The True Meaning of Luke 12.33 Disciples and Selling it all

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Sell everything "in your heart and spirit", yes, meaning that your only treasure is Christ. You're not tied spiritually and emotionally to materialistic things anymore.

Then sell literally everything, not necessarily : it depends on what God (I said God/Holy Spirit and his voice, not humans) tells you.

Some evangelists sold everything because they had a call in foreign countries.

Some christians do good for the Gospel being financially rich. If the money isn't their master and keep Christ their pearl, then it's ok. Joanna, Chouza's wife in the New Testament was a wealthy woman and she was doing good for the Kingdom (Luke 8:3).

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When a parent has a child, he can be rich but will say when the kid is sick : I would give away my fortune if it's the way to buy a cure. This means that what's counting most is the kid, not the money.

Hi today my rector at church gave a message aboiut a smilar scripture. They sent me their sermon sheet that they wrote. They wrote abou Luke 14, but it mention about selling all possessions as well. it is mentioning about love and doing the best what we can. i thought that I would post it as well. I did a blog post on this subject as well.https://www.racheltestimony.com/2025/07 ... rried.html

Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

May I speak to the glory of God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.

I don’t know about you but this Gospel reading is one of those which I find difficult to hear. It makes me wish I could pick up the phone and ask Jesus a few direct questions especially about what he means when he talks about hating my whole family and giving up all my possessions. This sounds scarey and in the wrong hands like it could be used for abusive ends. Of course we can chat with Jesus anytime in prayer – and that’s what I’ve been trying to do – Lord, does this passage really mean what I fear it means? What am I going to say to the good people of St Peter’s about all this, and how can I try to encourage them?

Living with holy Scripture, turning it over, praying with it and finding Jesus within it, is of course fundamental to our discipleship of Christ – that’s what we do as followers of Jesus.

We’re also given most of the letter to Philemon – for some reason we miss out on hearing Paul asking Philemon to get the spare bedroom ready for him and we also miss the closing sentence. In this letter to Philemon we hear a lot about love and encouragement to freedom. Paul starts off by calling himself not an apostle as he usually does but a prisoner of Christ Jesus. Paul spends a few years in jail literally during his ministry because he proclaims Jesus as the Son of God. But there is another reason Paul is drawing attention to himself as a prisoner as he writes to Philemon, master of Onesimus the slave who is delivering this letter. Paul is asking Philemon to free Onesimus – to receive him as a beloved brother – as Paul received Onesimus as his child, his son. Paul is appealing to Philemon on the basis of love, rooted in the grace and peace he knows from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I told you I was fearful of what Jesus might mean in today’s Gospel reading. Paul’s letter, despite his chains, is written in love. And we are called to love as Christ has loved us.

Did you hear about the US Vice President JD Vance back in January talking about Christian love? JD Vance said in an interview with Fox News: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.” There was a lot of discussion and disagreement about that statement – because there are several places in the Bible which emphasise the importance of honouring parents and caring for those close to us – and also considerable emphasis on loving our neighbours as ourselves – including loving our enemies. And when asked about the greatest commandment Jesus emphasises loving God with all our heart and mind and strength and loving our neighbours as ourselves. St. Augustine puts it this way: “He does not say you must hate them in the sense of giving them no love at all, but you must put God before them.” (On the Gospel of John, Tractate 110).
Back in January Pope Francis issued a letter to bishops in the US emphasising that the proper ordering of love can be found by meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.

Jesus consistently calls us to love, including in this Gospel reading which can be so difficult to hear. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. I don’t think Jesus wants us to isolate that phrase about hating our nearest and dearest – I think he’s saying that for emphasis and contrast with the strength of love Jesus himself is giving us and what it really means to respond by following Jesus – by committing to loving God and our neighbour as ourselves.

Today Jesus is saying “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple”. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing as Nazi Germany strengthened, makes some powerful points about how our calling by Christ is also a calling to die; for discipleship without the cross is cheap grace. In our baptism we are called to die to sin and to keep repenting of our sins. But Jesus, you have already carried the cross and died for us. Does it really have to be like this?

I wonder if you’ve watched the children’s Disney film, Frozen? During my training to be a priest, all of the younger children in the theological college community kept singing the song ‘Let it go, let it go, let it go’ from the film, Frozen. In some senses those words “Let it go” tell you all you need to know – let go of the things we hold tight but which stop us from loving God and neighbour or get in the way of us deepening in love. I knew that it was Elsa, the main character in Frozen who sings this song, but I didn’t know any more. So one day when we didn’t have too many essays to write, a few of us decided to sit down and watch Frozen, which is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”. Elsa has powers over ice and snow but she doesn’t have proper control over them so they get her in trouble when she uses them in anger and fear and she flees – living a simple life alone much more happily – except she has left many people living in permanent winter and she doesn’t realise it. When Elsa is told that she has killed her sister by freezing her heart something reaches Elsa’s heart and she hugs her frozen sister who slowly thaws and survives. Elsa realises that love is the key to controlling her powers and she ends the winter and there is reconciliation between Elsa and her sister and between Elsa and the people. God isn’t mentioned directly but Hans Christian Andersen was a Christian and the theme of love’s strength and of sacrifice, of giving up that which we identify with really closely, or being ready to let go of it is crucial.

St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century mystic, writes very clearly about this letting go. In The Ascent of Mount Carmel he writes:

“To reach satisfaction in all, desire its possession in nothing.
To arrive at possessing all, desire to possess nothing.
To come to be everything, desire to be nothing.”

Each of us have our own life experiences. And most of us will have experienced many times those moments when you can just feel stuff that is important to us slipping away and in that moment fear is so understandable. And yet the thing I find so hopeful is that somewhere around the point that you say ‘Dear God, I can’t do this’ most of us find that somehow by grace you are doing the thing or you look back later and realise that God was alongside you – it may be deeply painful and we may learn lessons we never wanted and we have also grown in faith, we know more of what

Paul is talking about when he speaks of his boldness in Christ, of himself as a prisoner and also understanding so much more of the grace of Christ, of the freedom we find in carrying the cross and following Jesus. What feels like emptiness becomes fullness. What seems like abandonment is in fact a way to deeper indwelling of God’s love.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Nadia Bolz Weber. She is a Lutheran pastor in the US, her arms are covered in tattoos of Mary Magdalene, she uses language that I won’t use in church. Nadia was called to ministry while finding her own faith as she and her friends got clean from addiction to drugs and alcohol. She’s written several books and one is called “Accidental Saints – finding God in all the wrong people”. I have a copy of this book but I can’t find it so I can’t quote it directly – most likely I’ve lent it to someone. But in summary it’s about those moments when you’re really struggling to get on with someone – I’m sure this never happens here – but I’ll tell you sometimes it happens to me – you’re really struggling to get on with someone and you say to God ‘Please help me persuade this person about this’ or ‘Please make this person kinder’ or ‘Please make me kinder’
and then you get that sinking feeling because the way of Jesus is often not persuasion or sudden shifts in kindness just like that but more our own hearts being turned, being wrenched up as Nadia puts it – being thawed from frozen to pulsing and ouch as Elsa might put it - as we suddenly realise Jesus is at work in someone we are really struggling with – of course he is – and he’s teaching us to love him through those experiences because he’s with us and he loves us and we’re going to need to let go of the hardness of heart which is keeping us finding this person deeply annoying and stopping us from loving as we would like to be loved and they would like to be loved.

Letting go is usually not easy. And yet…. On Thursday I officiated at a beautiful marriage service – the couple deeply in love, surrounded by their family and friends all in their finest clothes. We listened to 1 Corinthians 13 – love is patient, love is kind – and I talked about how even on their wedding day, when love is in the very air – that is still only the tiniest whisp of a glimpse of the height and length and depth of God’s love for us which we won’t know fully until we get to heaven. It always strikes me as deeply solemn that when two people marry in church we recognise the depth of commitment they are making in love to one another – for love always involves sacrifice – it always involves the way of the cross - by naming directly that the next destination is the banquet of their heavenly home, our heavenly home.

Friends, we are given many good gifts in this life. The greatest gift is the love of God whom we know in Jesusby the power of the Holy Spirit – that love is greater than all else. Today in the simplest meal of tiny scraps of bread and wine, in God blessing us, we are given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all peoples. Amen.


A song to end it by Frozen