Jesus is dead serious about making Him the most important person in our lives. He will not take a second place. He must be supreme, or He wants nothing to do with us.
“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.” Luke 14:26
 
When Jesus says, “hate,” He doesn’t literally mean for us to hate our family members. What He means is that we must “prefer” Jesus over our family members. Consider what Jesus wants us to prefer Him over. Father. Mother. Wife. Children. Brothers. Sisters. And even life itself! These were what were most important to the people of that time Jesus was addressing. Even now, in the East (and the West too), family is what’s most important.
In the culture (Korean) that I grew up in, mothers routinely said, “I live for my children. They are the reason for my being.” I’ve heard of many mothers who committed suicide when something evil happened to their children. There was no longer a reason for them to continue to live since they only lived for their children. About the same time that my family came to the U.S., another family from my town immigrated to the U.S. It was a single mom with a teenage boy. The boy didn’t adjust well to the life in the U.S. and joined a gang. The mother committed suicide.
When I visited the Philippines about 10 years ago and I had asked the school children what they wanted to be when they grew up, EVERY ONE of them got up and said, “I want to be …. so that I can help with my parents.” The importance of family was so strongly ingrained in them that no matter what they aspired to be, it was for the good of their family.
It is in this context, Jesus makes the audacious claim that He must be even more important than family. This is an absolute claim. And just in case we didn’t value our family, He adds, “.. yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”  There isn’t anyone who doesn’t value his/her own life. He is saying that He must be even more important than our own lives…
This makes me afraid. I wonder, according to this standard, how many of the church-goers can truly be called disciples. And the Bible does not make a distinction between disciples and christians.
Pray for yourselves. Pray for your fellow “Christian” brothers and sisters that they will value Jesus even more than their own family.
PH