Follow Jesus!

But… who wants to cheer when the team starts losing? Losers do not have fan clubs. And when Jesus’ career started showing signs of decline, and when Jesus predicted a very unhappy ending in Jerusalem, his fans were in a hurry to get out.

Many Christians today look for entertainment and excitement. They go to churches with a powerful organ and a huge choir, or to a worship service with a band that performs hypnotizing songs of praise. They go for the great and famous speakers. I know people who seek out healing services. They go far distances, if needed, either to find healing for their own sickness or to witness miracles.

But Jesus doesn’t want to offer us glory and entertainment—at least not here and now. I am sure we will have enough of that in heaven. But here and now he calls on us to follow when the going gets tough. He calls us to associate not with the bold and beautiful, with the popular and successful. He calls us to join the band of losers. He says: “Give up everything for my sake, and you will get a great reward in heaven.”

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”

First, Jesus demands self-denial. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines self-denial as

“the act of not taking or having something that you would like because you think it is good for you not to have it.”

Paul, in his first letter to Timothy refers to a degree of self-denial, when he speaks about “godliness with contentment”. But when Jesus speaks about self-denial, he means a lot more.

It means, first of all, that we don’t consider ourselves anything. We have no value, no worth, apart from Christ and apart from our calling as his followers. Paul said that he will not boast about himself; only about Christ, about his death and resurrection. As long as we have great and noble thoughts about ourselves, we miss the perspective that the Bible offers us. Jesus Christ needed to suffer and die the most shameful, ugly and painful death penalty imaginable. Not because he deserved it, but because we deserve it.

To deny ourselves is to cut through the clean and shining surface and look at the dark and dirty and rotten reality inside. To deny ourselves is to say to God: “I am not worth anything. Take me, shape me, fill me, use me, so that I may become a useful tool in your hand and a valuable member of your body.”

To deny ourselves is to also deny our right to our position, our possessions, and our future. Once we understand that as followers of Jesus we no longer own ourselves but he owns us, it follows that we cannot own anything without letting Jesus have access to it and the right to use it at his will. We cannot decide on our future without letting Jesus have the final word. We are in a sense like the people of Israel in the wilderness. When the presence of God—visible through the cloud in the day and the fire at night—settled in a certain place, the people had to stop right there. And if they saw his presence moving on in the morning, they simply had to pack and go immediately. That is the level of self-denial that Jesus asks from his followers.