Mat 16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
The first record we have in the English Bible of Christ saying this is in Matthew’s Gospel. Peter had just been, first, honored by Christ for the declaration, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Indeed, Christ has just bestowed tremendous honor upon Peter: the keys of the kingdom of God. The Roman Catholics use this text to say Peter was the first pope. And while I disagree with that, I don’t want us to make the opposite mistake of thinking that Christ’s blessing, given here, is meaningless:
Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven:
and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven:
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Protestants too easily spurn this incredible proclamation of Christ. For Christ here transmitted His kingdom from heavenly to earthly. He had been waiting, and teaching, and bearing with His disciples to this great day, when they would profess Him freely, in faith, as God, the Son of God, not just a great prophet. This was the opening of the Great Door that Adam’s sin had closed between earth and heaven. This was the consummation of the promise that the herald angels had sung to earth below, that God extended peace and good will to man: Faith came to mankind, a faith like no other faith: the faith of knowing God incarnate, God with us, God among us. Jesus Christ is the Light of the world, and on that day Peter saw by that Light and professed Christ the Son of God.
Christ blessed the faith of Peter (representative of the faith of Christendom) by granting the transmitting of His kingdom and its power to men, through the apostles. Henceforth, the counsels of God and God’s decrees for this earth would be carried out by the Body of Christ on earth. The Church as an institution was formally ordained later, at Pentecost. But here, the seed was held up before witnesses and then sown: faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God.
So, Peter has just been honored by Christ. We may assume, flushed with the authority that Peter mistakenly took as his own to use as he liked, Peter then remonstrated with Christ about Christ’s explanations to them that He must be taken captive, made to suffer, and die. And Christ rebuked Peter with a rebuke far more galling than one was likely to hear from Christ: for Christ actually called Peter “Satan” for trying to dissuade Him from His mission. Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
And then Christ laid out the explanation for this kingdom: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
It’s easy to recognize that He’s making this clear to Peter, especially. Even the great and mighty men of the Kingdom of God must do what the weakest and lowliest do: deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Jesus Christ. Nobody in the Kingdom of God is excused from that.
We ought to remember that Peter’s distress at Christ’s predictions were real, and Peter’s confusion was real. Christ had just endowed him and the apostles with incredible power in the spiritual realm, and Christ had explicitly assigned that power to this current world: the things bound on earth would be bound in heaven, and the things freed on earth would be freed in heaven. Peter may even have assumed that he had a right to change the earthly plan of Christ, to say that being bound by the Pharisees was not fit for the Son of God to suffer on this earth.
And we also make this same mistake. We can act from what we think are high motives, even though the plan we lay out contradicts what Christ has expressly told us. We can be guided by the strongest and even noblest of gut reactions, humanly speaking, and find ourselves in contradiction to Christ.
So Christ spells it out for us: First and foremost, even with the gifts of heaven given to us, and all the delight that God has for His Son that He pours out to us when we are in Christ, we still must deny ourselves.
No, we do not tell Christ how it has to be. He tells us how it has to be. And He tells us this even when we have our own list of reasons about why His plan is flawed.
In the last few weeks, I have read where people have awarded themselves the right to hate those who do evil (on the grounds that we must hate evil). But that is contrary to what Christ taught. We must hate evil, but like it or not, while He taught us to rebuke evil, to confront evil, He also taught us to love our enemies, and to forgive those who hurt us. I know that commandment to forgive has been twisted around by evil men in church office who use it as proof text to excuse their own wickedness. But most of my readers should know the Bible well enough to know that’s merely their deception. Yes, they spin lies about what forgiveness is, but their lies still don’t negate the real thing.
After all, one purpose of confrontation and rebuke is to offer the hope of redemption to those who have done evil. In addressing offenders with their sin, we open a door to them to repent, to see the sin for what it is and reject it. If they don’t repent, we have the choice to overlook the sin if its minor and limited to our jurisdiction; or we can pursue the grievance in increasingly public stages. But we don’t have the right to hate anybody. That where that “deny yourself” commandment really sticks.
I have also read the writings of people who dismiss the possibility of repentance in those who sin, and so they excuse themselves from forgiveness on the grounds that the offenders will never repent. But that’s just self deception. Of course the ideal is full reconciliation, but even when an offender will not repent, we cannot hate that person. We can confront; we can even rebuke, but we cannot do harm. We cannot rail, revile, etc.

Each person bears his or her own cross.
We have to deny ourselves to forgive. We have to deny ourselves to love. It hurts. It’s humiliating. And notice this: Christ made the process of taking up the Cross expressly singular. Denying yourself, denying myself, cannot be done as a group. People can encourage you to do it. But in the end, denying yourself goes against every grain of being being part of a group or even part of a relationship. It even means standing out, apart from the group, alone. Denying yourself is extremely grueling, extremely personal, tremendously humiliating (not just humbling), and if you do it right, nobody even notices that you’re denying yourself.
People can also despair of it: I know I will sin, so if I start this walk of denying myself and taking up the Cross, I’ll just be a hypocrite. And sure, nobody notices when I am denying myself with tears in my eyes, but let me fail my profession just once, and then EVERYONE notices. And that is absolutely true. Anyway, it feels true. (The real truth, in my experience, is that a lot of people who love me and want me to grow in grace encourage me, but what I remember most are the few who express contempt for me.) But whether I am encouraged or whether I am disdained, Christ said this is the only way to follow Him. This is the acid test of being a Christian.
Christ Himself fell under the weight of the Cross that He carried for the sins of the world, so certainly each of us falls under the weight of our own Cross. That’s part of carrying a Cross. More on that, later, I hope.
But the first lesson He gave us when He blessed us with the weight and the glory of bringing in the Kingdom of God among us, was the lesson of never exempting ourselves from the need to deny ourselves. We must do this or else be false and vain professors of Christ like those who teach that merely repeating a prayer will save us. No, saving faith is the power of God in us and among us. It demonstrates itself. And if a person would follow Christ, that person must deny himself or herself, take up his or her Cross, and follow Him.