"Deny Yourself" — The Call That Costs Everything (And Gives Back More)
Jesus told His followers to deny themselves, pick up a cross, and follow Him. Not a metaphor for skipping dessert. A cross — the thing people died on. Most Christians quietly tiptoe past this verse. But what if the life Jesus is asking you to lose is the one that's been suffocating you?
The Verse Christians Highlight But Don’t Obey
There’s a specific kind of Bible verse that gets printed on coffee mugs and framed in living rooms precisely because we’ve domesticated it. We’ve sanded down its edges until it fits neatly into a comfortable life.
This is one of those verses:
He called the multitude to himself with his disciples and said to them, “Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.…”
Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me.
Three commands. Twelve words in English. And they contain the most radical, life-altering, terrifying invitation any human being has ever received.
We’ve turned “take up your cross” into a phrase for mild inconvenience. “My boss is so demanding — that’s just my cross to bear.” “Traffic on I-40 — my cross to bear.” “My kid won’t eat vegetables — cross to bear.”
No. That is not what this means. Not even close.
When Jesus said “take up your cross,” every single person listening knew exactly what a cross was for. It wasn’t a piece of jewelry. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a Roman execution device. People carried them through the streets on their way to die.
Jesus looked at a crowd of people and said: Follow me to your death.
And somehow, people did.
The Moment This Was Said
The context matters enormously, and most sermons skip right past it.
Seconds before this statement, something extraordinary happened. Peter — bold, impulsive, always-first-to-speak Peter — had just made the greatest confession in the Gospels:
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.”
He got it right. For once, Peter nailed it. Jesus is the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah who would save Israel and the world.
And then Jesus started explaining what that actually meant:
He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
Peter’s response? He pulled Jesus aside and rebuked Him. The student correcting the teacher. “No, Lord. That’s not how this works. You’re the Messiah. Messiahs don’t suffer. Messiahs conquer.”
And Jesus’ response to Peter is one of the most jarring moments in the New Testament:
But he, turning around and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you have in mind not the things of God, but the things of men.”
He called Peter — His closest friend, the rock He would build His church on — Satan. Because Peter was doing exactly what Satan does: offering a version of God’s plan that skips the suffering.
That’s the setup. Jesus has just explained that He is heading to a cross. And in the very next breath, He turns to the crowd and says: You’re coming too.
What “Deny Yourself” Actually Means
Let’s take these three commands one at a time, because each one goes deeper than the last.
“Deny yourself.”
The Greek word here — aparneomai — is the same word used later when Peter denies Jesus three times in the courtyard (Mark 14:30-31, 72). It means to completely disown. To say “I don’t know that person.” To refuse association.
Jesus is telling you to do to yourself what Peter later did to Him.
Deny yourself. Disown yourself. Look at the person in the mirror — with all their ambitions, their carefully constructed identity, their plans, their “I deserve this” and “I’ve earned that” — and say: I don’t know that person anymore.
This isn’t about giving up chocolate for Lent. This isn’t self-improvement or discipline or willpower. This is identity death.
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a cell in a Nazi prison, put it this way: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”
Bonhoeffer wasn’t being dramatic. He was being literal. He was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945, two weeks before the Allies liberated his camp.
Self-denial in the way of Jesus isn’t subtracting a few bad habits from your life. It’s dethroning yourself. It’s removing you from the center of your own story and letting someone else sit there.
What “Take Up Your Cross” Actually Means
“Take up your cross.”
This is the part we’ve domesticated beyond recognition, so let’s un-domesticate it.
In first-century Palestine, you didn’t “bear” a cross the way you bear a burden. If you were carrying a cross, you were walking to your own execution. Period. The Romans made condemned prisoners carry the horizontal beam — the patibulum — through the streets as a public spectacle. It was designed to humiliate before it killed.
Everyone watching Jesus say this knew that. They’d seen it. Maybe they’d watched someone they loved carry one. The image wasn’t abstract. It was visceral.
So when Jesus says “take up your cross,” He’s saying: Accept a death sentence. Voluntarily. Every day.
Luke’s version adds a word that changes everything:
He said to all, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.…”
Daily. This isn’t a one-time dramatic gesture. It’s a daily decision to die — to die to self-promotion, to die to comfort-worship, to die to the relentless drumbeat of what about me?
Paul understood this. He wrote to the Galatians:
I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.
“I no longer live.” That’s self-denial in its fullest expression. Not I’ve cut back on sinning. Not I go to church more often. I. No. Longer. Live.
The old self — the one that wanted to be the hero of its own story — is dead. And someone better is living through the body that remains.
What “Follow Me” Actually Means
“Follow me.”
After the death of self-denial and the execution of cross-bearing, there’s an invitation. And the invitation is not to a program. Not to a religion. Not to a moral framework.
It’s to a Person.
Follow me.
In Jesus’ day, “following” a rabbi meant something specific and intense. It didn’t mean attending weekly lectures. It meant leaving your home, your job, your family’s expectations, and literally walking where the rabbi walked. Eating what he ate. Sleeping where he slept. Adopting his interpretation of Scripture as your own. Arranging your entire life around his.
The phrase used in rabbinic literature was: “Be covered in the dust of your rabbi.” Walk so close behind him that the dust kicked up by his feet covers you.
That’s what Jesus is calling people into. Not admiration from a distance. Not intellectual agreement. Not Sunday-morning association. He’s calling you into a proximity so close that His life starts becoming indistinguishable from yours.
But notice the order. You don’t get to follow until you’ve denied and died. The following comes after the funeral.
Because you cannot walk closely behind Jesus while simultaneously walking toward your own ambitions. You can’t follow Him to Gethsemane if you’re heading to your comfort zone. The paths diverge. You have to choose.
The Paradox That Unlocks Everything
And then comes the line that flips everything upside down — the paradox at the heart of Christianity:
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever will lose his life for my sake and the sake of the Good News will save it.
Read that twice.
The person desperately trying to save their life — protect it, control it, maximize it, build something impressive out of it — that person is losing it. Right now. One anxious, striving, self-centered day at a time.
But the person who lets go? Who opens their hands and says, “This life isn’t mine to hoard”? Who loses their life in the service of Jesus and His mission?
That person finds something they didn’t even know they were missing.
This isn’t a trick or a guilt trip. It’s the mechanics of how human beings actually work. We were designed for something bigger than self-preservation. We were built to give ourselves away. And when we refuse — when we clutch our lives with white knuckles — something inside us atrophies.
Jesus is describing a law of the universe as real as gravity: the tighter you grip your life, the more it slips through your fingers.
C.S. Lewis said it better than almost anyone:
“Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
Two Questions That Should Keep You Up Tonight
Jesus doesn’t let the crowd off the hook. He follows the paradox with two questions that strip away every excuse:
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what will a man give in exchange for his life?
What good is it to gain the whole world?
Imagine you got everything. The career. The money. The recognition. The house, the car, the retirement account, the Instagram following, the body, the spouse, the kids who turned out perfect, the legacy people tell stories about after you’re gone. All of it. Every single thing you’ve ever wanted.
And you lost your soul in the process.
Was it worth it?
Solomon tried this experiment. He had more wealth, wisdom, women, and accomplishment than any human being in history. And his conclusion?
“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
He gained the whole world. And he wrote an entire book about how empty it was.
The second question is even more devastating: What can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
Once you’ve traded your soul for the world’s prizes — once you’ve spent your one life chasing things that can’t follow you into eternity — what do you have left to buy it back with? The currency doesn’t exist.
Your soul is the one thing you own that is worth more than everything else combined. And Jesus is saying: Stop trading it for things that won’t survive a Tuesday.
What This Looked Like in Real Life
The New Testament is full of people who heard this call and responded — in both directions.
The Rich Young Ruler (Mark 10:17-22) — A man ran to Jesus, knelt before Him, and asked the right question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” He’d kept all the commandments since he was a boy. He was moral, earnest, and sincere. And Jesus looked at him with love and said: “One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
The man walked away sad, because he had great wealth.
He couldn’t deny himself. The cost was clear and specific, and he counted it, and he decided it was too high. And Jesus let him go.
Peter and the disciples — They left everything. Nets, boats, tax booths, families, careers. When Peter said, “We have left everything to follow you!” Jesus responded:
Jesus said, “Most certainly I tell you, there is no one who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or land, for my sake, and for the sake of the Good News, but he will receive one hundred times more now in this time: houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land, with persecutions; and in the age to come eternal life.…”
They lost everything. And Jesus promised they’d receive more — not less — because of it. Different currency. Better returns. Eternal portfolio.
Paul — He had it all by first-century standards. Roman citizen, trained under Gamaliel, rising star in the Pharisee movement. And then:
However, I consider those things that were gain to me as a loss for Christ. Yes most certainly, and I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ
The word translated “garbage” — skubala — is the strongest word Paul could have used in polite company. It means refuse, dung, waste. Everything he’d built, everything he’d accomplished, everything the world told him made him valuable… waste. Compared to Jesus.
Not because those things were bad. But because he’d found something so much better that everything else looked like trash next to it.
The Part We Get Wrong
Here’s where most modern Christianity goes off the rails with this passage.
We’ve created a version of Christianity where you can accept Jesus as your Savior without accepting Him as your Lord. Where you can receive the gift of eternal life without it costing you anything. Where the cross is something Jesus did for you, but not something you’re expected to carry with Him.
Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer called it. “Grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
But here’s what we need to sit with honestly: Jesus never offered a version of following Him that didn’t involve dying. He never said, “Accept me into your heart and your life will get easier.” He said deny yourself and take up your cross.
The invitation isn’t to comfort. It’s to transformation. And transformation always costs something.
Does that mean Christianity is about earning your salvation? Absolutely not. Salvation is a gift — free, unmerited, unreasonable grace (Ephesians 2:8-9). You couldn’t earn it if you tried.
But the response to that gift? The life that flows from genuinely encountering the living God? That response looks like surrender. Full, terrifying, glorious surrender.
Not because God is a tyrant who demands everything and gives nothing. But because when you’ve tasted the real thing — when you’ve actually encountered the love that went to a cross for you — everything else loses its flavor.
You don’t deny yourself because you have to. You deny yourself because you’ve found something worth dying for.
The Freedom Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part the self-help world will never tell you: self-denial — real, Jesus-shaped self-denial — is the most liberating thing you’ll ever experience.
Think about it. Right now, how many of your anxieties are rooted in self?
- Will I succeed?
- Do people like me?
- Am I doing enough?
- What if I lose this?
- What’s going to happen to me?
Self is exhausting. Self is a tyrant that never takes a day off. Self demands constant feeding, constant attention, constant defense. You are the most high-maintenance person in your own life.
But when you deny yourself — when you genuinely stop living for you and start living for Christ and His kingdom — something extraordinary happens.
The anxiety drops. Not because your circumstances changed, but because the center of gravity shifted. You’re no longer the main character fighting to keep the story going. God is. And His story doesn’t depend on your performance.
Paul, writing from prison — actual prison, chains, guards, uncertain future — wrote the most joyful letter in the New Testament. Philippians radiates peace. From a cell. Because Paul had denied himself so thoroughly that prison couldn’t touch the thing he lived for.
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
If to live is Christ, nothing can threaten you. Because the worst thing anyone can do to you — kill you — just fast-tracks you to the Person you live for.
That’s freedom. The kind of freedom no amount of success, wealth, or self-actualization can produce.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
So practically — away from the theological heights — what does “deny yourself and take up your cross daily” look like in an ordinary life?
It looks like a thousand small deaths:
The death of always being right. Letting someone else have the last word. Apologizing when it was 60% their fault and 40% yours, because peace matters more than your record.
The death of comfort. Getting up early to pray when your bed is warm and your phone is full of notifications that feel more urgent than God. Giving money you could have spent on yourself. Choosing the hard conversation over the easy silence.
The death of reputation. Being willing to look foolish for your faith. Not bending your convictions to fit the room. Loving people your social circle thinks are beneath you.
The death of control. Surrendering your five-year plan. Saying “Your will, not mine” and meaning it — even when God’s plan looks nothing like yours. Trusting that the Author of your story knows what He’s doing even when the chapter you’re in makes no sense.
The death of unforgiveness. Releasing the person who wronged you. Not because they earned it. Because you’re dead, and dead people don’t hold grudges. (See Part 3 — loving your enemies.)
None of this is glamorous. There are no Instagram highlights. No applause. Most of it happens in the quiet, unglamorous spaces of an ordinary life where nobody’s watching.
But that’s exactly where Jesus does His best work.
He Went First
One more thing, and it might be the most important.
Jesus didn’t ask you to do anything He didn’t do Himself. He doesn’t command self-denial from a throne room while you bleed in the trenches. He denied Himself first — more completely than any human being ever has or ever will.
who, existing in the form of God, didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, yes, the death of the cross.
Read that slowly. Being in very nature God.
He was God. All-powerful. All-knowing. Infinite. Unconstrained by time or space or human limitation.
And He denied Himself. He set aside the rights and privileges of deity. He became a helpless baby in an occupied territory. He lived in poverty. He was misunderstood, rejected, betrayed, tortured, and killed.
He took up His cross — literally. Through the streets of Jerusalem. Up the hill called Golgotha. And He let them nail Him to it.
Not because He had to. Because He chose to. For you.
When Jesus says “deny yourself and take up your cross,” He’s not giving you a command from a safe distance. He’s reaching back from His own cross, hand outstretched, blood dripping, saying: Come. I know it hurts. I know it costs. But I promise — what’s on the other side is worth it.
And He has the scars to prove it.
Reflect
-
If you’re honest, what is the thing in your life you’d find hardest to deny? The thing you grip tightest? What would it look like to open your hands?
-
Where has the pursuit of “saving your life” — protecting, controlling, hoarding — actually been costing you peace?
-
Paul called everything “garbage” compared to knowing Christ. What would your life look like if you actually believed that? What would change first?
-
What’s one small daily death you could practice this week? Not a dramatic gesture — a quiet surrender.
-
How does knowing Jesus went first — that He denied Himself before He asked you to — change how you hear this command?
This is Part 4 of the series “Things Jesus Said That Nobody Wants to Hear.” In Part 3, Jesus told you to love your enemies — a command that feels humanly impossible until you see what it looks like to love from a cross. Next time, we tackle the final — and maybe the most impossible — thing Jesus ever said: “Be perfect.” Two words that have crushed millions of Christians under a weight of guilt they were never meant to carry. What if Jesus meant something completely different than what you think? That’s Part 5.