A local furniture company has a jingle that says: “I want it all! I want it all! I want it now!” A soft drink company used the slogan, “Obey your thirst.” An optical chain adopted as their motto the lyrics “It’s your thing. Do what you want.” We live in a culture where the norm is to get what you want, as much as you want when you want. It is that flow of the cultural river into our daily lives that can cause us to not want to hear and follow the words of Jesus.
“If anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23
There are three actions in this sentence that are each vital to one’s following Christ. I am going to take them one blog post at a time. First of all we must deny ourselves. This is more than just giving up something temporarily for Lent. There is nothing wrong with that practice and it can be the first step of learning self denial. But it seems that more is intended by Jesus. On the other hand self denial does not mean self deprecation. Just putting myself down and taking on a passive role in life is definitely not the path that Jesus has for us.
As I understand it, self denial means that I actively put aside my personal ambitions, my hopes and dreams, my personal tastes in order to put Jesus first. In other words, I lose my life in him. I determine that I will make Jesus my first priority. I will make following him the first passion of my life. And as the verse says, it will have to be a daily choice. It is not a “one and done” type of decision.
When I was 16 my voice changed and I went from singing second soprano in the 8th grade choir to singing bass. God blessed me with a resonance that many suggested would be a good voice for the media. I pursued a career in broadcasting and earned a bachelor’s degree in communication. And yet in the middle of that I was challenged in the core of my being by the Holy Spirit to deny myself, my hopes and dreams of being in the national media and following Jesus as a pastor. What I found is that as I put aside my dreams God still used my training. I worked in the audio visual department of a national mission agency and narrated several productions for them. I narrated media productions for other missionaries and for a local crisis pregnancy center. I even spent a season in a local broadcast booth calling high school football games. When I denied my dreams of being on the national news, God reshaped them to give me a greater opportunity to be used to help others spread the good news of the gospel. Today because of the internet, people around the world can log on to our website and hear a sermon I have preached. Who would have imagined?
There is a cost to denying yourself daily and putting your hopes, dreams and plans aside for following Jesus. The fact is this is not an easy decision nor does it always result in Jesus giving us back what we have given up. But there is also a great reward in a way that we don't always expect. I don’t have it all materially. I chose to not obey my thirst. I realized it was not my thing but God’s thing and I chose to do what he wanted. But what I continue to discover is that denying myself results in a depth of satisfaction, contentment and fulfillment that is hard to describe.
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