Jesus gives us hearts that are worthy by making them cruciform — Matthew 10:34–42

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

“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. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. 

“Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly not lose their reward.” Matthew 10:34–42

Jesus gives us hearts that are worthy by making them cruciform.
1. Jesus makes us evaluate worth
2. Jesus gives us cruciform worth

If you’ve ever spent time on Facebook marketplace, you know about the crossthrough line. Facebook marketplace is where you can list literally anything for sale and people can message you to barter for it. And the crossthrough line is always telling. Because if I, hypothetically, were to list a faux-wood wardrobe that I thought was worth $200, and nobody messaged me, so I decided to lower the price to $150 to see if people would be interested at that price, what Facebook does is it edits the listing to have $200 with a crossthrough line and then shows the new price of $150 next to it. And guess what’s worse: if still no one messages me at $150 and I lower the price to $100, Facebook says $200 crossed through, $150 crossed through, then finally new price of $100.

Which is probably enticing for buyers, but for me as a seller, this is embarassing! It’s saying that here I have an item that I thought would be worth $200 to people. But not a single person wanted to buy it for that much. And then, with my tail between my legs, I thought it might be worth $150 to people. Still not a single person. So two strikethroughs sit on the listing showing the city that my sense of furniture style is out of touch.

Finding out how much something is worth can be a dangerous exercise. Because different things are worth different amounts to different people, right. And different people are worth more or less to other people, right. Not in a money way, but for example, I’ve gotten to meet many of your parents over the last year, and I hope I get to spend more time with them, they’re wonderful people, but I don’t want to trade them for my parents. And I’m sure you would say the same. Our families are worth more than just about anything to us in this world, right?

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. That word, worthy, was the word used when a person was out in the marketplace buying something. They would put, for example, grain on the scale against a counterwreight and see how much money it was worthy of being purchased for. Jesus says that if you love your family more than him, you’re not worthy of him, you don’t weigh up in the scale.

And maybe you’re thinking: we just had some challenging words from Jesus last week, and now this is even more challenging this week! And you’re right, these are some challenging words, but as Jesus explains them we’ll see that they are also some of most wonderful words in the whole Bible. And not only that, they’re a great way to finish up our worship series, when we’ve been seeing how Jesus manages our hearts, guided our desires, our goals, and our future. We’ve seen that Jesus connects us to the unlimited supply of selflessness that is the Holy Spirit. We’ve seen how Jesus gives us access to the God that is love. We’ve seen that Jesus is not afraid to use the “worst” of sinners in his plans. We’ve seen that Jesus’ message is an honor and privilege to share with others. And now, we’re getting an all-encompassing job description. This is what it takes to have a heart that desires to serve Jesus above all else. Today we’ll see that Jesus gives us hearts that are worthy by making them cruciform.

1. Jesus makes us evaluate worth

This is the final portion of Matthew 10, which is the chapter when Jesus sends out his disciples and gives them a long list of instructions for how to carry out his message. Last week, we heard that although the message of Jesus is so wonderful that it is always the single best thing a human can ever hear, because our hearts are naturally selfish sharing the message can lead to divisions. And we heard that it’s not Jesus’ goal to cause those divisions, they are the collateral damage. But here Jesus says: do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. Uh-oh. Sure seems like Jesus did, in fact, come to cause divisions. But these words don’t seem like the Jesus we are familiar with. After all, what did the angels sing when Jesus was born? Peace to earth. And what was Jesus’ first word to his disciples after he rose from the dead? Peace. And what was likely the last word he said to them as he was ascending into heaven? He likely spoke the blessing that we close our services with, the last word of which is intentionally, peace. So why does Jesus say he did not come to bring peace?

Thankfully, Jesus explains what he means. What he means is that he came to force our hearts to evaluate what is worth the most to us. Anyone who loves their father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. It’s not that difficult to love him more than we love the traffic on our commute, or more than we love humidity, so Jesus doesn’t say that. He says that we need to love him, to desire him, to consider him worthy, more than everything else, even more than our closest relationships.

Which it meant to make us slow down and think. Jesus doesn’t want us to go through life like a golden retriever, constantly being distracted by a new shiny thing every ten seconds. He wants us to slow down and evaluate he worth of the things we spend our days focusing on. And he does this because he knows that our hearts naturally get distracted easily, and without attention we would drift into becoming like the Israelites in the first reading. They essentially got bored of following the true God and started worshipping this exciting new idol. It’s easy for us to look at them and think “how could they waste time worshipping that idol when God was right there?” Jesus here tells us to try and take a step back and evaluate what our lives say about who we love most. The famous theologian Augustine put it this way, that we often disorder our loves. That a great deal of our problems in life come when we order our loves wrongly. It’s not wrong to love your parents, of course not. But it is wrong to love your parents more than God, to seek their approval and value their words more than God’s. It’s not wrong to love your friends, of course not. But it is wrong to love your friends more than God, to seek their approval and value their words more than God’s. It’s not wrong to love yourself, of course not. But it is wrong to love yourself more than God, to do things you approve of and say things you want to say, even if God does not condone those things.

And we have to admit, when we look back at our lives and we see whether we’ve loved Jesus most, desired him, been worthy of him, we haven’t. Why do we do this? Why do we go astray so often? It comes down to where we get our sense of self-worth from. If we think that having the perfect family is the most important thing in our lives, we’ll do anything to manufacture those relationships, even at the cost of sweeping sins under the rug. If we think that having friends is the most important thing in our lives, if that’s where we get our sense of worthiness from, then we’ll do anything to keep as many friends as we can, even if it means going out of the way to hide our Christian beliefs. If I think that my opinion of myself is the most important thing, if I measure our days by my evaluation of how worthy I am of myself, I’ll sacrifice just about anything else to chase whatever I happen to be in the mood for. Whatever it is, we can seek our worth in so many places. But Jesus warns us against this because he knows it’s always a wild goose chase. Friends may give us worth for a while, until they drift away. Family may give us a sense of worth, until we realize that no family is perfect and most families are far from it. Loving ourselves certainly gives us a feeling of worth, until we feel the guilt of trampling on others to care for ourselves. Whoever finds their life will lose it. If you seek around to find yourself and hand over your worthiness to something earthly, eventually you will lose that worthiness. If you love anything more than God, that thing will eventually leave you.

2. Jesus gives us cruciform worth

Whoever finds their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. We can sense that this is an amazing promise from Jesus, but what does it actually mean to lose our life for his sake, and then find our life? It means that when we slot our loves into the right positions, it feels a little bit like death. This is why he calls it carrying our cross. It feels like we’re carrying our cross up to the hill, or in modern terms, it feels like walking into the room with the electric chair. It feels a little bit like death to give up loving our family members, or our friends, or ourselves, the most. It feels like death to value some important part of your life a little less so that you can value God more.

But when you rightly order your loves, you find the life that Jesus wanted you to live. Because when you give your life to Jesus, you are recognizing that no one can give you more worth than he has already given you. The worth that Jesus ascribes to you does not change, like other places you might look to for your worth. It is set. And it looks like a cross. Your life is worth not how many friends you have, not how well your family gets along, not even how highly you think of yourself. Your life is worth the life of the Son of God. That’s the price God was willing to pay to regain his relationship with you. That’s how much God loves you. Despite all the times when we have failed to love God more than anything else, he still paid this exorbitant price for us. I can’t put it any better than the hymnwriter Keith Getty did in what we just sang: Two wonders here that I confess, my worth and my unworthiness. My value fixed, my ransom paid, at the cross.

So now you see how loving Jesus is: he wants you to know that if you settle for anything other than the cross as your worth, you’re settling too low. If you settle for the amount of friends you have, your relationship with your parents, how packed your weekends are, how free your weekends are, how much money is in your bank account “how much is he worth.” Are any of those things the greatest indicator of what makes you you? No, Jesus has made you worth so much more. When we don’t live for Jesus, we’re not living up to our worth.

Now just because Jesus has paid the same price for us all doesn’t mean we’re all exactly the same product. We’re all quite different, and our lives given to Jesus will never look exactly alike. You can have hobbies, you have different gifts. But the uniting feature is that because your worth is named at the cross, Jesus gives you a cross-shaped heart. A cruciform heart. As you go through your life, you do and say and think and believe among your hobbies in the same way that Jesus did. You approach [temptations] in the same way that Jesus did, knowing that you are worth the life of the Son of God.

Jesus has set your worth. No matter what anyone else says or how anyone else treats you, to your God you are worth the life of his Son Jesus. And so if you were to act like something like set your worth, you’d be lowering your own price. But when we lose that life and give our life to Jesus, we are living up to our worth. We are living a life worth living. We’re carrying our cross.