Reverend Bart Morrison

Light of Christ Anglican Church 

The Reverend Bart Morrison

June 21, 2026 

When Following Jesus Costs Everything

Text: Matthew 10:24–39

Happy Father’s Day to the dads in the room, to the men who raised children not

their own, to those who had wonderful fathers and those who are still working

through complicated ones.

I also want to say this: the text before us today is not a Father’s Day greeting

card. Matthew 10 is one of the most demanding passages in the Gospels. But

here is what I’ve discovered — it is also, in the deepest sense, about fathers.

About what a father does when he loves his children enough to tell them the

truth. About what it costs a man to pass something worth having on to the next

generation. And about the Heavenly Father who watches over every one of us

when following his Son gets hard.

Most of us have rehearsed a version of this conversation in our heads. You’re

at the dinner table, or in the break room, or at a family reunion. Someone says

something about faith, about the church, about Jesus — and you feel it: that

familiar tightening in the chest, that split-second calculation. Do I say something?

Or do I let it go?

The silence usually wins. And we tell ourselves we were just being wise. But

there’s another word for it, and Jesus says it plainly in this passage.

The subject of this text is simple: the cost of following Jesus. The big idea is this:

Authentic discipleship means fearing God more than people —

and that fearless loyalty to Jesus will cost you something.

There are three moves in this text. Let’s walk through them.

EXPECT THE MASTER’S FATE Matthew 10:24–25

Jesus opens with what feels like cold water in the face: “A student is not above

his teacher, nor a servant above his master.” It’s a proverb — self-evident,

almost throwaway. But the application is not throwaway at all.

He continues: “If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much

more the members of his household!” Beelzebul. That’s a name for Satan. The

Pharisees had said Jesus was doing his miracles by the power of the devil. The

most faithful, most obedient, most perfectly righteous man who ever lived was

called a demon. If that’s what they called the Master, why would the disciples

expect better treatment?

There’s something fathers understand instinctively that mothers sometimes have

to teach: that real love sometimes means preparing a child for hard things, not

protecting them from hard things.

That is exactly what Jesus is doing in Matthew 10. He is the kind of master —

the kind of Father — who tells you the truth before you sign on. He has already

taken the blow. The accusation came first to him. If we follow him, we should

expect — not fear, but actually expect — that the world will treat us as it treated

him.

Jesus is calibrating our expectations so that when difficulty comes, we will not

think something strange is happening.

Dads, what are you preparing your children for? The easy version of Christianity,

or the honest one? The faith that costs nothing is also worth nothing. The greatest

thing you can pass down is not comfort — it’s courage.

FEAR GOD, NOT THEM Matthew 10:26–31

Three times in these six verses Jesus says some version of “Do not be afraid.”

That repetition is a signal. He knows this is the place where his disciples are most

likely to fail. So he pounds the nail three times.

First (v. 26): “Do not fear them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be

disclosed.” Truth has a way of surfacing. The gospel will come out. What is

whispered in private will be shouted from the rooftops. Don’t hide it — it can’t

stay hidden anyway. So proclaim it freely.

Second (vv. 28–31): “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” This is the sharpest verse in the passage. Jesus acknowledges that

people can kill you. He does not pretend otherwise. But he draws a limit: they

can only kill the body. They cannot touch the soul. Only God can. So fear him —

and be free from everyone else.

Third (v. 31): “So don’t be afraid.” Jesus saves this one for last, and gives it the

longest run-up of the three — because this time the reason why matters more

than the command itself.

Notice the word Jesus uses in verse 29: not “God,” not “the Almighty,” not “the

Lord.” He says “your Father.” This is the pastoral pivot of the entire passage.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to

the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your

head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many

sparrows.”

In the Roman economy, sparrows were the cheapest food available to the poorest

of the poor. Two for a penny. Buy four, they’d throw in a fifth for free. They were

worth almost nothing.

And yet. Not one falls without the Father knowing.

On Father’s Day, this is the verse I want to plant in every heart. Because Jesus is

doing something remarkable here: he is defining what a true Father does. A true

father doesn’t just demand. He watches. He counts. He notices when something

small falls.

A man I’ll call David told me once that his father — a quiet, working-class man

who never said much — used to remember things his children thought no one

noticed. He remembered the name of a fish his son had caught when he was

eight. He remembered the exact day his daughter’s team won the regional

championship. He remembered which child preferred the window seat and

which one liked the aisle.

When David was grown, he realized: his father had been paying attention

his entire life, even when it didn’t look like it. He hadn’t said much. But he’d

counted. Everything. That is the image Jesus reaches for when he wants to explain God’s care. Not a distant deity running the cosmos — a Father who counts hairs on heads and watches sparrows fall. And if he watches sparrows, he certainly watches you.

You, standing in the break room deciding whether to speak. You, sitting at the

table with your family. You, trying to hold faith and relationship together at the

same time.

The fear of people is the great paralyzer of the church. Jesus doesn’t rebuke the

impulse to fear. He redirects it. He says: you’re fearing the wrong person. Fear

the one who holds eternity. And when that fear is rightly ordered — when you

know you are held by a Father who counts and watches and cares — the fear of

men shrinks to its proper, tiny size.

CONFESS HIM, CARRY THE COST Matthew 10:32–39

Now Jesus moves to the sharpest edge of the text.

“Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before

my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown

before my Father in heaven.”

Notice again: my Father in heaven. Jesus is not speaking abstractly about a

cosmic authority. He is speaking about a relationship. He is the Son who knows

the Father, and he is calling us to loyalty that the Father himself will honor.

And then Jesus says something that has surprised every generation of readers:

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not

come to bring peace, but a sword.”

The gospel produces division because it demands a verdict. You cannot remain

neutral about Jesus. And that line of division, he says plainly, will run right

through families — “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother.”

He names the father-child bond specifically. He knew where the tension would

be sharpest.

For some fathers in this room, the cost of following Jesus has been paid precisely in

family currency. A son who walked away from the faith. A daughter who is hostile

to it. A grown child who sees your faith as a judgment on their choices. These men

know the sword Jesus is describing. They carry it quietly, week after week.

And then there are men whose own fathers never gave them the faith — who came

to Christ and found themselves on the other side of something from the family that

raised them. They know this passage from the inside. The division is real.

Jesus does not say the pain of that division is nothing. He says it is worth it.

And he says it precisely in the context of love: “Anyone who loves their father

or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” This is not cruelty. It is a call to

rightly ordered love — to love the Father in heaven in a way that shapes how we

love every father and child on earth.

A retired pastor told me about a letter he wrote to his adult son, who had left the

faith in his twenties and hadn’t been to church in fifteen years. The son was not

hostile — just gone.

The pastor prayed over the letter for weeks before he sent it. It said something

like:

“I have never been prouder of the man you’ve become. And I want you to

know that I will never stop praying that you’ll find your way back to Jesus.

Not because I’m disappointed in you. Because I’ve found something I don’t

want you to miss. I love you too much to stay quiet about it.”

That’s a man who feared God more than he feared his son’s reaction. That’s

a man who understood that real love sometimes takes the risk of the harder

conversation.

The son called him two weeks later. He wasn’t ready to come back. But he said:

“Dad, I needed to hear that you hadn’t given up.”

The passage ends with one of Jesus’s great paradoxes: “Whoever finds their life

will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”

The life that is clutched and protected and kept safe from risk — the life that

never says the hard thing, never makes the costly stand, never chooses Jesus

when it’s expensive to do so — that life ends in loss.

But the life poured out for Jesus — the life that speaks when speaking costs something, that stands when standing is dangerous, that confesses him before an audience that doesn’t want to hear it — that life finds itself. It finds the thing it was made for.

CONCLUSION

Here is what I want to say to every father in the room today.

The most important thing you will ever give your children is not a college fund or a work ethic or a strong last name, though all of those matter. The most important thing you will ever give them is a picture of what it looks like to follow Jesus when it costs something. To choose him in public. To fear God more than the opinion of the room. To love them enough to tell them the truth about what matters most.

That is a legacy. That is the thing that can outlast you.

And here is what I want to say to everyone: the Heavenly Father who watches

sparrows fall is watching you today. He knows the cost this text describes. He

does not ask you to pay it carelessly or joylessly. He asks you to pay it trustfully

— with confidence that the one who counted the hairs on your head will not look

away when following his Son gets hard.