I have a vivid memory of being in church listening to a man preach in what sounded to my south coast ears as a very heavy accent. It was the evening service and the church was packed with 600+ people. The man sat for the duration of his 70 minute talk. He told the story of how he had been imprisioned for 14 years in Caesescu’s Communist Romania. I didn’t remember it but his wife also was there and gave greetings. She was imprisoned at the same time as him in a separate prison.

Today I got to listen to the talk again. It was touched by delightful humour, he said they had been married for 100 years – 50 years each, and not a few cultural gaps between 1987 post-commuist culture and 2020s in London. But a few things were really remarkable to me:

  1. the date the talk was given: 1/11/1987 – 2 years and 2 months before the fall of the communist regime.
  2. the date the talk was given: 1/11/1987 – when I was 9.5 years old. What a vision my parents must have had to take me to church for that profound experience. Indeed I started attending the evening service for the next few years as my parents alternated who got to go twice on Sunday and I got some precious ‘grown up’ time one on one with each of them (this in addition to the excellent morning sunday school [we had a boys group for 11-14s with 30 lads in it]).
  3. a story he told from Communist China, in which he references a group of villagers oppressed in the Boxer Rebellion. All their bibles and hymnals were burnt in front of them, save for one page a brave boy snatched from the fire. The passage saved: Matthew 16.

Matthew 16 is the passage I am preparing to preach on today. Earlier in the chapter is the key encouragement to Peter that ‘the gates of hell will not prevail against the church’ and in today’s passage Mt 16: 21-28 Jesus predicts both his death, shows why it is necessary and tells us we have to walk the same way he did. ‘If anyone wants to be my disciple let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me..’

Rico Tice has done an excellent job of expositing this passage. He argues that we need to be honest about the cost of following Jesus, and the cost of not following Jesus.

He looks at the word ‘must’: Jesus ‘must’

  1. go and suffer many things
  2. be killed
  3. on the third day be raised to life

He points out that this word means ‘it is necessary’ and the reason Jesus gives through Matthew’s gospel is the one given to Mary in Matthew 1:21: “he will save the people from their sins”. He then walks us through Matthew’s gospel to explain the consequence of our sins as outlined by Jesus:

Sin is an enemy intruder that leads to destruction in this life and the world to come. In Matthew 5: 22 Jesus warns against ‘the fire of hell’ for someone gripped with anger for their brother. In Matthew 5:29 Jesus warns about the “whole body being thrown into hell” if a part of our body gets controlled by sin and leads the rest of us astray. In Matthew 7 Jesus warns us to ‘enter the narrow gate’ that few find, as the narrow way leads to destruction, in Matthew 8:12 he prophesies that poeple who think they are sons of the kingdom will be ‘thrown into outer darkness where there is weaping and nashing of teeth. In Matthew 10:29 he cautions the disciples to fear God ‘who can destroy both body and soul in hell’ and in Matthew 13:49 describing the end of the age Jesus says the angels will come and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnance where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ No wonder Rico calls Jesus the ‘theologian of hell’, and here in Matthew is clearly laying out the cost of not following Jesus as described by Jesus himself.

So this is the backdrop to the ‘must’ of Matthew 16. In verse 4 Jesus describes the people of his day as ‘an evil and adulterous generation.’ Those are the people for whom he must: 1) go and suffer; 2) die and 3) ultimately be raised back to life for. Why? Because God in his loving mercy does not want to give those people what they deserve. Jesus must die for them.

Very rarely will anyone die for someone of consequence but God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still God’s enemies, Christ died for us

It was moving listening to Richard Wurmbrand preach again, filled not with hatred for his own ‘evil and adulterous generation’ who had torrtured and imprisoned him in a cell so small he could not walk in it, and beaten the soles of his feet with rods. He spoke as a man who knew that he too was saved by grace. A beneficiary of the grace that can save us from hell. A saved sinner reaching out his hands to save the guards around him with this message of life.

He had learnt the slow way, watching ministerial colleagues die around him, that ‘what will it profit someone to gain the whole world, yet lose their very soul’. He knew that ‘whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.’ He knew that hell in this life could not compare with the glories of the life to come, but trying to acheive your own personal definition of heaven on earth now could not compare with the horrors of hell to come for those who don’t accept Jesus’ substitutionary death and warnings to repent.

But there is, as Richard Wurmbrand knew so well, a cost of following Jesus, and we have to be prepared to talk about that in our 21st century church. It’s a cost I don’t instinctively want to pay. And I doubt you want to pay either. It’s a cost that can only be paid by putting to death whatever remains of our sinful nature. But as martyred missionary Jim Elliot, once said, ‘he is no fool, who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.’

So have a listen to one who knew that reality through a very real ‘14 years of hurt’. It blessed my 9 year old ears, and does my adult ears good to be reminded of too.

And you can view one of my talks today inspired by this at a Christ Church W4 service recorded here – nb: it’s worth tuning in for the extended worship after the talk.