Take Up Your Cross

Good morning, friends. You know, if grocery hauling were an Olympic sport, I would go for the gold medal. When Allison and I, maybe this is like this at your house, but we go to Kroger, we go to Walmart, and we come home with the, the back end of our car just full of all of those plastic bags. My goal is to get all of that stuff into our house in as few trips as possible. Where are my people?

A lot of dudes. A lot of dudes, right? So one plastic loop at a time, you know, just finger after finger after finger, I try to bundle all of those bags together and then I try to lug them all into the house and set them on our kitchen island before I lose circulation in my hands. That's the goal. Now, you might think I'm a goofball for trying to carry 20 bags at once.

You might think I'm a goofball for other reasons. But even if that's not your thing, it's possible that you carry a purse that weighs a ton or maybe a ginormous book bag. When I used to pick up our daughter from high school, her backpack was so heavy that when she tossed it into the floorboard of my car, the suspension would creak. I'm pretty sure she had a bowling ball and a boat anchor, a refrigerator, maybe an anvil. I don't know.

There are a lot of things in there. There are times when we carry things that we shouldn't. And maybe trying to carry 30 grocery bags at once is one of those examples. Maybe a back seat that's full of fast food trash. Sometimes it's the self inflicted stress of over commitment.

Sometimes it's the unrealistic goal of trying to just please everybody. Sometimes what we carry that we shouldn't is guilt and shame over sins that Jesus has already forgiven. And we've talked at other times about some of these things that we carry needlessly. But there are also some things that we should carry. And we're going to look at one of them today as we kick off this second part of our trigger warning series.

In this series for the next few weeks, just like in part one this past spring, we're going to focus on some of Jesus toughest, most comfort, disturbing teachings. Jesus didn't come to earth just to lecture us about correct doctrine. He didn't come just to give us self help tips for behavior modification. He came to call us to whole life surrender, total obedience. He came to delve beneath outward appearances and get at our inner desires and our motivations.

And so before we jump into the key verse that I want us to look at together today. I think we need to set the scene, which is found in Luke chapter nine. We're going to pick this up in verse 18, which is just a few verses ahead of where we're ultimately going to land. Luke chapter 9, starting in verse 18 says, Once, when Jesus was praying in private, which we know he did a lot, and his disciples were with him, he asked them, who do the crowd say 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 I am? Peter answered, God's Messiah.

Peter got it. He'd been watching Jesus and listening to Jesus. And he had concluded that Jesus was the Messiah the prophets had predicted and the Jewish people had anticipated for centuries. And he was right. So Jesus made no effort to correct him.

But Jesus also knew that many people were were expecting the wrong kind of Messiah. Jesus had come to teach and to heal and to serve and to reconcile sinful people to God. But most of the Jewish people were expecting a military Messiah who would make Israel great again. That was what they were looking for. And Jesus knew that if his messianic identity became widely known, he would be more and more frequently mobbed by people who, who wanted him to do things that weren't even on his agenda.

So right after Peter correctly identified that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. And he said, the Son of Man. This is the way that Jesus most commonly referred to himself. 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.

Jesus didn't come to earth to stage a military coup. He came to fulfill prophecies like Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 that looked forward to a suffering Savior. Jesus mission could only be accomplished through pain and rejection and death. And even though resurrection awaited him on the other side of the cross, the scenario that Jesus described didn't sound very victorious, at least not in the way the Jewish people had hoped for. And in that moment, Jesus told his disciples that he wasn't the only one called to sacrifice.

Luke 9:23. Then Jesus said to them, all, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. To live for Jesus is to die to self. Now our objective today is to break down what Jesus said and what he meant in that key verse. If we want to be his disciples, if we want to belong to him, if we want to experience the life that you and I were created for.

Jesus calls us to do three things. Number one, he calls us to say no to ourselves. You could save this for later. This is a homework assignment. I would encourage you every day this week to to get your phone out at some point and turn on your camera and turn it around so that you know the same way you would for a selfie and look yourself in the eye and say no.

It's good practice. We need to get better at that. It can be done. Jesus said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. Which is nobody's favorite thing, right?

We talked just a couple of weeks ago about how Burger King tells us, have it your way. Netflix and Amazon queue up movies and TV shows that cater directly to our personal preferences. Doordash brings whatever we want to eat right there to our front door. Amazon puts everything we could ever want at our fingertips without the hassle of getting dressed and going to the store and waiting in line and, you know, interacting with people. Our dislike of self denial shows up in so many ways.

Shopping without self denial often leads to out of control debt. We tend to overspend just like our government does. Eating without self denial leads to a host of well documented health issues. Using our phones without self denial leaves us distracted and exhausted. Venting our emotions without self denial leads to angry online rants and episodes of road rage.

Using sex without self denial fuels the porn and sex trafficking industries. It contributes to numerous unplanned pregnancies that leave many children growing up in poverty and without fathers. Using sex without self denial is the reason there was a Me Too movement that was birthed just a few years ago. Parenting without self denial raises spoiled, entitled kids. I've talked to multiple educators who who are exhausted by parents who rarely tell their kids no and who push back when their teachers try to see.

Trying to always get everything we want actually isn't even good for us. It breeds materialism and obesity and anxiety and conflict and self absorption and indifference to others. And Jesus knows that. So he said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. Whoever wants to be my disciple.

Whoever chooses to be My disciple. You'll notice in this verse that Jesus doesn't force us to follow him. But if we want to be his disciples, he is the boss. He's in charge. Which means that we are not.

We cannot follow Jesus if we think our own desires are always the most important thing in the world. The apostle Paul said it this way. Paul said, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, in view of the amazing sacrifice that God has offered for us, Jesus said, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Now, to be holy, we just talked about this recently, means to be dedicated to God. To be pleasing to God means elevating his desires far above our own.

And Paul called that a living sacrifice because. Because we have to do it again and again and again. The animal sacrifices we read about most often in the Old Testament, those were dead sacrifices. But a living sacrifice is a sacrifice that has the choice to crawl off the altar. And we do that quite often.

So how do we learn to become living sacrifices? How do we learn to deny ourselves? Well, it begins with taking our eyes off of ourselves. And that's one of the reasons that God wires us for relationships. That's one of the reasons that God calls us into community.

There are very few things in my experience that reveal our self centeredness any faster than interacting with other people. Any of us who are married recognize that getting married forces us to think about our partner's needs. And if we don't learn to do that, our marriages often don't survive. Any of us who are parents have probably recognized that having children powerfully reveals it magnifies our own selfishness. Loving our kids well sometimes costs us sleep.

It sometimes costs us watching Bluey or Paw Patrol videos. It sometimes costs us fixing chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese much more often than we would prefer. It means coming home from work and playing with our kids and helping them with their homework instead of just parking it in the recliner and entertaining ourselves for the evening. You know, as an individual, you can easily slip right in and slip right out of church. But if you join a life group or you go on a mission trip, or you participate in Impact week, you're gonna have other people that you work alongside.

And you just can't make it all about you in every setting. Have you noticed this? There are tasks that nobody really likes to do at home. That might mean taking out the trash or unloading the dishwasher. It might mean cleaning the toilet or putting away the groceries that you brought in from the car in one trip might mean scooping dog poop at the store.

Those jobs include actually returning your shopping cart or letting someone else go ahead of you in the checkout line. At church, that includes tearing down tables and chairs after events. It includes scooting toward the middle of the row which nobody wants to do to make room for people who arrive late and can't see their seats when we're all standing up. So one way to practice self denial is simply to identify tasks like these and decide ahead of time that when they need to be done, I'm gonna do them. I'm gonna take the initiative.

Rather than hanging back and waiting and hoping that somebody else will do it for us, we just jump in. The Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians chapter two, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, instead in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others. We say no to ourselves by prioritizing other people's needs. You know, loving and serving other people more often than not is less about grand gestures than it is about just doing small, simple things every day.

Giving Christmas gifts is a lot of fun, but that's no substitute for just showing day to day thoughtfulness to the people we love. Flowers on your anniversary are nice, but so is helping with the dishes and changing a diaper or run in the vacuum. Disney vacations are great, but they cannot replace time spent simply listening to our loved ones. To live for Jesus is to die to self. And we will have a hard time saying no to ourselves in those big moments if we're not already in the habit of practicing that in the small ones.

Jesus says, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. Now, in addition to saying no to ourselves, Jesus calls us number two. To carry our cross daily. To carry our cross daily. I've had the opportunity several times to take groups of high school students to Colorado and to hike to the top of Mount Zion near Leadville.

It's a beautiful hike. And on one of those trips I remember this is a view from the top. This is Turquoise Lake, just a spectacular place. But on one of those trips, a group of guys managed to partially unzip a friend's backpack without him realizing it. And as we hiked several miles up that mountain, they kept tossing rocks into their buddy's backpack.

Now, it happened so gradually he didn't notice the extra weight. But at the top, when we sat down to get our water out and eat our lunch, he discovered that his bag was full of gravel. That burden wasn't his choice. It certainly wasn't his fault. He was a victim of his friends.

Very sadistic sense of humor. Now, people sometimes assume when Jesus said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily, that he was basically just giving Us a pep talk about dealing with everyday annoyances. You know, like a difficult boss or fussy kids or Internet outages or slow Internet. That's the worst, isn't it? Or noisy, you know, inconsiderate neighbors or excessive back hair or arthritis or having short, stubby thumbs like I do.

But is that what Jesus meant? I mean, to interpret scripture correctly, we have to look at its context. And the context of Luke chapter nine, which we've already looked at, makes clear that Jesus was not talking about everyday garden variety hassles. Remember what Jesus said right before he got to this take up your cross teaching? 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. And he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. When the Romans crucified people, their goal was not just execution, it was also humiliation. They forced victims, Jesus was one of them, to carry the patibulum that that heavy wooden cross beam that made the horizontal piece of the cross, often a beam weighing 75 pounds or more. They forced crucifixion victims to carry their own crossbar to the place of execution.

And then they stripped them completely naked as they nailed them to those crosses. So for Jesus, taking up his cross was not a metaphor for tolerating annoyances. It was quite literal. He came to suffer and die on an actual cross for the sins of the world. For your sins and my sins.

Now, two weeks ago, when we were in Matthew chapter six, we were looking at the your kingdom come, your will be done section of the Lord's Prayer. And we saw how Jesus, just before he was betrayed and arrested and beaten and killed, he considered the grueling ordeal that lay ahead of him. And he prayed, father, if you are willing, take this cup, take this suffering from me, yet not my will, but yours be done. Jesus knew what he was about to suffer, and he dreaded that. But he was more committed to God's glory.

He was more committed to our salvation than he was to his own comfort. So in the end, he said, not my will, Father, but yours be done. He yielded to God's will, and he went to the cross in our place. Now, every time I read that prayer, every time I relive that moment, it's humbling to me and it's moving to me. But a few years ago, I had the opportunity to actually visit the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed those words, Matthew's version of that statement, that prayer is engraved on a plaque there in The Garden of Gethsemane.

And what struck me when I was in the Garden of Gethsemane was how close the city of Jerusalem actually is to that spot. Jerusalem sits on a hill where it's separated only by a very narrow valley, the Kidron Valley from the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane that sits there. And from Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed, you can look through the olive trees. You can look through the olive trees and you can see the walls of Jerusalem. Yeah, this is a photo I took from the Garden of Gethsemane.

You can see the walls of Jerusalem and the city gate right there. And that reality, that realization as you sit in Gethsemane and you look across that small valley to the city of Jerusalem paints a powerful picture. We know from scripture that Jesus was arrested at night because the soldiers who came for him carried torches and lanterns. So as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, he would have seen those torches moving through the darkness and coming for him. And during the few minutes it took those soldiers to reach him, Jesus could have climbed further up the Mount of Olives and just disappeared into the wilderness.

But he didn't. He stayed put. And he waited for what he had come to earth to do. He submitted himself to the mission of suffering and death that God had sent him to complete. Paul described Jesus decision like this.

Philippians 2 says he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. See, for Jesus, the cross wasn't just some hassle to tolerate. It was a choice to say no to himself and fully embrace the will of God. Now we tend to talk and think a whole lot more about living for Jesus than we do dying to self. But we can't live for Jesus without dying to self.

We can't live for Jesus without offering these bodies as living obedient sacrifices. The cross Jesus calls us to take up is a daily decision to say, you're in charge and I'm not. So what you say, I will do, not my will, but yours be done. Then Jesus said to them, all, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. To live for Jesus is to die to self every single day.

Saying no to ourselves and carrying our cross on a daily basis are at the heart of what it means to number three, follow Jesus.

I don't know how often we think about this, but the reason that you and I, gentiles, non Jewish people living halfway around the world from Israel 2000 years after the Life of Jesus the reason that we here in the Western Hemisphere are able to know Jesus is because his disciples took his message and they lived it and they taught it to others and they wrote it down for us to read. And in many cases they died for it. Jesus earliest disciples traced their teaching and their preaching and their writing ministries back to two words Jesus said 21 times in the four Gospels. Follow me.

Who was it that Jesus commanded to deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Him? He said, whoever wants to be my disciple. If you want to follow Jesus, this is the only way to do it. To be a disciple of Jesus means to follow Him. It means to learn from Him.

When I was in grade school, I was given a copy of a It was an old book then it was written in 1896, a novel called In His Steps written by Charles Sheldon. This classic book describes what happens in a small town church after the people of that church commit for an entire year to doing nothing without first asking this question. What would Jesus do? If you've ever seen the letters WWJD on a bracelet or a bumper sticker, they don't stand for we want jelly donuts. They don't stand for weed whacking, juvenile delinquents.

What that means is what would Jesus Do? Now that's a thought provoking question. It's a book I would highly recommend that you read. At the same time that what would Jesus do Question can sometimes become dangerously speculative where we put Jesus into scenarios that Scripture never describes and then we imagine him doing more or less whatever we would be most comfortable with him doing or saying. So I would recommend, rather than asking what would Jesus do?

That we simply ask ourselves, what did Jesus do? Because as we've already seen, Jesus denied himself and he took up his cross. He obeyed God no matter the cost. And Jesus calls us to follow that example. Jesus went on in Luke chapter nine to say this for whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, Jesus said, the Son of man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the Holy angels. To follow Jesus, to be his disciple means to love him more than anything. More than life. Jesus lived a life of total surrender to God's purposes.

He embraced long days and short nights and needy people and uncomfortable circumstances because he believed God's purposes mattered more than his own comfort. Friends, are we seeking the life that only Jesus can offer, or are we busy trying to squeeze him into our own version of of what life is all about? Are we surrendering our ambitions to Jesus or are we trying to use him to get what we want? To follow Jesus means to love him more than anything. That means we love him more than wealth.

You know, Jesus left the majesty of heaven to sleep in a livestock feeding trough. He left the majesty of heaven to be raised by poor working class parents, to do manual labor himself, and to be homeless depending on the generosity and hospitality of others. Friends, are we trusting Jesus when it comes to storing up treasures in heaven rather than on earth? Do we recognize honestly that nothing we earn or gain or stockpile on earth is going to go with us when we die? I mean, are we managing our material blessings in a way that reflects kingdom priorities?

Or do we primarily say mine?

Jesus said if we're going to follow him, we have to love him more than wealth. He said if we're going to follow him, we have to love him more than popularity. As you read through the Gospels, you will notice how often Jesus took heat for the company he kept. He hung out often with sick people who were considered to be unclean. They were outcasts.

Many people consider that their their conditions, their suffering was a result of a curse from God. Jesus befriended social outcasts like tax collectors and prostitutes. He also pulled no punches in calling out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his day. And eventually those religious leaders killed him for it.

Are we willing to follow Jesus even when others don't get it? Are you willing to follow Jesus even if there are people in your life who say that that's a foolish decision? Are we willing to claim Jesus even if that means being rejected or ridiculed or persecuted or killed? We have brothers and sisters right now in other parts of the world who are losing their lives for choosing to follow Jesus. To live for Jesus is to die to self on every level.

Then Jesus said to them, all, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

So let me close just by asking us a few questions. Do you want to be Jesus disciple?

Will you say no to yourself so you can say yes to him? Will you take up your cross on a daily basis and obey whatever Jesus asks of you? Not just the things that would be your natural inclination anyway, not just the things that are convenient, not just the things that are socially acceptable. But with Jesus says, this is what it means to be my disciple. Is that enough for us?

Will you follow him? Will you learn from him? Will you seek to become more like him? To live for Jesus is to die to self. And if that sounds hard, you're not wrong.

But the fully surrendered life that Jesus calls us to is the best, most rewarding, longest lasting life available. It's also something that we simply cannot do on our own. And that's why Jesus came not only to give his life to remove our sins, but he also came to offer us the gift of his Holy Spirit, who helps us to think and desire and live differently. And we would love to help you know Jesus so that you can follow Jesus and discover that life and spend the rest of your days on this earth living it. Would you pray with me, Lord Jesus?

Your call to us is intense.

It's all consuming if we're honest. It's daunting, it's. It even feels a little scary sometimes. And yet we're reminded this morning that the call that you extend to us is no different than the call that you yourself answered.

We're thankful for your courage and your humility and in being willing to put on the limitations of a human body and to experience the difficulties, the frustrations that go along with life in this world. Ultimately, to be so obedient to the Father that you would lay down that life that you would suffer, that you would die in our place to deal with all of the sin that has made such a mess of our world, the sin that would separate us from you otherwise, and to wipe that out of the picture.

And because you made that sacrifice, Jesus, and because you reclaimed your life from the grave, we know, we see, we believe, we trust that all power and authority belong to you. And because we believe that to be true, you are more deserving than anyone else of our obedience, our worship, our loyalty, our submission. And so we ask you, Lord Jesus, to show us all over again the life that you call us to. A life of self denial, a life of cross carrying, a life of following you no matter what. And we pray that you would give us the desire more than anything else to live that life.

Because we know that you are supremely worth our living that life. We're thankful, Father, for your love for us. We pray all these things in Jesus name, Amen.