“If anyone would come after me,” he said, “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 gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34–35).
For disciples of Jesus, the gospel of grace not only plucks them from the easy path to hell but also places them on the hard path to heaven.
“When Christ calls a man,” wrote the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “he bids him come and die.”
That’s more than a cute tweet.
A Cross-Shaped Trail
Jesus’ suffering was ultimately so that we would not suffer forever. The greatest accomplishment of Jesus’ mission is something he did on our behalf—substitutionary atonement. But Jesus was not only a substitute, he was also a pioneer (Heb 2:10; 12:2). He not only bears the cross in our place; he also blazes a cross-shaped trail for us to follow.
“A crucifixion of the natural self,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “is the passport to everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.” Meaningful discipleship under Jesus Christ is not the fruit of cool, detached onlooking, however admiring of his teaching we may be. Only the disciple who loses his life for Jesus’ sake, securing the only life worth having, understands who Jesus is and how God’s redemptive purposes in the world operate.
Have You Died?
To take up the cross is, however, the only path to real, solid joy. To take up the cross is to walk with the One who in great love bore the ultimate cross in our place.
Counterintuitive as it is, the way to save our life is to lose it. Death was the way to life for Jesus. Death is the way to life for Jesus’ disciple. “Die before you die. There is no chance after,” remarks a character in C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces.
If we tunnel into the very heart of Christian discipleship we find, echoing the mission of Jesus himself, this startling principle: loss is gain. Yielding all guarantees receiving all. Glad abandon is our only sanity.
"Against what all our instincts of self-preservation whisper to us every day, total surrender to Jesus is the safest investment we can make."
Our only security is renunciation of all that this world holds secure. The safest and the hardest thing we can ever do.
Jesus is not asking us to try harder. He is asking us to come and die and therefore live.
He is not offering to make us nicer. He is offering to make us new.
Adapted from Dane Ortlund's new book, Defiant Grace: The Surprising Message and Mission of Jesus.
Posted on: The Resurgence
http://theresurgence.com
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