Deny Yourself and Follow Jesus

“Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, 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 will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom."”Matthew 16:24-28 So I got to thinking about the word “selfless”. We are all familiar with self help, self service, inner self, be yourself and love yourself. You can hardly turn on a TV, open a magazine or the internet without seeing these words. While there is nothing really wrong with the words above, we need to remember that God loves us and has plans for us. However, there is something wrong with how often these words find their way into describing a life of following Jesus.Here’s why. Jesus illustrated our faith in complete opposite to most of what we hear in today’s world, sometimes even in contrast to what we hear in churches. He did so with these two rather inconvenient words, deny self.Jesus had just finished telling His closest friends and followers that He’d eventually be killed before He was raised back to life. At that, Peter, part of Jesus’ crew, didn’t want to hear Jesus for talking that way. “Heaven forbid,” He said. It’s as if He was saying, “God wouldn’t let You experience something so hard, Jesus!”You see, Jesus wasn’t having any of Peter’s reasoning as “human thinking,” right before He let Peter and the rest of us know what it would really be like to follow Him. Enter those inconvenient words again. Deny self. When you serve more, you take less. When you give more, you need less. When you thank more, you want less. When there’s more of God, you’re Selfless.Be Nice. Grace Wins.