The Call to Self-Denial: Walking in the Footsteps of Jesus

Self-denial goes beyond simple sacrifices, representing a fundamental shift in how we live our Christian lives. It involves releasing control, surrendering our desires, and following Jesus' example of selflessness. Through self-denial, we learn to pick up our cross daily, look different from the world, and align ourselves with God's purposes. This spiritual discipline leads to freedom from anxiety, better decision-making, and deeper spiritual growth.

Transcript

So last week we started our Lenten sermon series by talking about repentance as a spiritual practice, something that we are supposed to be doing during Lent. And this morning we're going to be focusing on a specific way to live out that repentance in our lives, and that's through something called self denial. Self denial is defined as making a sacrifice of one's own desires or interests.

And that seems kind of lame. So there are luckily more definitions through different encyclopedias and dictionaries. An additional definition is the act of denying yourself, controlling our impulses. And another definition is renunciation of your own interests. And this is what I love in favor of the interests of others.

That, to me, is gospel. However you view self denial, there are aspects not only of curbing our own desires through self control, but there also is this kind of undertone of self sacrifice, selflessness, and a word, I think, that kind of gets a bad rap right now, empathy. When we talk about self denial, many of you might think of things that you've given up as a part of your Lenten sacrifices, right? So if you are, we're here on our Ash Wednesday service. There's usually a call to be thinking about something you can give up for 46 days throughout Lent or to add to your spiritual journey for 46 days.

Some of you, it might have been something like Dr. Pepper or coffee or swearing. Things that we love, things that we might Be too dependent on giving these things up as a part of Lent is a great way for us to release some of that power that these things hold over us and to begin to try to rely on God. But for many of us in here, I would say that our comfort zone is killing our calling. The purpose of Lent and this self denial that we're called to is not just to give up something for the sake of giving something up.

It's instead supposed to be for us a time to remember the self denial and sacrifices of Jesus that He made on our behalf and his call for us to go and do likewise.

Christ warned us if that we followed him, that our lives wouldn't be made easier, but instead our lives are going to be made more difficult. I just want to say this as a reminder. If your faith cost you nothing, you might not actually be following Jesus. You might be cheering from the sidelines. So I want to read to you today from the book of Luke, chapter nine.

And this comes to us in verse 18 through 23. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to follow along. If you don't, it's okay, you can follow along on the screen. Here's the word of the Lord for us today. Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, who do the crowds say that I am?

They replied, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life. But what about you? He asked, who do you say that I am? Peter answered, God's Messiah. Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone.

And he said, the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Then he said to them, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. So clearly Jesus is calling us to self denial in a way that is not just.

Hey, every once in a while when you think about it, could you just pick up your cross and follow me? He says every single day we are called to pick up our crosses and follow him. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves or practice self denial, take up their cross daily and man, there are just some days in my life where I look nothing like Jesus, right? And I bet if you're anything like me, there are days in your Life where you look absolutely nothing like Jesus too.

And the words that Jesus uses here, it's not like kind of iffy words. They're not like. Well, you might interpret it one way. Jesus is pretty clear. He doesn't say whoever wants to be my disciple should think about denying themselves and take up their cross daily.

He doesn't say it would be a nice thing if you would take up your cross daily. It's definitive. He says you must pick up your cross daily. And must is a command. It means to be compelled physically.

It means to be obliged. Jesus is not using passive language here, and he doesn't do that because he's intentional. He's requiring us as followers of Jesus to do what he did and to do it every single day. And it's hard to look like Jesus every day. And so I would just say this.

If we look at Christianity in America, it's proof that it's hard to look like Jesus every day. Because the church in America no longer preaches the gospel of Jesus. It preaches something different. And we need to get back to looking like Jesus.

One of the things about following Jesus is that when we do that, we're required to look different than everybody else. Friends, the world tells us to chase more, to be busy, but Jesus is calling us to surrender more, to let go. As a reminder, self denial is not an opportunity for you to practice self hatred, but instead it's surrendering your control to God. But the world tries to convince us that we can do everything on our own, right? Like we don't need Jesus, we don't need God in our lives.

I'm perfectly capable of making my own choices and doing all the things I need to do. But even though the world says that's how we can live, God is calling us to rely more on Him. There's this kind of illusion of self sufficiency that happens in our lives, right? If you read the book of the Proverbs, which if you want to be wise, read Proverbs. In Proverbs, chapter 3, verses 1 through 6, it says this, my son, do not forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your heart, for they will prolong your life not many years and bring you peace and prosperity.

That is a beautiful promise. Verse 3 says, Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck, write them on a tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. Here's where I want you to dig in.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and Lean not on your own understanding in all your ways. Submit to him and he will make your paths straight. We often cling to our own personal desires, thinking that they are the things that bring us happiness. Our control over our lives gives us this false sense of security. But God is telling us if we let go of control, he's going to make our paths straight for us.

I just wish letting go was easy, but it's not.

I would say one of the hardest things that we have to face as humanity is to try to put to death our own egos, right? We want to make all the decisions for our lives. We want to feel like we are the deciders of our own paths. We want to feel like we are in control of our own destiny. If I do this one thing, I'll get a raise at work.

If I will be able to buy a new car, I'll be able to get her to love me if I do this one thing when we try to force things to happen rather than letting God work, some other things might end up happening. Number one, we might become frustrated and exhausted. When we rely on ourselves, our own strength, rather than trusting God's timing, we are going to end up burning out too quickly. We push, we strive, and we stress, but nothing seems to work because we can't force things to happen. We also end up making bad decisions.

When we act out of impatience or desperation, we often make impulsive choices. And those impulsive choices sometimes lead to regret. Think of Abraham and Sarah, right? Perfect example. Abraham and Sarah are really wanting a child.

And so Sarah says, hey husband, I've got an idea. Go sleep with my maidservant. There will be no problems, right? When we try to force situations, we end up making the wrong decisions that cause big problems in the long term.

We also miss out on God's best. Sometimes we don't see what God has in store for us. And when we think we know what's best, we choose the option that is not necessarily the best for us. God's ways are higher. His timing is perfect, and what he has in store for us is far greater than we can have in store for ourselves.

And when we force things along, we sometimes experience anxiety instead of peace. When we try to make things happen, it creates stress in our lives. Trusting God brings peace. When we can just relax and say, God, your timing is good, we when you want these things to happen, I'll rely on you to make them happen. When we try to control everything, we carry a burden that we weren't meant to bear.

Sometimes when we act on our own accord. We end up delaying God's plan instead of making it happen faster. Sometimes our attempts to rush things along actually slow them down. Think about the Israelites, right? The Israelites, for example, constantly tried to take control instead of trusting God, which meant they ended up staying in the wilderness for 40 years.

When we follow our own way, when we think of our own desires, when we focus too much on ourselves, when we follow our own hearts, we could end up in trouble.

And the crazy thing is, like, if you've ever watched any movie from Hollywood, they always say, oh, follow your heart, right like that. That's the thing in every movie, every book, it seems that if we just follow our hearts, we'll end up in the right situation. We'll marry the prince in the end, right? When the lead character follows her own heart, she is set free from the bad relationship and can now rely fully on her own strength for the future. And when I pick that line out, I'm thinking, let it go.

Let it go, right? Like, that's one of those things when you. Yeah, and these stories in these movies are nice, they're fun, they're great to watch. But scripture tells us repeatedly that the human heart is deceptive. If we try to follow the world's advice for following after our own hearts, we wind up following the wrong thing.

Jeremiah 17, 5, 9 says this. This is what the Lord says. Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the Lord. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands. They will not see prosperity when it comes.

They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes it. Its leaves are always green.

It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?

True fulfillment comes not in chasing personal, personal ambitions, but in surrendering to God's plan. When we force things or try to follow our own hearts, our own desires, we end up frustrated, weary, and sometimes anxious.

The tighter we hold on to our own will, the further we drift from God's will.

So be thinking about it off the top of your head. Can you think of maybe a couple things that you're trying to force to happen in your own life today that maybe you should instead be letting God take care of. Maybe you should let go of worrying about these situations and instead just be thankful. Sometimes the things that we want to hang on to get in the way and cause us to give up space for things that we really should rely on instead. And I got to thinking, you know, oftentimes when we get going out into the wilderness to go hiking, we bring along a pack full of stuff that we need, right?

But let's imagine today we're going on a hike together in the desert. One of the harshest places we could go on a hike. You think about it in your head, the things that you need to prepare to go on a hike in the desert during the heat of the day. So I have packed my backpack full of the things that I think I'm going to need in my life. If I have life my way, it'll be fun.

Let's look at some of the things I packed, shall we?

Do you don't need a potted plant on your hikes? It does. At some point I'm going to need this, right? And I've got it in my backpack to make sure. Like, listen, I don't know when the last time any of you used an iron was, but sometimes you need.

If you. If your clothes are wrinkly, you need an iron, right? You can't go hiking in wrinkly clothes. What about this Windows 95 laptop, huh? Did you guys.

Is this. Do you think this is going to be necessary on our journey? Probably not. What else do we have in here? Oh, yes.

In the desert, we need our snorkeling set. No, no, you can't fight this one. We're in the desert. All right, what else? Oh, and my Cox remote from a.

Or, no, it's a DirecTV remote from about 47 years ago. Listen, sometimes when we are packing our lives filled with all the things that we think we want to have, we end up with kettlebells instead of water.

When we pack our lives full of things that we think we're gonna need, like this Covid era gallon of hand sanitizer, it is not gonna help us in the midst of our daily lives. Friends, we are packing our lives so full of stuff that we're crowding God out.

Sometimes we've gotta pull the stuff out and lay it aside, let it go. And all of this is great stuff, and at some point, it served a purpose. But if we're hanging on to it, we can't serve the purpose that we were called to.

Every one of us has a Tendency to hold on to things that keep us weighed down and prevent us from fully knowing Jesus.

What you refuse to lay down may very well be the thing that's standing between you and God today. Self denial is the act of getting rid of personal desires, unloading selfish ambitions and releasing attachments to comfort and gratification. And I think comfort is the key word because here in America, Christianity is comfortable. It's easy. Self denial isn't about losing everything.

It's about releasing what's holding us back so we can take hold of the example of Jesus and we can follow in his footsteps. As a reminder, we cannot claim to follow Jesus if we refuse to walk like he walked. Jesus modeled self denial in every single way every day that he lived. In the book of Philippians, the Apostle Paul speaks to the church in Philippi and reminds them, be like Jesus. So he says this in Philippians 2, 5, 8.

In your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used for his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking on the very nature of a servant. Being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus. Every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue every acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus laid down his own privilege, his own power, his own comfort to serve others. He stepped away from his heavenly throne and became one of us. But something more.

We've talked about it a thousand times in here. Who did Jesus identify with when he came? The poor, the broken, the sinners, those who were lost. And the church in America looks like the most affluent in all the world, right? We no longer use church dollars to help the poor.

We use church dollars to build bigger buildings. We use church dollars to buy our mega jets that we need, right to go all around the world. When we as a church are not identifying with the same people that Jesus identified with, we have lost the message.

And I will tell, I have to tell you this. Jesus self denial wasn't a sign of his weakness. It was a sign of the ultimate strength. Choosing self denial meant that Jesus willingly got rid of his personal comfort, unloaded his own will and released his rightful privileges as the Son of God in order to fulfill a greater Purpose that saves and redeems us. And it wasn't easy.

And if Jesus had to wrestle with surrender in the garden of Gethsemane, don't expect that that acts of self denial will be easy for us either. It's something we're going to have to wrestle with too.

I want to read this to you. Comes from Matthew, chapter 16, 2127. From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders and the chief priests and the teachers of the law. Does it sound familiar? Like we've read it in Luke already today?

And that he must be killed and on the third day be raised from from dead to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Never, Lord, he said. This shall never happen to you. Jesus turned and said to Peter, get behind me, Satan.

You are a stumbling block to me. You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns. Then Jesus said to his disciples, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will find it.

What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels. Then he will reward each person according to what they have done. The paradox of the Kingdom of God is that we have to lose ourself in order to get true life.

When we let go of our need to control, we find peace and purpose. When you guys were young and you're learning how to swim, how did you learn how to swim? Was it by slowly hanging onto the sides? Was it with the floaties? Nah, my dad threw me in the water.

Right. Sometimes you have to let go of the sides. You've got to let go of the dock, and you've got to jump full in in order to know what the purpose of God is for you. Too many of us, I think, are just so complacent, not even getting in the water. We're good to put our feet in.

We're good to dip a toe in. We're good to like, scoop up the water. It's a hot day. Oh, goodness. But we're not ready to jump all the way in.

And that's what God is calling us to be. Followers of Jesus, don't sit on the sidelines. Followers of Jesus get dirty with the poor followers of Jesus, empathize with the broken followers of Jesus, show mercy instead of judgment. And that's who we're called to be.

I know that it is a very famous month for a lot of people who like some sport called basketball. Right? Right. What is the thing that it's in March? March unhappiness.

Is that what it's called? March anger? What is it? Oh, it's madness. March madness.

Right. During March, I bet a lot of NCAA players, they give up the junk food, they give up the late nights of partying and dating, they give up any personal time in order to train for the games that could take them all the way to the championship. When making a commitment like that, it's not deprivation that we're letting stuff go. It's not depriving ourselves of things. It's dedication to something better.

In the same way, our self-denial is about becoming spiritually fit for God's calling on our lives.

Sometimes we're going to have to live with a little self denial so that we can do the things that God has called us to do. What we surrender in self denial, God replaces with something far greater. Empty hands are the only ones that can fully receive God's best friends. I know we are way over time, right? It's only 1208.

I got another hour.

Just kidding. Chuck did not like that. I want to read one more scripture to you. This comes from the book of Gosh. I want to say Second Corinthians.

I left out the number on it, so I don't know. It's Corinthians 4, 16, 18. Here's what it says. Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. We've got to shift focus, friends. We're all a little nearsighted.

We focus too much on the things that are here that don't really make a difference in our long term lives.

Every sacrifice for Christ results in deeper spiritual richness. And my hope is that as we journey throughout Lent that we're willing to make more and more sacrifices for our faith.

Jesus did not die so that we could sit here and be comfortable. Jesus died so that we could be fully alive.

I don't know if you guys plant fruits or vegetables like I do, but Every farmer who plants on a large scale, they always reserve something, right? In order to grow next year's crops, you've got to make sure that you have enough seed for next year. And so that means oftentimes you plant 100 acres, you harvest 100 acres, and then 10% of that, I don't know, I'm not a farmer. But a certain percentage of that goes to plant next year's crop. It's a sacrifice that the farmer has to make to ensure their longevity, right?

Self denial may feel like sacrifice, but it produces spiritual fruit. It's not about loss, it's about gaining something greater. So, friends, during this Lenten season, let us be people who constantly ask ourselves, what is Jesus asking me to lay down today? What unnecessary burdens are slowing our walk with him? What comfort, habit or mindset do I need to shift so that I can fully embrace the type of discipleship that's going to make a long term difference in my life?

True discipleship is a daily decision to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow Jesus. It's not a moment, it's a way of life, but the reward. A life fully aligned with the power, purpose and presence of God in our lives.

Let's pray.