The Cost and Benefit of Following Jesus

Notes for the Ekklesia Meeting
Sundays @ 10:00 a.m. Info: (651) 283-0568 www.dtminc.org Today’s Date: August 28, 2005

The Cost and Benefit of Following Jesus
by Dan Trygg

"Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. 25 For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it. 26 For what will a man be profited, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and will then recompense every man according to his deeds." Matthew 16:24-27

In the preceding verses, Peter had confessed that Jesus was the anointed King of Israel, the promised Messiah. Jesus had commended him for voicing this insight, and began to prepare the disciples for the upcoming events, which were going to be difficult. He plainly told them that it would be "necessary for Him to suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day" (16:21). Upon hearing that, Peter took Him aside to rebuke Him, saying, "This shall never happen to You." Jesus immediately turned and confronted Peter, saying, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are not thinking the things of God, but the things of man." It is at this juncture ("then" = "at that time") that Jesus gave this discipleship challenge to His men.

This challenge is one of those statements uttered by the lips of Jesus which continues to resound and reverberate through history. It has not lost its challenge, or its relevance. It remains a fundamental principle of the Kingdom of God. In fact, as the Master's words clearly reveal, denying self and bearing the cross is a universal challenge to every follower of Jesus Christ. We cannot go down the path in pursuit of Jesus without soon coming face to face with a cross with our name on it. It is unavoidably, inescapably part and parcel of what it means to follow Jesus. Without the context, however, we may miss the true thrust of what Jesus was getting at.

What is the cross? The cross was a well known, clearly understood word picture to the first people who heard Jesus' words. To us, however, this symbol has been romanticized, religified and spiritualized to the point where it is almost unrecognizable. To the first hearers, however, the cross was the most awful and dreaded form of capital punishment that they knew. It provided a slow, painful, tortuous death-struggle in the most humiliating of circumstances. The victim was stripped totally naked, attached to the cross beams and post by thongs and/or nails (the nails were designed to increase the torture) and suspended in public view for the purpose of humiliation (and as an example to other potential offenders of the horror of this kind of punishment). As the victim tired, and began to slump, the outstretched arms made it impossible to exhale, so he would be forced to pull and push himself to an upright position to be able to breathe. Eventually, as muscles cramped, and exhaustion overcame the poor wretch, these struggles to breathe became more periodic, but desperate, until finally asphyxiation won out over the victim's innate will to live. Anyone who has ever choked on anything knows the desperate feeling of gasping for air. Place that memory into this scenario and you can understand the evil tortuous design of this form of execution. It was not uncommon for people to last many hours, even to three or four days, in this hopeless death struggle, until all resources gave out and there was nothing but death.

Death by crucifixion was a horrible, long, drawn-out process. There was nothing romantic, or spiritually desirable about it. It does, however, portray clearly the desperate struggle of the self-oriented life to preserve itself. Stamping out sin and selfishness is not the result of a momentary decision. Selfishness dies hard, ...and in long, drawn-out, agonizing fits of desperation, it struggles to preserve itself. The act of crucifixion is in the nailing to the cross. Actual death does not happen until much later, after much struggle for self-preservation. This is the powerful aspect of this word picture that has been covered up and romanticized to near oblivion. Sin-oriented living dies hard. To follow Jesus means that we must voluntarily give our self-life up to this agonizing death-process.

Sound like fun? Eager to sign up? This image was not designed to generate eagerness. It was designed to illustrate what we are up against, and to get us to count the cost before we make commitments. Isn't there more than this morbid word picture? You bet there is! The gospel story is a "good news" message, not morbidity. There is, however, this "dark side of the cross" that we do not often think about. What is the good news in this passage? The good news Jesus offers is that we can save ourselves. Self preservation does not come as we would expect, however. In fact, if we try to preserve our own lives, we will destroy them. If we embrace the cross, and put our natural self-agenda aside in this world out of preference to Christ, we will preserve, heal, and make ourselves whole, as well as keep ourselves from self-destruction.


The cross is different from the everyday trials and difficulties that everyone experiences. Often people confuse the two, and would make them the same. The essential difference between the cross and trials is that the cross is suffering which results from obedience to Christ. Trials are involuntary. They just happen because we live in a fallen world. The cross is voluntary. It is the result of our choice to follow Jesus.

The cross is not simply pain and suffering, either. If we experience pain, hardship and difficulties as a consequence of sin, of disobeying God, this is not the cross Jesus is speaking of (I Pet. 4:15,16). God desires to deliver us from the painful consequences of wrong and foolish choices. That is why He gave us the Scriptures. The Hebrew word for the law, torah, means "instruction". Following God’s word is like following the instruction manual for life. Disregarding God’s instruction manual is like not changing the oil on your car, or driving it in extreme ways that it was never designed to perform. Just as abusing a car will bring on a breakdown, or a crash, in the same way if we live in ways that God says are dangerous and should be avoided, we run the risk of disastrous and painful results. So, if you "crash and burn" because of poor choices, don’t talk about the "cross" you have to bear. That is not a Jesus-cross, that is a "stupid-loss", …consequences of poor and foolish choices.

Not all suffering is the cross, even when we might think it is in "the line of duty".

Sometimes we experience suffering because we go about things the wrong way. We are not mature or skilled enough to avoid hurting others, or getting hurt ourselves. Our own short-sightedness, lack of compassion or lack of understanding gets us into situations where we are offensive to others, and we are rebuffed or even attacked. Sometimes our own selfishness is mixed with proper motives, and we end up creating a "holy mess", and get hurt in the process.

Sometimes we suffer because of over-involvement. It is not the cross, at all. We are suffering because we are trying to do more than God ever asked us to do, and we are spreading ourselves too thin. We, and our loved ones, will pay a price of pain that is caused by a self-agenda, not by God's leading.

Sometimes we suffer when we should confront. There are times when we choose to shrink back from standing up against evil because of the fear and discomfort of confrontation. We are actually choosing to protect ourselves from the scary consequences of being ridiculed, rejected, or harassed, or having to deal with someone else's rage or tantrum, by just keeping our pain and thoughts to ourselves. Here is an example of where we may be trying to preserve ourselves (our immediate comfort), but in the process we actually ruining our potential because we never stand up for who we are, or for what God is showing us.

Denying self to follow Jesus. There is a curious tension in this passage: On the one hand, Jesus tells us we must deny ourselves, i.e., to forget, or lose sight of, one's self and one's self interests. On the other hand, the goal of this whole process, the "good news promise" of this passage, is that we can save, preserve, or heal our selves. Self-preservation, or more accurately, self-actualization is the goal or end that both God and I have in common. Jesus is saying that if I pursue this on my own, I will mess myself up, and my potential will never be actualized. If, on the other hand, I put aside my immediate self-interest and self-comfort to follow Jesus, ...voluntarily embrace what the cross represents, i.e., a painful and humiliating death-struggle of self before a watching world, ...in the end, I will emerge whole, sound and fulfilled. Jeremiah had written that the human heart is "more deceitful than all else, and desperately sick: who can know it?" (Jer. 17:9). The answer to this rhetorical question is found in the next verse: "I, Yahweh, search the heart, and examine the inner parts, to give to each person according to their ways and according to the fruit of their practices." In other words, God knows what is best for us. He searches us out in order to give us what will work for us, according to our own nature and according to the choices we have made up to this point in our lives. We cannot trust ourselves to figure out our own self-development, but we can trust that God knows what to do to bring about health, fulfillment and fruitfulness in our lives, and blessing for the Kingdom.

Note that this is exactly the context of the verses immediately before and after these I have mentioned. Peter was confronted by Jesus because he was "not thinking the things of God, but the things of humankind". God’s ways are not our ways; His thoughts are not like our thoughts (Isa. 55:8). He has a perspective and understanding which we do not have. We can't trust our reason, or our emotion, to lead us into what is truly "life", but we can trust our God to do so. Sometimes He will ask us to do things that seem or feel like they are only destructive, yet, when we trustfully do them, we find that life, growth, and health is there.

Finally, Jesus does not ask us only to bear the cross. He asks us to follow Him. Being a disciple is an active proposition. He has great plans for us (Jer. 29:11), but we must put aside our plans to begin to discover His. We are on a journey with God, but He is setting the pace and the direction. Our everyday choices affect the outcome.