The following sermon was delivered in Truro Episcopal Church on June 26, 1977. The speaker is the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Church. His topic is, Count the Cost. 

Take our minds and think through them. Take my lips and speak through them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you and for your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Amen. It was 850 B.C. and a man named Ahab was king of Israel.

But the real power behind the throne was his wife Jezebel. She got him to do just about whatever she pleased. And if you think women's lib is a new idea, you need to meet Jezebel.

The thing for which her name is most remembered is that it was under her leadership with Ahab's acquiescence that right in the very heart of Israel amongst God's chosen people, Baal worship became institutionalized. The worship of this ancient Canaanite deity, fertility god, nature god, that was accompanied with the grossest sort of immorality and cult ritual prostitution was practiced right in the temple of Israel. Mind you, the significance of all that is this was while they still continued to call themselves God's people and play lip service to the Lord.

Elijah, in many ways the conscience of Israel, one of the great and mighty prophets, saw what was happening to God's people and prayed that there would be no rain. Kind of a symbolic expression of the drought, the aridity of spirituality amongst the people. Our relationship with God has dried up.

Let that be reflected in nature itself. You worship a nature God? Let's see what He can do for you.

So Elijah prayed that there be no rain and for three years there was no rain. Then one afternoon King Ahab runs into Elijah. Some meeting.

And Ahab says, is it you, you troubler of Israel? Recognize the power of Elijah's prayer. Elijah comes back at him.

It's not I who has troubled Israel, but you. He says, I tell you what, let's have a little contest. You and Jezebel have 450 prophets of Baal who live there right within the palace.

Another 400 prophets of Asherah, the female counterpart. I'm the only one I know of who's been faithful to God. 150 to 1.

Baal against Yahweh. How about a little contest? And Ahab says, that sounds like a fine idea.

So they gather all the people to the top of Mount Carmel. And Elijah says to the prophets of Baal, you go first. Prepare a sacrifice, lay it on the wood on your altar, and ask Baal to send down fire.

When you're done, I'll pray to the Lord. the same kind of a prayer for my sacrifice. And the God who answers by fire, let Him be God.

The people said, that's fantastic. That is better than the Indianapolis 500. So they begin.

They lay their sacrifice out on the altar and they begin praying. And the Scripture says they prayed from morning to late afternoon, running around, jumping, screaming, pleading with their God, Send down fire. Come on, Baal, light my fire.

Nothing happens. Elijah mocks them. You've got to really respect Elijah at this point.

850 prophets against one. And he says, you're going to have to shout louder than that. We don't have this in nice English translation.

It's much too delicate. But as near as we can tell, the literal thing that he said was, Perhaps Baal is out talking to someone or sitting on the toilet somewhere. Nothing happens.

It says they cut themselves with lances till the blood flowed freely. Nothing. Nothing.

It comes the afternoon. Elijah gathers together twelve stones. One for each of the tribes of Israel.

And lays upon it the sacrifice. That's not enough. Before he prays.

He says cover it with water. There are four large barrels. Standing by.

They pour it. They drench it with water. He says that's not enough.

Do it again. Do it a third time. Twelve stones and twelve barrels of water.

Thing is drenching wet. Water is flowing in the trench. Around the altar.

And then he prays. God, prove yourself. And that's what we heard Mary Carlin read.

The Lord answers from heaven and fire comes down and consumes not only the sacrifice itself, but the wood, the stones, the dirt, the water, it laps it up in this great conflagration of power. And the people reply, The Lord, He is God. The Lord, He is God.

That issue, most dramatically expressed in this particular incident, runs through Scripture. In many ways, it's the theme of Scripture. Either God is God, or He's no God.

Either the Lord is Lord of all, or He's not Lord at all. And we repeatedly have prophets and leaders and kings, finally apostles and Jesus himself, pressing the issue, as Joshua said, choose this day whom you will serve. Don't be like Jezebel, thinking you can have it both ways.

See, it wasn't merely that she worshipped Baal, but that at the same time, she claimed to be faithful to the Lord, hedging her bets. It's like the Romans, with their altar to the unknown God, We'll worship all the gods we know about, and just in case we've missed one, we'll have an extra altar to Him. Choose this day.

Either God is God, or He's no God at all. We turn to the New Testament lesson, and we see Jesus pressing this very same issue in quite a different context. This is one of the hard sayings of Jesus.

I think if you look closely you'll see that Jesus spent probably more time discouraging people from following Him than He ever spent encouraging them it's not that He didn't want them to follow Him but it's that He was warding off any kind of premature allegiance and He says wait take a look at what's involved at one point He uses the analogy of somebody starting out to build a tower He says how foolish it would be if somebody set out to build a tower without first determining if he had enough money to complete the job. He gets about halfway done and runs out of resources and everybody laughs at him. He says, don't be like that.

If you're going to follow me, be aware of what it costs. And in this reading we had from Luke's Gospel, chapter 9, he puts his finger on the two areas that most of us find hardest to yield to him. Our possessions and our families.

Man comes up to him and said, Lord, I'm ready to go with you anywhere. And Jesus replies, Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. are you prepared to follow me there to a place of not only having no home of your own but no bed of your own no pillow of your own are you prepared to abandon the things of your life to the point of having nothing of your own this is Jesus the Lord to whom belongs everything in heaven and on earth and yet he's divested himself of ownership and treat it as if it didn't belong to Him.

Are you prepared to follow me there? He says. It's important that we notice that Scripture nowhere condemns ownership per se.

It doesn't say that possessions in and of themselves are bad things. But it's when possessions begin to become idols to us. Begin to get in the way of our allegiance to the Lord.

begin to occupy His place, begin to become a God before God. Scripture is often misquoted. People say money is the root of all evil.

The Bible does not say that. But it says the love of money, the inordinate, insatiable lust for more, the intractable clinging to what we already have, the unwillingness to abandon it if God calls us to something else. John D. Rockefeller was reported as having been interviewed about his $10 million a year income.

Somebody asked him, is that enough? And Rockefeller is supposed to have replied, well, frankly, just a little bit more would help to make ends meet. I'll follow you anywhere.

Even to the place of having nowhere to lay your head? Are you willing to let go of possessions? You know, a lot of Christians are afraid to follow Jesus into tithing.

They're afraid. They've told me so. I'd like to tithe, but I've got all these bills.

As if God could on the one hand lead us into a set of responsibilities which on the other He makes it impossible for us to fulfill because He wants us to tithe. As if God is some kind of schizophrenic. But they're afraid to take Him at His word in the area of possessions.

Came as a great liberation to Karen and me when we were in the prep school ministry when we finally stopped wrestling with the question every time a prep schooler came in and said, may I borrow this, that, or the other thing? May I watch your television? May I use what's ever in the refrigerator?

Will you drive me over to Avon Old Farms, etc.? And each time we had to ask ourselves, how much does that interfere with what I had already planned to do? Is this a high enough priority? How much of a ministry is it to that kid?

Finally, we came to the point of saying the answer is yes. The answer is yes. If God cannot protect our schedule and our property, then He's no God.

If He wants to send somebody to use what we have, it's available. What a sense of liberty there was in finally arriving there. Many of you know the story of Jim and Betty Elliot.

I've referred to it from this pulpit. A fantastic missionary couple who about 20 years ago went to South America and Jim and four other men were killed by the Ucca Indians after years of preparing to go and bring the gospel to them. People thought what a senseless waste.

Especially when those missionaries had guns with which they could have defended themselves. Years after that, I read a little footnote to the story. That at one particular point, Jim and his wife Betty had realized that what they had been doing was technically illegal.

They had been sending letters back home, and in the large envelope to their parents, they would enclose many other little notes to various friends and relatives. And it turns out that was technically illegal, that they should have put each note into a separate envelope with a separate stamp. You know what they did?

They went out and bought what they estimated to be the amount of postage that they had defrauded the government of, and as an act of obedience, they burned it. And the reporter said, how senseless. What a waste.

Except that maybe it's that kind of scrupulous denial of greed, denial of self-interest in little things that would lead to the point of a willingness to pour out your whole life in offering to God. Their offering has turned a whole subcontinent to the Lord Jesus Christ. Missionaries have gone out from that very tribe and those very Indians who took Jim's life.

Either Jesus Christ is Lord of our possessions or He's not Lord at all. I said some are afraid to follow Him into tithing. Some are afraid to follow Him into simple honesty.

If I tell the truth about my expense account, I'm never going to make my bills. is he Lord of our possessions? He says count the cost.

Are you willing to come to that place of abandoning what you have to me so that if I want to use it for my purposes, it's mine? Let me tell you, if you're afraid of tithing, the Christian standard is not tithing. The Christian standard is everything belongs to Him.

So that we come to where Luther said, we own it as if we didn't own it. We're simply caretakers. If He wants it, it's His.

Of course, the promise is there. That untold blessing comes in that kind of obedience. And you will never ever know the blessing.

until you're willing to come to that obedience. Second issue is family. Undoubtedly even harder.

The vast majority of the time, our family responsibilities will coincide precisely with our allegiance to Jesus. But just every now and then, there may come a time when what He would have of us conflicts with what they would have of us. One man says, Lord, I want to follow You, but I've got to bury my father.

Another man says, Lord, let me say farewell to those at home first. Both of those are perfectly good and legitimate concerns. But you see what they're saying.

I want to give You my allegiance, but not now, not yet. first things first. And Jesus' reply is, this is the first thing.

No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. If I had followed my Father's wishes, I would not be in the ministry. sometimes we've got to make choices against what our parents even our husbands and wives or our children might have of us and again Jesus is asking where is your allegiance?

who comes first? one of his hardest words of all if anyone comes to me and does not hate father, mother, wife, children, brother, sister yes, his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Now clearly he doesn't mean hatred in the sense of rejection and anger and animosity and all that.

But what he means is that our allegiance to him would be so much superior to any other claim upon our lives that by comparison we would as readily abandon those things as if we hated them. That's costly. We in the Christian church are too eager for conversions.

Too eager for members. Come to Jesus. Come to church.

Sign on the dotted line. Join the fellowship. Without ever, ever going into the cost that Jesus says must be counted.

We're so anxious for new birth that we produce spiritual abortion. Now this hard word comes also with a promise. There is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not receive manifold more in this time and in the age to come, eternal life.

But it's a matter of priority. first things first is absolutely right but Jesus wants to be the first thing the very first either he's Lord of all or he's not Lord at all and probably a whole lot less dramatically but no less significantly Jesus would speak to us as he did to those contemporaries of Elijah you cannot have it the Lord and Baal you cannot have it God and Mammon you cannot have it the Lord Jesus and let us pray Lord, that brings us up short. We look into our own lives in the light of such a calling and were overwhelmed at how perforated they are by competing allegiances and other values.

We recognize, Lord, that You spoke these hard words in graciousness and love, and that You never asked anybody to give up something for Your sake and the Gospel, but that You promised him that in that self-denial he would find himself. and that you would give to him more generously than he would ever grasp for himself. And so Lord, we dare to ask you this morning to speak specifically and particularly to us, to lay your finger upon those things in our lives which have become, as it were, other gods competing with God.

and give us the boldness and the faith to dare to abandon them and to put You first. For Your great name's sake. Amen.

Amen.