Unfiltered — Part 2 | Who Sits on the Throne
Think of the one person you would do anything for. The child, the parent, the spouse, the friend whose name arrives the second you hear the words unconditional love. Hold them there, because that is exactly where Pastor Jess DiSabatino asks you to be standing when she reads Luke 14:26 out loud. In Part 2 of Unfiltered, she takes the saying that makes most of us quietly change the subject and shows that it is not a command to feel less for the people you love. It is a command about order, and it turns out to be the only way to love them well.
Series: Unfiltered
Scripture: Luke 14:26 | Matthew 10:37 | 1 Peter 1:8
Pastor: Jess DiSabatino
Date: September 20, 2026
Key Takeaways
The word translated hate means to love less by comparison, not to feel less. Pastor Jess named the damage before she taught the text. Cult leaders and abusive church environments have quoted this verse to cut people off from the people who love them, and that is not what Jesus meant. The Greek is miseo, and in the Semitic rhetoric Jesus was speaking it carried a comparative weight rather than an emotional one. Matthew 10:37 says the same thing plainly: anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. This is the same Jesus who honored his mother at the cross, healed Peter's mother in law, and wept at the tomb of his friend.
When the people you love become the first thing, you hand them a weight no human was built to carry. C.S. Lewis wrote that if you put first things first you get second things thrown in, and if you put second things first you lose both. Order your family beneath your love for God and your love for them grows, because it is drawn from a source that does not run dry. Make them the first thing and something quietly goes wrong. Children were never meant to be their parents' source of meaning. Spouses were never designed to complete each other, whatever Jerry Maguire said. Asking a person to be God for you does not love them better, it distorts them, and they will fail, not because they do not love you but because they are human.
Jesus told the crowd to count the cost, and your own life is on the list. Large crowds were traveling with him, caught up in the momentum, and instead of making it easier he made it harder: a man building a tower sits down first and estimates the cost, a king going to war first asks whether ten thousand can face twenty thousand. Discipleship that costs you nothing and changes nothing is admiring the meal without eating it. And the verse does not stop at father and mother. It says yes, even his own life: your comfort, your plans, your reputation, your future as you had imagined it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison cell, put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
This hard saying turns out to be the most liberating thing Jesus could say to an exhausted person. Most of us are worn out from trying to be everything to everyone, and from expecting the people we love to be everything to us. Jesus is not asking you to carry more. He is asking you to put down the thing you were never designed to carry. When he is genuinely first, you stop needing your family to validate you, because you are already known and chosen. You stop clutching your children, because you trust them to a Father who loves them more than you do. You stop asking your spouse to complete you. And somewhere in there you become a better spouse, parent, child and friend, because you are loving from a full place instead of a desperate one.
A love you cannot see grows the way every love grows, by giving it your attention. Peter wrote to Christians who had never met Jesus and told them, though you have not seen him, you love him. Pastor Jess told her own version. She could not connect with Dave face to face, so for a year he wrote her letters, and somewhere in the reading, not in the seeing, she fell in love with him. George Mueller found the same thing: his mornings of dutiful prayer left his heart cold until he started by listening instead, reading Scripture slowly, which he later called the difference between water running through a pipe and food feeding a hungry person. So the question she left the room with is not who you would say is first. It is who is actually sitting on the throne of your life, and whether you are brave enough to be honest about it.
