Setting: Great crowds are traveling with Jesus, and he turns to confront easy enthusiasm with the real demands of following him, "Whoever doesn’t bear his own cross and come after me, can’t be my disciple" (Luke 14:27). These twin parables drive the point home. Citation: Luke 14:28-33
The twin parables
The tower-builder (vv.28-30). "For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doesn't first sit down and count the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Or perhaps, when he has laid a foundation and isn't able to finish, everyone who sees begins to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and wasn't able to finish.'"
The king going to war (vv.31-32). "Or what king, as he goes to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an envoy and asks for conditions of peace."
The conclusion (v.33): "So therefore whoever of you who doesn't renounce all that he has, he can't be my disciple."
The point: eyes-open allegiance
Both pictures press the same lesson: discipleship is a deliberate, costed decision, not an impulse. The builder who fails to reckon the price ends in unfinished shame; the king who fails to reckon his strength ends in defeat or surrender. Jesus wants followers who have looked clearly at what following will cost and have decided anyway.
The cost he names is total, "renounce all that he has." This is the supremacy of allegiance: nothing (possessions, family ties, even one's own life, vv.26-27) may rank above loyalty to Jesus. It is not that disciples literally divest of everything, but that nothing is held back from his lordship.
On the hard word "hate" (v.26). The surrounding saying, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters" (BSB; WEB renders the same verb "doesn't disregard"), is Semitic hyperbole for "love less / subordinate to" (compare Matthew's plainer "loves father or mother more than me," Matthew 10:37; and Jacob "hated" beside Rachel "loved," Genesis 29:30-31). The idiom is noted here so the saying is read rightly.
Theological framing (multiple views)
Radical-discipleship reading (mainstream), the call is to whole-life surrender; better not to begin than to begin and fall away unprepared (cf. the parable of the soils, the shallow seed).
Pastoral / counting-honestly reading, Jesus is not discouraging faith but inviting honest faith: come with open eyes, because the road includes a cross.
Caution noted, this is about allegiance, not a transactional price one pays to earn salvation; the "cost" is the reordering of every loyalty under Christ.