#128- Destination Transformation

A new year brings new journeys. Are you "cruising to nowhere" with your faith? Jesus calls us to intentional transformation, not just religious activity. In Luke 9:57-62, He challenges three would-be followers with a powerful truth: following Him requires wholehearted commitment, no delays, and keeping our eyes fixed on Him alone.

How can you be intentional in your spiritual transformation this year? What will you look like at the end of the year? Will you look the same, or will you truly look more like Jesus?  

The journey starts today.

To learn more about the Trinity Church family visit our website at https://trinitychurchsugarland.org; or find us on Facebook and Instagram

Transcript

Transcript: Destination Transformation

 This is our first service for 2026 and we're starting a series called charting the course or charting your course, mapping out your year with clarity and purpose.

Our reading today comes from Luke chapter 9, 57 to 62.

It reads as follows.

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, I will follow you wherever you go.

Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

To another he said, Follow me.

But he said, Lord, first let me go and bury my father.

But Jesus said to him, let the dead bury their own dead.

But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Another said, I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.

Jesus said to him, no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

As we start the year with this passage of scripture, I want us to reflect on one or two questions.

What is it that you hope to accomplish in 2026?

We spend a lot of time setting goals for ourselves within the natural world, whether it's academic or professionally, but do we set ourselves spiritual goals?

And when we set goals, we really are saying we want to be intentional about the way this year turns out.

How do you hope your faith will grow and mature in 2026?

Have you given that thought?

Have you put a plan in place to ensure that by the end of the year, things look a lot different than from the beginning of the year?

Are we being intentional about our spiritual development?

Something that's really strange that I came across a couple of years ago that I thought really sounded odd, but in fact is a real thing, is that you can in fact sign up

pay for, and get on a cruise that is called a cruise that goes to nowhere.

 In fact, you can do the same thing with a train.

There are some places where you can jump on a train and they'll drive you, although the train will head out for who knows how many miles in a direction to nowhere, maybe stop for a while and turn around and come back.

Exactly the same with the cruise.

It really is a lot of movement, a lot of energy, and a lot of going nowhere, really.

In the end, we understand it's actually about the recreation.

It's a recreational trip where we get on a ship and we enjoy ourselves for three, four, five days, whatever it is.

We don't mind where we go as long as we can have fun going along.

It's about recreation, socialization, hanging out with people.

Unfortunately, in so many instances, especially within the West, Christianity has become very much like a cruise to nowhere.

A lot of activity, doing a lot of things, but really no real destination in sight.

Do we really kind of live our lives in such a way that we are moving towards something in ourselves and in our relationship with God?

Yes, ultimately, heaven is our destination.

But surely God has got work for us to do even in the here and now.

Too many people and in too many situations within the Western Christian world, we find that has become more about recreation, even entertainment, socialization, all the adherence of traditions because, well, we've always just done it that way.

And so let's keep doing it the same way so that we can feel a sense of comfort in the traditions that we have.

We might even be doing or kind of exercising our faith purely because we have a sense of conscience and somehow we believe that by engaging in religious activity, we can actually appease our conscience.

We feel better about ourselves.

As we reflect on this, we understand that Jesus called us.

In fact, in Matthew 4, verse 19, Jesus reaches out.

He calls some of his disciples.

He says to them, follow me and I will make you fish for people. Some translations say fishers of men.

Well, what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?

What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?

What qualifies us to be called Christian or Christ ones?

Is it purely just church membership?

We sign on the dotted line and say we are a part of a congregation.

I'm not sure that's right.

Maybe we think it's the attendance of weekly services that makes us an attendance.

A Christian, I'm not sure that's it either.

Sometimes we think it's good works.

We might even think it could be our practices as in praying or reading our Bible that makes us a Christian.

The truth is, a Christian or a Christ one or a follower of Christ, a disciple of Jesus, is someone who has answered the call to follow Jesus, in other words, follow in the ways of Jesus, and even as he says, to be made.

Jesus says, I will make you.

Are we submitting ourselves to be made and to the making of Jesus in our lives?

As Christ followers, we are intentionally journeying to the place of transformation.

That's why today's sermon is called Destination Transformation, where our lives emulate that of Christ.

Really, the challenge is, what will we look like at the end of 2026?

Will we look the same, maybe a little bit worse?

Or will we truly look more like Jesus, the one we profess to follow?

There's a few helps that this text gives us, practical helps in our journey towards transformation.

And I want to draw a couple of them.

Jesus speaks to three people here.

One person reaches out to him, he reaches out to another, and so we see the interaction taking place.

In the first instance, we see in Luke 9.57, as they were going along the road, someone said to him, someone reaches out to Jesus and says, I will follow you wherever you go.

Jesus replies and says, not come and be a part of this.

He says, I want to make this statement.

One of the key concepts to following Jesus is we need to attach ourselves to Jesus.

And in saying that, I mean we should not be attaching ourselves to the things of this world.

We need to follow Jesus wherever he goes and understand that comes at a cost.

How do we as the church respond?

Think about this for a second.

When someone even comes to us as a congregation or an individual and says, I want to follow Jesus.

Well, the truth is, as soon as somebody comes and says that, we get really, really excited.

We think that possibly maybe even revival has broken out.

Something beautiful has happened.

Somebody has reached out and we embrace it all heartily as we should.

The first encounter with someone who does just that, who reaches out and says, I will follow you, is cause for celebration.

In fact, we do everything that we can to bring them in, to embrace them and to love them.

Jesus seems to respond a little bit differently to the way we do.

If somebody came to our churches and said, I'd like to follow Jesus, can I join your church?

And we said, well, you know, foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests.

Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.

I'm not sure that's the best way to get people into the life of the church.

Jesus seemingly, and we could even make an argument of the fact that he is discouraging the enthusiasm of this follower by doing something very interesting, pointing out the discomfort that is associated with being a follower of Jesus.

 And that's important for us in our current times because we want faith on our terms.

We want faith the way we want, in the right tradition that we want, with our expectations met.

Because we live in a consumeristic society, we have attached ourselves to the comforts of this world.

And so when we come to Jesus, we want him to fit into our world rather than we fit into his world.

We want a comfortable faith, fits into our schedule, meets our wants, meets our needs, meets our personal expectations.

And if we think about this, this sounds very much like the rich young ruler in Luke chapter 18 in verses 18 to 30.

He comes to Jesus.

He says, I've done all this.

What all must I do?

What else must I do?

He says, sell all you have and follow me.

And that was just too much.

because he was attached to something else, and Jesus was saying, you need to let go of those attachments.

Your attachment needs to be with Jesus.

We see the same thing coming out in Matthew 6, 24, where he speaks about finance, but this can relate to so many other things in our world.

Finance, our comforts, our wants, our relationships, our habits, all these things, even our ideologies, some of those things need to be surrendered to Jesus.

Matthew 6.24, his teaching says no one can serve two masters.

We cannot be attached to two masters.

For a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other.

We can't serve both God and wealth.

And so really, as we start this here and we want to journey towards transformation, the question is, does Jesus have your heart?

Does he have your whole heart?

And are you more in love with Jesus than all the comforts of this world?

So instead of seeing possibly this is a detachment from the world, maybe we can turn it around and say, why don't we attach to something more attractive, something more beautiful?

Why don't we attach ourselves to Jesus this coming year?

The second point I want to make from this, and this comes from the second person that Jesus actually reaches out and speaks to.

Here's the point I want to make.

Embrace FOMO, the fear of missing out.

It's a simple thing, and we've come to use that term kind of just in passing if we say somebody has FOMO.

It means they don't want to miss any opportunity because there's excitement. There's something beautiful happening.

There's something that they don't want to be on the outskirts.

They want to be on the inside.

They want to be a part of it.

When it comes to Jesus, we need to have that same feeling.

We should fear missing out on all that God has for us.

Luke chapter 9, 59 to 60, Jesus says to another, follow me.

And this person responds, Lord, first let me go and bury my father.

But Jesus said to him, let the dead bury their own dead.

But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Sounds a bit harsh, actually.

But if we understand what's happening here, what Jesus is saying, don't delay.

Don't make excuses.

Choose today.

And I say embrace FOMO because we put off giving God our whole heart.

We put off wholehearted devotion for so long that we actually do miss out on all that God has for us.

Craig Keener puts it this way in commenting on this passage of scripture.

He says, a son whose father had just died would probably not be talking with a rabbi at that moment.

He would be immediately seen to his father's burial.

He wouldn't have time to have that conversation.

Scholars have noted that I must first bury my father sometimes functions as a polite request for delay, not because the father has died or the father is even sick, but it is a polite request to delay until one day when eventually his father dies, he may well then at that point follow.

You know, we have that all the time.

What are you waiting for?

What are you waiting for?

What is delaying a wholehearted response to Jesus?

What is your when?

When this finally happens, if this finally takes place, at this point in my life, what is it that you are using as an excuse to wholeheartedly follow Jesus?

When it comes to young people, I always used to have a conversation with them.

And one of the first things they would say is, we want to live our lives to the full.

We want to experience all that this world has for us.

And then later, maybe later, when we've done all that, then we will follow Jesus.

Well, truthfully, by doing that, really what people are saying is that to kind of engage in and fall for and to be caught in the trappings of this life is actually better than following Jesus.

I'm not sure that's true.

We don't want to get caught up in those things.

We have to undo all those things.

We have to come back from all of that and start our journey with Jesus.

In delaying our decision to wholeheartedly follow Jesus, we

We're living a life or living a life for Jesus.

We're saying it's actually to live a life for Jesus is less appealing than a life.

Living a life without Jesus is less appealing than a life lived for Jesus.

The more we know Jesus and as we grow older, as we grow in our intimacy, you know, one thing we come up all the time and come up with is we just wish we had more time.

We wish we knew him more.

We wish we had started the journey to knowing Jesus earlier.

It's so difficult to have those conversations sometimes.

But as we grow and mature, the more we know of Him, the more we want to know of Him, the more He touches our soul, the more we want Him in our lives and in our existence.

I think to myself, how much different would we be today?

Would I be today?

Would our churches be today?

How much more would we be like Jesus if we had been more intentional about our personal formation and transformation when we were younger?

Instead of chasing all over the show, digging in deep, taking an intentional approach to Jesus.

You see, the sooner we start, the more of Christ's beauty we get to experience.

Know today, Jesus has a full and beautiful life he wants you to live.

Embrace the fear of missing you.

Embrace FOMO.

Get into it today.

Give God wholehearted commitment in 2026 because once you start that journey, you're going to want a lot more of it.

The last point I make from this passage is this.

Keep your eye on Jesus or keep your eyes on Jesus.

 Luke chapter 9, 61, 62 says, another said, I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at home.

Jesus said to him, no one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

Distractions and temptations will certainly come, but will they pull you away or will you keep your eyes on the prize?

Will you keep your eye on Jesus?

 Throughout the journeys of the  coming out of Egypt and towards the promised land, one of the biggest challenges they had was to avoid, to stop, to actually think differently, to stop looking back.

 There's a point there.

 In Exodus chapter 16, the beginning of Exodus chapter 16, where they are grumbling because they have not, they say, we're going to die here.

 We're going to starve.

 This was before God gives them manna.

 And they look back and they say, if only we were in Egypt.

 If only we were back in Egypt.

 And they look back.

 God gives them manna.

 He blesses them.

 He gives them divine and supernatural deliverance and provision throughout their journey.

 After a while, they've had manna.

 Guess what they do?

 They look back at Egypt.

 They want the leeks.

 They want the onions.

 They want to go back into slavery, looking back at the good old days, even after they've experienced the goodness of God.

 And in many ways, our Christian walk, we can learn from the Exodus, from the Israelites' journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.

 We should not spend our lives looking back.

 We need to be looking forward to all that Jesus had for us.

  Much the same way as followers of Christ, we're inclined to take our eyes off Jesus and look at what used to be.

 We want to look back and pine at the good old days, those highlights of our faith, the memories that we have.

 We have nostalgia.

 We have traditions that we want to kind of embrace and hold on to.

 Traditions are good and we need to hold on to many of them.

 But we don't sit and look at the good old days because actually when we lived in those days, they probably weren't as good at that stage as what we remember them to be like.

 Was slavery in Egypt really better than the divine deliverance of God and as a free people journeying towards a promised land?

 Well, the Egyptians looked back and somehow seemed to think that.

 I mean, the Israelites looked back and somehow seemed to think so.

 They pined to go back into slavery, even though God had set them free.

 We do the same.

 We continually look back at what was, thinking it's better, when actually it was not necessarily better.

 Were they really remembering correctly?

 And that's a good question for us as well.

 As you look back at the past and we get nostalgic and we kind of want to go back to what used to be, do we truly remember correctly?

 Is it really as good as what we remember it to be?

 Well, generally we tend to kind of paint better pictures than the realities that we have lived.

 Another reason we take our eyes off Jesus is because of the distractions of this present world and the distractions of the things in life.

 We take our eyes not only to look back, we look away.

 We take our eyes off Jesus.

 In church, we have conflict.

 And at that point, we start to listen to voices.

 We hear things being said.

 We look in different places and we lose sight of Jesus.

 We have personal preferences that we feel are not being fulfilled.

  We lose sight of Jesus.

 There's worldly distractions, the temptations of this world, and we lose sight of Jesus.

 Or we just, as is so common in humanity, we look at the grass that is always greener on the other side, and we lose sight of Jesus.

 In verse 62 of Luke chapter 9, Jesus says, No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

 Well, William Barclay notes this, and this is something that we don't always get, the nuance within the passage.

 He says, no ploughman ever ploughed a straight furrow looking back over his shoulder.

 Needed to look at something ahead, keep his eyes on where he was going.

  There are some whose hearts are in the past, says Barclay.

 They walk forever looking backwards, thinking wistfully of the good old days.

 Let's keep our eyes on Jesus and plough straight furrows of life transformation in our lives and even community transformation.

 As our lives change, so do the lives of those around us.

 So as we look at 2026, is 2026 going to be a cruise to nowhere, a journey to absolutely nowhere, aimed at recreation, socialization?

 Or will you be intentional about journeying to a destination called transformation in your life?

 Will there be visible transformation?

 Will people look at you and say, you are a different person today than you were 12 months ago because you have been intentional about your faith and about your transformation?

 Let me leave you with a beautiful scripture, one we'll pick up with next week as we continue the series.

 1 Corinthians 9, 24, do you not know that in a race, the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize first.

  And I love this phrase, run in such a way that you may win it.

 God bless you as you embrace a life of transformation and a journey of transformation in 2026.