Dear Friends,
There are a few passages in the Bible that you might easily misunderstand but should not. Today’s devotional deals with one of them. If you find something that doesn’t seem to make sense, ask someone who knows more about the Bible than you do and it will likely be cleared up. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Luke 14:25-26 (ESV)

  25 Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, 26 “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.

“Do not misunderstand this passage. Our Lord does not use the word ‘hate’ in our common acceptation of the term, for no man would hate his own life; but he means that the love of all these must be secondary to the love we bear to him. Compared with our love to our Lord, all lower love must be more like hate. We must be willing to give up everything — to give up even ourselves — our entire selves — to him, for Christ will have all or nothing. He will never divide the human heart with any rival. If we profess to serve him, we must have him for our only Master, and not attempt to serve two masters. I fear that this truth greatly needs to be enforced nowadays, for we have numbers of so-called Christians, who are worldlings first, and then Christians afterwards. We have a great many professors who might be accurately described by the words of a little girl concerning her father. When someone asked her, ‘Is your father a Christian?’ she replied, ‘Yes, but he has not worked much at it lately.’ There are plenty of that sort. Christianity is their trade, their business, their profession; but they have not worked much at it lately, they carry it on very slightly indeed. Let it not be so with us; if we would be followers of Christ, our whole hearts must be his.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLVI, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1900), p. 371]