And let's pray. Lord God, we pray that the earth would resound with the songs of praise to you, especially as we're thinking about missions more during this month. We pray that your name would be proclaimed in all the earth, and not only proclaimed, but that people from every land and nation would bow their knees to Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior, Lord, it's for our good and for our joy and for your glory. We need that, Lord. This earth needs that. It needs you like the Israelites needed manna in the wilderness as we were singing earlier. We need the spirit, the living water to fall on this earth. And Lord, as we open your word now to study it and to meditate on what Christ has taught to us, teach us. Teach us in our hearts. Give us a right heart, a right spirit to obey you, to respond to you. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. You may be seated. We are in Mark chapter eight, the end of the chapter here. And two weeks ago when I preached, we saw that the disciples, they could only half see Jesus, only half understand, but when he asks them the big question, who do you say that I am, they get it. They say, you are the Christ. And then the next sentence is, they totally misunderstand, or totally fail to understand how suffering, death, and his resurrection can fit into that identity, that he is the Christ. And so Peter rebuked Jesus for that, and Jesus turns around and rebukes Peter, and he presses on further to say, and this is the verse that we're looking at this week, not only is my life's mission gonna be accomplished through suffering and death on a cross, but your life of discipleship is gonna be on that same path. So let's read verses 31 through the end of the chapter, well through nine, actually I'm gonna read through 9-1. And he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father and the holy angels. And he said to them, truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power. Jesus' cross, his suffering and death are central to his own life and mission. And it's central to his example to the disciples. And it's going to become, this little verse gets picked up by Matthew and Mark and Luke, and it really becomes the paradigm for our entire life as a Christian. And it can be summed up, John Calvin has a little book called Self-Denial. And it's a little short treatise on how do you live the Christian life. And he says it's all summed up in this. your self-denial so that you can follow Christ. I had somewhere around here, I was running around too much this morning, I pulled out Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book, The Cost of Discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor during World War II. well, prior to World War II, he was put to death by the Nazis in 1945, just a month before World War II officially ended. And he writes this book in 1937, so this is a few years before World War II officially starts, but Hitler's come to power, and he's seen Hitler and the state of Germany moving more and more liberal. more and more anti-God, more and more anti-Christian. And the church is largely complacent as they're watching it happen. And so this is his rousing call to the church. There is a cost to discipleship and you've got to stand your ground against this entire culture that's moving away from Christ and is turning against you. Well, the cross is the place where Christ himself says, he says to the Father, not my will, Lord, but yours be done. You remember the garden Jesus prays. If it's possible, let this cup pass from me. If it's possible to do this work any other way, let this one pass from me. Because he knows the horror and the fear of what's coming. He knows the pain of what's coming. And he says, and yet, not my will, but yours be done. Well, we could say the exact same thing about the call to discipleship that Jesus puts on every one of us. Because the call to discipleship can be a painful one, and the road can feel like a road of suffering. It would be so much easier just to drift along with the world, just to hide in your own little cave, Or just to live your own little life, living only for yourself. Make it as cush as you possibly can. Make it as insulated as you possibly can. And yet Jesus says, not your will, mine is gonna be done. You're gonna take up your cross and follow me. And that's what every Christian has to do. The cross of Jesus is the place where God opened up the door to eternal life. He paid the price for our debt. Our condemnation was placed on Him. And He's gonna tell us, and if you want to partake in that, there's a cross that you're gonna have to carry daily. And that cross is, you're gonna have to deny yourself take up your cross, follow me. And so this week we're looking mainly at these three little commands. And next week we're gonna look especially in verses 35 through 38, the reward that Christ gives to us, the promises that he gives to us. So it's kind of a two-part sermon. This week we're looking at what it means to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. The cost, just like Bonhoeffer says, the cost is your whole life. Grace is free, but it's not cheap. I mean, it's a lot like marriage. You can get married without costing a penny, right? And yet in another sense, it's gonna cost you everything. It's gonna cost you your whole life, which is now covenanted to and given to another person. You now exist in this marriage relationship to serve the other person. They become your primary focus and target in life, is the joy and the peace and the benefit and the good of this other person. And the Bible tells us, and that's just a picture of you in Christ. That's just a picture of the church in Christ. is that when you become the disciple of Christ, it's not just you giving up and saying, okay, my whole life is now gonna be about serving you, Christ. Jesus is on the other side saying the exact same thing. Anyone who covenants to me, who commits to me, I'm here with the same commitment and the same covenant that I am going to give my all for your joy, for your benefit, for your good. We get far more out of this discipleship relationship than we ever give to it. And we're gonna especially be looking at that next week. Command number one, deny yourself. What are we denying here? We're denying ourself. What does he mean by that? Well, in 1 Corinthians 6, do you remember Paul says, you are not your own. You were bought with a price. And so glorify God in your body. What you're giving up is you're giving up living for yourself. Everybody's got desires. Everybody's got dreams, ambitions. And what you're doing with every single one of those, some of those are good, some of those are bad. It's not bad when the six-year-old watches a game on TV and says, I want to be a major league baseball player when I grow up. Well, it's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? But there's lots of other desires that we have that can be bad. We say, I want to be rich. I want my life to be filled with this or that. What it means to deny ourselves is that instead of that desire or this desire ruling over us, guiding us and shaping our life, this one desire becomes the overarching desire that puts every other one in order, that I belong to Christ and I desire to obey you, Jesus, no matter what comes. And every other decision gets put into place as it's brought in line with that. I wanna get married, okay. What does Christ say about marriage? He says you marry a believer. You do it like this. You bring that in. You're going to act as a husband in this way. You're gonna act as a wife in this way. And so all of your desires to be married gets brought into that. I wanna make a lot of money. Or I wanna be successful in business. Or I wanna be successful as a carpenter or whatever your trade is. Okay, all of those things get brought in line with this, that He calls on you to be just and righteous in the workplace, and to be generous with your money, and to think of others as more important than yourselves, to watch out for the good of employees under you, to be honest as a worker to your employer. The desire to please Christ and obey Christ becomes the biggest desire. And every desire that you can't bring in line with Christ, you throw that one away. That's what it means to deny yourself. And there's times, just like in marriage, where you think, man, I'd really like to go do this and that. And you go, but I don't have time for that. because I have a spouse that I'm taking care of, or I have children that I'm taking care of. And so you're denying those things that would get in the way of you doing the better thing, the bigger thing. You know, there's the Psalm 37, four, people love to quote this, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. You think, I'm gonna come, I'm gonna worship the Lord on Sunday and bam, bam, he's gonna give me the desires of my heart. Well, meanwhile, what he means is he's gonna fix the desires of your heart and then fulfill those desires. And he's gonna strip out the bad desires so that the better ones can come to fruition and grow. and that the real desires that he's put in the heart of every man, woman, and child to know their creator and to worship him is gonna get fulfilled. Because that one sometimes gets buried underneath all the others. And then we're gonna find when he's started to sanctify us and purify us and pull out those bad ones, we're gonna find he knew all along. what the deepest desires of my soul were. Like Augustine says, remember, he says in his book, The Confessions, where he's writing kind of an autobiography of his own spiritual pilgrimage, and he says, our hearts find no rest until they find their rest in you. Following Christ begins with this commitment to total surrender, total surrender of yourself, your will, your ambition, your dreams, your desires, to live for the one who died for you and gave himself for you, to glorify him in every part of your life. Denying yourself begins with a 100% total surrender to Christ. The second command, take up your cross. Take up your cross. The cross in those days was an instrument of death. It was the punishment for the wicked, punishment for prisoners. Like a noose or an electric chair, they used it to put people to death. And to put someone to death on the cross is called crucifixion. And we're called to crucify the passions of the flesh in Romans. Crucify the desires of the flesh. Luke gives us more detail about this verse. Mark just says, take up your cross and follow me. Do you remember what Luke says? Take up your cross daily and follow me. When we become disciples of Christ, the life of Christ is an unending struggle of the Spirit with every available weapon against the world, the flesh, and the devil." That's from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's an unending struggle of the Spirit with every weapon that God's given us, every spiritual weapon. against the world, the flesh, and the devil. And so the cross is the perfect concept, it's the perfect pattern for our Christian lives. Christ, as sin, was crucified. Paul tells us in Galatians, he was put to death as sin. And so it's the perfect pattern for us because as we still have remaining sin in us, we still have wrong desires, we still have selfish ambitions floating around in there. Every time that old man and those sinful desires raise up, it's a fresh chance to crucify that sin again. That old man, every time he starts to exert his influence, needs crucified daily and hourly. Bonhoeffer again, the cross is laid on every Christian. It's that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark on discipleship, we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death. So we give our lives over to death, and thus it begins. The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life. It meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. Everybody who comes to Christ, the first thing you meet is the cross. And he says, if you want to belong to me, you deny yourself, take up your cross. and follow me. He holds it up right there for us to say, here's what it's gonna cost you. It's gonna cost you your life. It's gonna cost you crucifying yourself so that you can belong to me. And if that doesn't happen, he says in Matthew, you're not worthy to come after me. We've got to die to the attachments to this world. to the love of money. We've got to deny to thoughts of others. We've got to die to holding on to bitterness and anger, to not forgiving. We've got to die to thinking that our, to assuming our thinking is without error. We've got to die to the lure of the world, the enticements of the world, the sirens of this world. Every delight that pulls on our senses. We've got to die to the thoughts of men, what others are saying about us. You would think Bonhoeffer's writing this about America today, but he was writing about Nazi Germany pre-World War II in 1937. He says, listen, the messengers of Jesus are gonna be hated until the end of time. They're gonna be blamed for division which rends apart cities and homes. Jesus and his disciples will be condemned on all sides for undermining family life and for leading the nation astray. They're gonna be called fanatics and disturbers of the peace. Man, simply to say, You know what, I'm gonna call a person by the gender that they were born with, created with. I'm gonna teach my children that God made you with a gender, and that's what you need to be and become, and we're called child abusers for that. And we're told that we are the threat to our children for teaching them such things. Or to say I don't want to bake a cake and print something on it that goes against what I believe. He needs fined, he needs put in prison. Taking up your cross means you're going to have to stand against what the world says. And you're gonna be hated for it. And that's why he says in verse 38, whoever's ashamed of me and my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation of him will the son of man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father and the holy angels. There is a great cost to following Christ and he likens it to a cross because it's like you have to die to yourself and it's like your life in this world feels like you're put up on a cross so that everybody can walk by you and mock you in your shame and your nakedness just like they did to Christ. We've got to die to the world and what the world says about us. But in dying we live. In verse 35, whoever would save his life will lose it. And whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospels, they will save it. Paul says in Romans 6, 19, just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity, and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness, but what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you've been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and to its end, eternal life. We're being crucified, but only so that we can be given a new life in Jesus. The third command, follow me. There's a lot of aesthetics in the world, a lot of aesthetics in different religions. There's a lot of secular pagan ascetics. Ones who deny themselves, they punish their body, they buffet their body. They try to discipline their minds to become better than they were, to become purer than they were, or more holy. But they don't deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Jesus. And that's what repentance means. These commands are all really three parts of one thing. It's all repentance from one life turning to God. If you simply become more disciplined in your life and more developed into the pinnacle and the apex of humanity, You're still lost in your sins because you haven't done the most important thing, which is follow Jesus. This third element is the highest and most important piece of the turning of your soul, turning from darkness to light. Some people turn from darkness all the way back to darkness. They've never turned out of it to the light of Christ. And Jesus instructs us how to follow him. And it can seem really easy sitting here in church listening to a sermon that gets you pumped up, gets you excited, kind of fans those flames of I've got a greater desire and ambition to follow Christ. And then when Jesus' instructions hit us in real life, we stand there weighing his words, and we stand there in our conscience, and it can seem so hard at that moment. Don't neglect meeting together as is the habit of some. Don't neglect meeting for the worship of the Lord. And Sunday morning rolls around and you're like, man, do I want to get out of bed? Keep the marriage bed pure in every form that God defines it, singles, marrieds. Forgive as Christ has forgiven you. Oh man, you can be at odds with a person and you're thinking, I need to forgive, I don't want to forgive. Seek first the kingdom of God. And in that context, he's talking about money and how are you gonna take care of your life. Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. Be kind to one another. Outdo one another in showing honor. In the Sermon on the Mount, he talks about prayer. Pray like this. When you do your fasting, fast like this. When you do your giving, give like this. All of these commands, all the commands of Scripture, this is Jesus saying, follow me. Here's my instructions. Here's how to follow me. I haven't hidden it under a bush. It's right here. It's plain. I wrote it all down to help you devote your life to it. And because it's following Christ and because this is discipleship, you either take all of it or you take it not at all. Jesus calls this, he compares it to slavery, meaning I'm the master and you're the slave. You're the bond servant. And so that means whatever he says goes. And this is, in my experience, this is one of the most controversial and misunderstood teachings of Christ to some Christians. And it boggles my mind because we start talking about the necessity of obedience, the obligations of duty, the imperative that you conform every aspect of your life to Christ in every detail that he's commanded you. You start talking like that and it puts people in a tizzy. They start thinking we're confusing justification and that our works are getting in there to our salvation. I'm not gonna try to unravel all of that this morning. These commands are in front of us, and they're plain to us, aren't they? This is what I tell my kids, and this is what I tell myself oftentimes. It doesn't matter if you understand all exactly how all these doctrines connect together. It's enough to just hear your parents' command and obey it, isn't it? All right, so let's start with that. That every single one of us has these three commands, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, written right in front of us. And if Jesus says it, by golly, we're gonna do it. Simply because he said it. Because he bought me with his blood, I am not my own, I belong to Christ. Heart and soul, mind, body, I belong to Jesus. And I'm gonna obey him whatever it says. You either take Jesus' yoke upon you with all of his instructions, or you don't get Jesus. It's like a college math class. You say, okay, I'm gonna go enroll in this math class at Missouri Western. And so you get all the assignments, you get the books, but you know what? Pay time comes around. They send you the bill two weeks later, and you decide, I'm not gonna pay that. And Friday comes, and you're supposed to turn in your assignments. You're not gonna turn in your assignments. A month rolls by, you still haven't paid your bill, you still haven't turned in your assignments. What does the teacher do? He comes and he says, look, you're out of here. You don't pay for the class, you don't do your assignments. You're not part of the class. He disenrolls you. The university disenrolls you. He says, you haven't even done enough to audit this class, go home. If you're not willing to pay the price of discipleship, and you're not willing to listen and obey the commands of Jesus, you don't get Jesus. Luke 6, 46, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Jesus says there's a disconnect here. You can't call me Master, Lord, and not do what I tell you. Those two things are absolutely contrary to one another. They're incompatible with one another. When Jesus says we're to be his disciples, he means we're to learn and to do all of his instructions. So in Luke 640, he says a disciple's not above his teacher, meaning if Jesus said it, the disciple can't come up and say, well, I have a better idea for you. We don't get to talk like that to Christ. And if we know anything about ourselves and darkness and sin, the darkness of sinful thinking, the fallenness of man, and we know something about the person of Jesus, the Son of God, Holy One, wisdom of God, we're not going to be so foolish as to say, I got a better idea than you do, Jesus. A disciple, not above his teacher, not above his master, but when he's fully trained, he's going to be like his teacher. And so in Matthew 28, verses 18 through 20, this is the very end of the story for Matthew, Jesus gathers his disciples this one last time and says, all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore, make disciples of all nations. All right, so the apostles, Jesus is leaving, the apostles are supposed to take this mission to make disciples out of all the nations. How do we do that? All right, what's the next sentence? You baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And you instruct them to do all that I've commanded you. All right. We can do that. And if you're sitting here listening, you can obey that. How would you obey that? Well, if you hear His voice calling you to be His disciple, When you commit to be a disciple, you get baptized, and then you start obeying every other command. That's just the first one. That's how you be a disciple, is that you sit at Jesus' feet, you listen to his words, and whatever he tells you to do, you do. Whatever he tells you to learn, you learn. How he tells you to act and to walk and to love, you act and walk and love in the same way. Some people try to have a Christ with no discipleship, but they will find that they have no Christ at all. It's precisely at this point of following and obeying Christ that one shows whether or not you belong to Christ. And that's just another reason that that's so important. And so Matthew says, chapter 10, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. You see how important this is to Jesus? This simple idea of learning from him, sitting at his feet, following his instructions? But the beautiful thing that should be encouraging to us. The beautiful thing about being saved by a humble and loving Christ is that there is no perfection required here. There are zero achievements necessary. There are zero works, zero contributions that you need to become a disciple of Christ. It's open to the simplest person, the lowest IQ, the lowest physical prowess, the humblest of upbringing. All you need is to obey, to trust and to obey. And that is one of the most beautiful things about the Christian life, is that all you need is humility to come to Jesus, to just listen to him. It's like the song that we sing, to trust and obey, because there's no other way to be happy in Jesus. There's times when this can feel so hard You're walking on the Christian road and you think, this is just so hard. I cannot keep doing this. I cannot love that person. I cannot forgive that person. Or I can't give up this thing or that thing. And you think, like Jesus, if it's possible, Lord, let this cup pass from me. But there was no other way for sin to be atoned for than to Christ be crucified on the cross for us. And most of the time, there is no other way for us to be purified and sanctified except to continue on that path, carrying our own cross. There's no other way to be purified from the stain of sin, the darkness of sin, the folly of sin. except this holy road of obedience to Jesus, of denying yourself, taking up your cross and following him. But the surprising thing is, and you can ask every saint who's walked with the Lord for decades, once you start down that road and you push through those hard moments, you find his yoke is easy and his burden is light. And you think, what gain was I getting from this road when I was trying to do it my way? Broken relationships, bad fruit, and the way of Christ is the way of love, isn't it? This is my commandment, that you love one another as I've loved you. And you find that his burden is light because the power of obedience he supplies by his own Holy Spirit. The instructions for obedience he writes on our hearts. And on the path of obedience we find sweetness, joy, love, life, sweet communion with people. He never calls us down in his instructions. Every instruction he gives us takes us higher higher in joy, higher in glory, higher in love, and at the end of that road, eternal life with the Father. Jesus is calling you today to become his disciple. If you're listening to my voice, listening to these words of Jesus, he's calling you to become his disciple. And if you don't know Christ as a disciple, you don't know him as your teacher and your Lord, I urge you to obey these three simple commands. Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him. It will be rest for your soul. And it will be eternal life as your reward. And if you know Jesus as your teacher and you are his disciple, I urge you to let go of anything in your life, anything in your conscience that you haven't fully given over to him. Something that you might be holding on to some control or holding on to something where you go, I know that I need to take this, this is my next step in obedience. Do it. Deny yourself. That's the old man rising up inside. Crucify it. Take up your cross and follow him. It will bring rest for your soul. It will return sweetness of joy in your life of obedience to the Lord. Psalm 1611. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy, and at your right hand, pleasures evermore. That's a promise, and that's fulfilled in Christ. Christ, you have made known to me the path of life. And it's not just God generally, it's Christ saying, come and get it. in the right hand of Christ are the keys to death and Hades, and his right hand is the reward of eternal life for everyone who will answer him. Let's pray. You make known to me the path of life, and in your presence there's fullness of joy. Lord, help us to know the joy. Help us to get up out of ourselves, to leave our old life, to crucify the old man, and to turn to you, the living and eternal one who gives life freely and has come to give us life. And we find it by taking up our cross and following you. Help us, Lord. Help us to do that. Oh, we need such a push from behind from your Holy Spirit so many times. Lord, help us, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.