Lose Yourself

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will loose it, but whoever looses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his fathers glory with the Holy angels”
- Mark 8:34-37

There are no half measures. It’s not a nice hobby. Following Jesus is all or nothing.

Jesus says that if we want to follow him then we need to disown our values, cultural norms, expectations of our self, even some of our ideas about God. We are asked to lay down our ideas of how things should go. It is a call to self sacrifice and absolute surrender. On the cross are our own plans and desires.

C.S.Lewis summarises this so well in his book Mere Christianity. He says:

“The more we get what we now call ourselves our of the way and let him take us over the more truly ourselves we become. Our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. The more I resist and try and love on my own the more I become dominated by my own hereditary and upbringing and surroundings and drives, without Him, what I proudly call myself becomes merely the meeting place for chains of event which I never started and cannot stop. Most of what I call me can be very easily be explained by my physical drives or what others have said and done to me. It is only when I turn to Christ when I give myself up to his personalty that I finally begin to have a real personality all of my own. 

Never the less you should never go to christ for the sake of a new self. As long as it is your own self you are concentrating on you haven’t really begun to go to him.”

Self denial and cross baring do not eradicate or repress the self, rather the Holy Spirit works through them, restoring the image of God in us as we grow in christlikeness and become more fully who we were created to be. Our real new self will not come when we are looking for it, only when we are looking for Him.