If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. (Lk 9:23)
. . . I die daily. (I Cor 15:31)
Father, grant me the heart to give up my very being to you.
Living the Christian life is the hardest thing you will ever do.
It is also the most fulfilling thing you will ever do.
But isn’t that normal? Aren’t the hardest things in life usually the most rewarding?
Sometimes people act as if God made us just so He could forgive our sins, and then we could go live our lives as we wished. I know. It’s silly thinking. When you read Scripture you find that God made us for Himself, that we went and lived our own way, but that He responded with the Cross in order to remake us. He wants us conformed into the image of Christ. He then wants us, in Christ, to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him. To make such a sacrifice involves dying to self, and the soul does not want to do it. And yet, in Christ, the soul wants it. This is the irony of following Jesus: we want the very thing we don’t want. We have desires on different levels.
Jesus did too. At Gethsemane Jesus did not want to go to the Cross. He prays, “Remove this cup. Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.” Jesus explicitly states that it was not His will to go to the Cross. And yet it was. He went for the joy that was set before Him. He went because He delighted to do the will of the Father. He had desires on different levels.
The Christian who will live a godly life must want to do so. And he must want this so strongly that he is willing to die to see it happen.
We don’t talk this way in Christian circles today, but I would propose to you that the reason is that we don’t like the message of dying. We emphasize the comfortable truths of the gospel to the exclusion of the hard ones. But the gospel, whatever else it entails, entails a call to die. And the people who actually do this dying are the people who desire Jesus so passionately that they are willing to give up all for Him.
Dying to self is not so much a matter of exerting one’s will to mortification. Nor is it a matter of following a set of rules that emphasize self-denial – fastings, prayers, vigils, etc. People who die to self do so because they desire the kingdom of God more than they desire their personal desires. Thus, dying to self is not a negative endeavor. It is not primarily a subtraction of our desires but a fulfillment of a greater desire.
I’m not talking craziness. We understand this concept quite well, for people act this way all the time. When I was a boy, I had a morning paper route and would get up at 5 am to deliver newspapers. It was not my desire to get up at 5 am, but it was my desire to earn an income, so I died to my desire for sleep so that I could fulfill my desire to earn an income. In other words, my dying to one desire was not a subtraction or a personal negation. It was a necessary part of fulfilling a greater desire. This is why athletes lift weights, students write term papers, and parents drive their kids to soccer. All of these ordinary activities are pictures of dying to a small desire in order to fulfill a bigger one.
Biblical dying to self simply puts an exponent on the same principle. Jesus willingly went to the Cross even though He didn’t want to. Paul willingly suffered imprisonments, beatings, hunger, thirst, slander, and more, even though he didn’t want to. Daniel’s three friends were willing to forfeit their lives. Jeremiah faced constant abuse and opposition but kept preaching. Peter went to jail for preaching, and when freed he went right back to preaching. In all these cases and more, someone died to his life and comfort because he desired something higher. These people had a passion for God and His kingdom. They denied their desires because they were fulfilling their ultimate desire.
Without this ultimate desire for Christ and His kingdom, there is no living the Christian life. You cannot give up the career you always wanted just to die to it. But you can die to that career if you have a desire higher than that career. You cannot deny yourself money and comfort just to do it. But you can deny yourself those things if you desire something higher.
Now I need to say a word here about the nature of self-denial. Sometimes people give up the career they always wanted because they somehow think God wants us to have only the things we don’t want. They think it is more spiritual to deny themselves what they want. But this idea is not always true. Does a good father want his daughter to always deny her desires, or does he want her to actually enjoy some of those desires? In fact, he may do everything he can to help her pursue her desire to go to law school. And yet that same father may tell that same daughter to set aside short-term desires to pursue long term benefit. This is how God is. Earth is short term. The kingdom of God is long term. Biblical dying to self must occur when God lets us know that we need to set aside a particular desire for His sake. We must not, however, deny self just to do so. If our driving passion is for God, then the driving principle in our lives must be for what God wants. Sometimes He wants you to enjoy the desires of your heart. Sometimes He will call you to lay them down, but when you lay them down, you do so because, ultimately, He is your great desire, and, thus, you are then pursuing the desire of your heart.
Our desires are part of the foundation for living the Christian life. They are central to the Christian life itself. So look at your big desires. Are they focused on earth? If so, you handicap your ability to live for God. He wants to be your great desire.
Making God our main desire is something that we cannot do ourselves. This change comes from God’s Spirit in us. Perhaps the most basic work of the Spirit in a person deals with transforming the heart. The Spirit changes our desires, and it is these new desires that He then uses to spur us on to a new life.
A passion for Christ is foundational for living the Christian life. You can’t live a life that calls you to die to your desires unless you have a greater desire for Christ. You won’t let go of earth unless you want heaven. And you need God to help you want heaven. And the odd thing is that when you get heaven, you enjoy earth all the more. You find your life by losing it.
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