reformation leader. Suppose one wanted to be a disciple of Martin Luther. He would need to be a student of Martin Luther. He would need to learn everything he could about Martin Luther to really qualify as a disciple of Luther. He would be able to tell you what Luther believed; he could tell you biographical material about Luther, because he would be an avid student of Luther.

The same would be true about one who would claim to be a disciple of Jesus. He needs to be a student. How could a person be a real disciple of Martin Luther in all that that term connotes (as we shall see later in this sermon), in addition to being a student, if he were not that earnest student? You see, he could claim to be a disciple of Luther, but when he studied a little bit more (if he hadn’t studied very much) he might find a number of things that Luther taught that he didn’t agree with at all.

And of the multiplied millions of people in our world today who claim to be disciples of Jesus, I fear this is true. They have heard a few things about Jesus, and the person that He was, and some of things that He taught, and those were attractive to them. And so they say, “I’m a disciple of Jesus,” but they really know very little at all about what Jesus really taught, about what He stood for, about how He really lived. And if you try to help some of them see those things, they’ll reject them out of hand because what you try to teach them doesn’t agree with their preconceived ideas. So, you see the significance of being a real student of One Who we claim to be our Master, as a disciple.

Now, to be a real student does not make one a disciple. Every real disciple must be a real student, but not every avid student is, thereby, a disciple. One could go to school and get advanced degrees in church history, and he could have fixed most of his attention upon Martin Luther and the Reformation Period, and learned everything there was to learn about the man and what he taught, and still not be his disciple. The same is true about claiming to be a disciple of Jesus. In fact, the same IS true in the lives of some men when speaking of their “discipleship” to Jesus. There are men who have doctoral degrees in “Christology.” That is, they’ve studied about Christ. And they teach it in theological schools, but they’re infidels! They don’t even believe that Christ is the Son of God, many of them! They don’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God! Oh, they know, back and forth, what Jesus taught, but they don’t believe a word of it, as far as authority is concerned! And such men in the “divinity schools” and the “theological seminaries” have been turning out preachers in denominational pulpits for three or four generations! Is there any wonder so few people believe the Bible is the Word of God anymore!?! One must be an avid student to be a disciple, but being a student does not make one a disciple in and of itself.

This is what brings us, now, back to Jesus’ challenge. Here we find the outworking of that sincere study of Jesus and of what He taught and of what He was and Who He is. In bringing one in a practical way to be a disciple, what does it mean, Lord?

In the first place, a disciple is not just one who does the studying, but after doing the studying, he does the following. “If any man will come after Me…” And then, later in the verse, He says, “…let him take up his cross daily and follow Me.” A disciple, by Jesus’ definition, is one who has done his homework and then begins to follow.