Following Jesus: Mark 8:34-38

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What is a disciple of Christ? One might say that a disciple is one of the twelve original followers of Jesus, and indeed those twelve were disciples. But they are not the only ones who bear the title of disciple, for in the Great Commission, Jesus told those twelve to go into all the world and make disciples. And that commission still belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ in the twenty-first century. Each of us has been called to be a disciple of Christ, and called to make disciples for Christ. So, what is a disciple? Literally, that word means “a learner.” And so, Christians today have many programs and studies called “Discipleship Training” in which they complete a workbook and get a little certificate at the end. But it is possible to be highly educated in matters of the Christian religion and still not be a disciple. In fact, one of the great ironies of our generation is that we have so many resources available for discipleship training, and yet so few genuine disciples. Jesus said in John 15:8, “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples.” By “bearing fruit,” Jesus does not mean that we will be disciples by planting orchards, but rather that there would be visible evidence in our lives that we are His disciples.

Discipleship, as we will see in this passage, is not about a one-time decision that a person makes, nor is it about accumulating information about the Christian faith. Discipleship is an active and volitional way of living – to be a disciple is to “follow Jesus.” If we are making a trip and I say, “I will follow you,” I have made a decision, and I may have a detailed map, and know all the proper routes, but it isn’t until I actually begin moving in the same direction that you are that I have begun to follow you. Some have made a decision to follow Jesus, and have gained much information, but have yet to begin moving in the direction of Jesus. These may be converts, but they are not disciples; and the Great Commission has not beckoned us to go out and make converts, but disciples. And so, it is of great importance to us to understand what it means to follow Jesus, for each of us are called to be disciples first, and also to make disciples of all nations. Here in this passage, Jesus instructs us in how to follow Him with some simple instructions, and some severe implications.

I. In order to follow Jesus, we must follow His simple instructions (v34)

If you’ve ever been lost while traveling, you know the value of simple instructions. Some people, when you ask them for directions, have a hard time keeping it simple. They would never settle for giving you two steps of direction, when they could give you ten instead. No road names, no route numbers, just random landmarks here and there, some of which may not even exist anymore.

Well, Jesus didn’t give directions like that. He said, “Follow Me.” Two words. And to live out those two words involves two steps. Verse 34 has been understood by some to include three chronological instructions: 1) Deny yourself; 2) Take up your cross; and then 3) Follow me. But it is also possible, and indeed more probable, that the sense is that in order to follow Him, one must do these two things: Deny yourself, and take up your cross. So these are our two simple instructions for following Jesus.

A. In order to follow Jesus, we must deny ourselves.

Have you ever wondered where children learn to be selfish? It is not by coincidence that two of the first words children learn to say are, “No,” and “Mine.” In fact, selfishness is not learned, it is congenital. We have inherited this trait from our ancestors Adam and Eve with the fallen sin nature that has been passed down to us. By nature we are all inclined to always seek our own best-interests and personal pleasure. Our carnal desires speak, and we listen and obey them. We do what we want, when we want, and how we want. Jesus says if we are going to follow Him, this must cease. Rather than gratifying our selfish desires, we must deny ourselves. We must develop the regular practice of saying no to ourselves, but it is even more than this. In Jer. 17:9, we read that the human heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick, who can understand it? So distorted is our understanding of our own heart that even many of the things we think are “good things” become enemies to the “best thing” which is serving Christ with single-focused attention and affection. So, in denying ourselves, we must always scrutinize our actions and thoughts, but also our motives, to determine that we are not merely satisfying our self-centered desires, but denying them as we follow Christ.

When we sacrifice everything else in life to our own personal desires, we have made an idol of self, and that idol must be toppled in a revolution of the heart that establishes Christ as the supreme object of our affections and service. We must deny ourselves if we are going to follow Him. And this is not a one-time decision you can make. While it is true that we make a one-time decision in our lives to deny self-effort for salvation in order to trust Christ as Savior, on a daily basis, even on a moment-by-moment basis, we must continue to deny ourselves.

Then secondly, notice …

B. In order to follow Jesus, we must take up our cross.

Our culture is much less familiar with the true meaning of these words than were those in Jesus’ day. Most of us come to recognize the cross early in life as something people wear on a necklace. I dare say that probably more non-Christians wear crosses on a necklace than do Christians. I have no research to back that up, just a personal observation. And of course, we have all heard someone say that some particular difficulty in their life is “their cross to bear.” Maybe many of us have even said that. So, you have a spouse who is hard to live with – “Well, I guess that is just my cross to bear.” Or you have some chronic illness, and you say, “It’s just my cross to bear in this life.” When Jesus spoke these words, that is in no way what He meant.

In order to understand what He meant, we need the context of this passage. If you are following someone, you are going where they are going. And where is Jesus going? You may recall from the last passage here that He told the disciples very plainly where He was going. In v31 Jesus said He was going to suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed. Now, do you want to follow Him as a disciple? If yes, then right this way.

Bearing your cross here does not mean putting on a piece of jewelry, or putting up with personal inconvenience. It means taking up an instrument of death. Those in the first century felt the full brunt force of these words, as they were familiar with the sight of condemned criminals being compelled along the streets of their village carrying the cross on which they were about to die. They knew the pain, the shame, the insult, and the horror of that scene. When you saw someone carrying a cross, you knew they weren’t going to adorn the church with it. They were off to be killed. If you want to put it in more contemporary terms to which we can all relate, it is as if Jesus said, “Pick up your electric chair and carry it to the death chamber;” or “Pick up this sword and tote it to the place of beheading”; or “Carry this rope all the way up to the gallows.” Yet, somehow even these images do not do full justice to the image Jesus presents, for the cross was a particularly heinous kind of death.

Crucifixion was invented to be a very public, horrific, and gruesome means of death for the lowest of criminals. It is perhaps no stretch to say that in the history of humanity, the cross remains the most cruel, torturous, shameful and dehumanizing kind of death anyone could experience. Yet unlike the condemned criminal who was forced to carry the cross, Jesus bids us to take it up voluntarily as we follow Him. We see His death on the cross for our sins, and hear Him say, “Now its your turn. You take up your cross.” And out of love and loyalty to Him, we take up the cross and say that we will accept betrayal, rejection, beating, mockery, death, and even death on a cross if obedience to Him should require it. Many in the early generations of Christianity did indeed die in the same way as their Master, and by many other ways as well, because their faithfulness to Christ was unflinching before the threats of earthly powers that hate the Gospel. So it is even today in many parts of the world. Our brothers and sisters are presented with an option – “Follow Christ to death, or renounce Him and be spared.” And with the chorus of history’s Christian martyrs, they sing, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back; the world behind me, the cross before me, no turning back; my cross I’ll carry ‘til I see Jesus, no turning back.”

What a mockery we make of their sacrifice and His when we domesticate this cross bearing to which Jesus calls us into putting up with chronic coughs and cranky spouses. We strip these words of their radical thrust – a call so radical that most of us in the Western world cannot even relate to it. Nonetheless, the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died a martyr’s death at the hands of Hitler, still ring out more than a half-century later: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Now I said these are simple instructions, and perhaps I should qualify that. They are simply stated. You want to follow Jesus as His disciple, then deny yourself and take up your cross. But these instructions are not simple to accomplish. In fact, it may be said that these are the most difficult things in all the world to do because they are so unnatural to our innate instinct of self-satisfaction, self-protection and self-preservation. But we do not have to rely on our own human nature to accomplish these things. Just as Jesus was helped to carry His cross by Simon of Cyrene when He became too physically weak to carry it Himself, so too the Holy Spirit comes to our aid. Our conversion and our sanctification – the process of growing in discipleship – are His work within us, and He enables us to do what we would not otherwise be able to do. Often He will do this by giving us His strength within ourselves to endure when everything within us wants to give up. But at other times, He aids us by giving us human helpers. This is why fellowship in the life of the church is so important for Christians. As you wrestle with self-denial and cross-bearing each moment, and each day, you are not alone. Look around you and see the faces of others who are wrestling just as much. And where one is weak, another can be strong, and so fulfill that apostolic admonition in Galatians 6:2 to bear one another’s burdens and the exhortation in Hebrews 10:24 of spurring one another along in love and good deeds. While ultimately each of us must make that moment decision to deny ourselves and bear our own cross, we must never forget the obligation we have to our brothers and sisters in Christ to avail ourselves to the Holy Spirit in order to be ministers of encouragement to them in their time of weakness.

But lest we think that compliance with these instructions is no great consequence, we see next in the text …

II. The Decision to Follow Christ Bears Severe Implications (vv35-38)

This moment-by-moment decision we make to stay in step with the Savior on the path of discipleship is so critical that Jesus speaks of it in terms of three implications, each one severe, each one with consequences of an eternal nature.

A. Following Christ Means Prioritizing Him Over Preservation (v35)

The call to come and die with Jesus rightly snaps us to attention. I like life. You like life. We like being together here with our loved ones. And if something threatens to take that away from us, we fight against it. That’s why we have bypasses and chemotherapy. We don’t want sickness to take our lives away from us. But the point of the call to self-denial and cross bearing, the point about losing one’s life for Jesus and the gospel is something different, and Mark’s original audience knew that. For in that day, and in many parts of the world today, the alternatives are given: Renounce Jesus and live, or follow Him and die. And in that moment, if the preservation of life is our chief concern, we will lose it. Oh, we may live on for a longer period of time on this earth, but that will be all. You see, there are two sides to life. There’s life on this side – earthly life; and there’s life on the other side – eternal life. And whoever chooses to preserve the life on this side rather than following Jesus to death will lose the life on the other side – and that life is far greater importance than this one. If following Jesus and clinging to the gospel is more important to you than life itself, then you have nothing to fear, for life will never end. This earthly existence will pass away, but something greater will take its place – life forever with Him. But the one whose earthly existence is more precious to him than Jesus is, that one will lose both Christ and the eternal existence promised to him in the gospel. The word lose here translates a Greek word that can mean lose, or destroy or ruin. And it is not a passive verb here, as if someone or something is destroying your life. Rather, it is an active verb, meaning that by making the choice of earthly life over death with Jesus, you have ruined, you have lost, you have destroyed for yourself the better life that is to come.

You and I may never see the day when we are presented with that option, but daily we are faced with smaller decisions that bear similar implications and far less severe consequences. Perhaps your family members or friends threaten to disassociate with you because of your faith. Will you soften in the face of their threats? Perhaps your job requires you to compromise on your convictions. Will you back down? I could go on, but you see in just these two examples how we are faced with a decision to prioritize self-preservation over following Jesus and holding fast to the gospel. If we choose to preserve life, we will lose it. But someone will say, “I thought once saved, always saved. If I am saved, then I can make those compromises and convenient decisions with no fear.” But friends, even though salvation is permanent and bestowed at the moment of conversion, genuine conversion demonstrates itself in perseverance. And a faith that does not persevere in the face of hardship is not saving faith. It may be well-intentioned, it may be optimistic, it may even be religious, but true salvation it is not. As a sponge reveals its contents when squeezed, so saving faith show itself to be genuine in the face of opposition, as we choose Christ and the gospel over self-preservation.

B. Following Christ Means Prioritizing Him Over Profit (v36-37)

We live in a materialistic society that seems to operate under the slogan, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” And so most people spend their lives in the endless pursuit of more and more stuff, and bigger and bigger places to store it all in. But if we think biblically about it, what Jesus seems to be saying here is that “Whoever dies with the most toys still dies, and then what will become of them?” Jesus talks about a person gaining the “whole world,” a highly unlikely scenario, but used here to illustrate the relentless pursuit of the earthly prizes and treasures of business and social life. But what if they gain all this at the cost of their own soul? Then he hasn’t gained a thing, but in fact lost everything. It’s cliché, but no less true, that there are no trailer hitches on hearses, because you can’t take it with you when you go. Suppose for a moment that you could take it with you. A man lives his whole life on this earth and amasses great fortune and all the possessions anyone could desire, all the while neglecting his own soul and never giving more than a passing glance to Christ or the gospel. And then he dies. Imagine that man standing before God. What would he say for himself? Would he think for a moment he could write a check to gain admittance into heaven? Might he barter with God, “Look, here’s an iPod, these are all the rage down there. You really should have one. I’ll throw in a Ferrari and a plasma screen TV.” Ridiculous.

Jesus says, “What will a man give in exchange for his soul?” Notice the wording. Not what will he get, but what will he give. In that moment when the sentence is handed down and the Lord says, “Depart from me, for I never knew you,” what value will all of the man’s stuff have? If he had the world to give, how much would he be willing to give in return for the eternal life of his soul that has been forfeited. I dare say in that moment, he would trade it all. But he cannot. The stuff is gone, passed on to the hands of his heirs, and the soul is condemned to perish eternally in wretchedness and horror.

On October 28, 1949, Jim Elliot wrote these now famous words in his journal: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” On January 8,1956, Jim Elliot did that fully and finally. Several years earlier, he had said goodbye to the treasures of this world, opting instead for a simple life of sharing the gospel in the jungles of South America, and at last, had forsaken the preservation of his own life for the upward call of God in Christ as he met death at the end of an Auca spear. The very tribe of people that he and his fellow missionaries were striving to reach to with gospel killed them all. But on that day, what would it have profited Jim Elliot to gain the whole world at the forfeiture of his soul? Not one thing. He gave what he could not keep, earthly treasure, earthly life, in exchange for what he could not lose, life forever with Christ.

C. Following Christ Means Prioritizing Him Over Pride (v38)

When Jesus speaks of this adulterous and sinful generation, he is echoing a common theme in Scripture. Whenever God’s people abandon Him in unfaithfulness, Scripture accuses them of spiritual adultery. They are “cheating on God” by following after false gods and the idols of worldliness and carnality. Well, here Jesus acknowledges the temptation that exists in an environment full of this kind of godlessness. In a world that quickly abandons faithfulness to God for some lesser idol of the month, there is an ever present temptation to be ashamed of Jesus. It is a temptation we all face to some greater or lesser degree. As the coworkers are gathered around the water cooler talking about sports and electronic gadgets, dare we interject with a word about the Savior? When the neighbors are talking about their plans for the weekend, will we invite them to church? When family members are speaking to us openly about their lives, for better or for worse, will we point out to them their need for Jesus? Truth be told, more often than not, we clam up in silence and do not speak a word. What is the cause of our silence? Some would say fear, and that plays into it, but of bigger concern is pride. The fears that bind our tongues from speaking openly of Jesus are symptoms of pride – we fear rejection, we fear being shunned, we fear our own ignorance, we fear embarrassment because all these things threaten our pride. And when we cling more tightly to our pride than to the task of serving Jesus, we have shown ourselves to be ashamed of Him. Just like Peter, warming himself by the fire, and denying that he even knows Jesus in order to save his own skin, so too we often treasure the social acceptance around the fires of this world more than being faithful to Christ.

We must wage war against this temptation and tendency in our lives. And three things will help us do that. First, we must move from Peter’s denial to Paul’s declaration. Rather than being ashamed of Christ, Paul said in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation.” In other words, as long as I remain silent, my lost friends will remain lost. Only as they hear the gospel is the power of God unto salvation made available to them, so I must speak up about Him. Second, we must not fear the offensiveness of the gospel. Just know this – the gospel is offensive. It says that people are sinners condemned to hell unless they follow Jesus. That’s offensive, but being offensive doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And the fact is, a lost person is condemned already because of their unbelief, says Jesus in John 3:18 – they aren’t going to more lost or more condemned because they get offended. The offensiveness of the gospel just might save them. Third, we will overcome the pride that makes us ashamed of Jesus when we replace our fear of man with a fear of God. If I keep silent out of fear of what others will think of me, I need to stop and consider what Jesus thinks of me keeping silent. He says that if I am ashamed of Him in the midst of this adulterous and sinful generation, He will be ashamed of me when He returns. We ought to live and serve Him as if He were returning today, and we don’t want Him to be ashamed of us when He comes.

In Mark’s day as he wrote this gospel the threats of persecution and martyrdom were prevalent all around. Nero had put to death many, with many more to come. And the temptation would be to think that such harsh treatment was a sign that God had abandoned the church. But with these words, Jesus assures them that their suffering is not a sign of abandonment, but rather a sign of their identification with Jesus and assurance of God’s faithfulness to them through the midst of it. When we consider what most Christians in all times and other places have endured for the sake of Jesus, the gospel, and His word, we should be ashamed of the petty compromises we make on a daily basis. So, today, let every Christian be willing to say, “Lord I want to follow you on the path of discipleship and endure whatever comes my way for the sake of You and Your kingdom.” Let us be disciplined to deny ourselves, to take up the cross and follow Him, choosing Him as more precious to us than preservation, profits or pride.

If there is someone present today who has never come to Christ by faith and put their trust in Him as Lord and Savior, then we would beckon you today to do just that, to come and acknowledge yourself as a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness, and recognize that Christ died the death your sins deserve on the cross, so that He could take the punishment for you. And now, risen from the dead, He is eager to save you, to forgive your sins, to clothe you in His righteousness, and give you eternal life with Him. While we sing our hymn of commitment, if you need to ask Christ to save you, we would invite you to come forward and share that with me down front here.

Or maybe the Holy Spirit is dealing with you about your progress, or lack thereof, on the road of discipleship. Have you made preservation, profits, and pride more of a priority in your life than Jesus? Have you resisted taking up the cross? When was the last time you told yourself no about something? Are you in the regular practice of denying yourself? Why not today ask God to help you make the necessary changes in your life that will keep you following more closely to Jesus as his disciple.

And then finally, we would say today that if you long to follow Jesus, but presently you are weak and feel yourself stumbling as you walk in His way, let the church gather round you for support. Share that burden with us. And if you are walking well on the path of discipleship today, consider whom you may aid as they try to follow Christ. We can’t be Lone Rangers, we need each other, so that where one is weak another can be strong. May it be so in our church.