Rend your heart and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
For He is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger and abounding in love,
And He relents from sending calamity.
Joel 2.13
Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me.
Mark 8.34
To deny ourselves is to behave towards ourselves as Peter did
towards Jesus when he denied him three times. The verb is the same (aparneomai).
He disowned him, repudiated him, turned his back on him.
Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries such as
chocolates, cakes, cigarettes and cocktails (though it may include this), it is
actually denying or disowning ourselves,
renouncing our supposed right to go our own way. To deny oneself is to
turn away from the idolatry of self-centredness. Paul must have been referring
to the same thing when he wrote that those who belong to Christ ‘have crucified
the sinful nature with its passions and desires’ (Gal. 5.24). No picture can be
more graphic than that, an actual taking of the hammer and nails to fasten our
slippery fallen nature to the cross and thus do it to death. The traditional
word for this is ‘mortification‘, it is the sustained determination by the
power of the Holy Spirit to ‘put to death the misdeeds of the body’, so that
through this death we may live in fellowship with God.
Our ‘self’ is a complex entity of good and evil, glory and
shame, which on that account requires that we develop even more subtle
attitudes to ourselves.
What we are (our self or personal identity) is partly the
result of the creation (the image of God), and partly the result of the Fall (the
image defaced). The self we are to deny, disown and crucify is our fallen self,
everything with us that is incompatible with Jesus Christ (hence his commands ‘let
him deny himself’ and then ‘let him follow me’). The self we are to affirm and value
is our created self, everything within us that is compatible with Jesus Christ
(hence his statement that if we lose ourselves by self-denial, we shall find
ourselves). True self-denial (the denial of our false, fallen self) is not the
road to self-destruction, but the road to self-discovery.
So then, whatever we are by creation we must affirm, our
rationality, our sense of moral obligation, our sexuality (whether masculinity
or femininity), our family life, our gifts of aesthetic appreciation and
artistic creativity, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love
and experience of community, our awareness of the transcendent majesty of God,
and our inbuilt urge to fall down and worship him. All this (and more) is part
of our created humanness. True, it has been tainted and twisted by sin. Yet
Christ came to redeem it, not destroy it. So we must gratefully affirm it.
What we are by the Fall, however, we must deny or repudiate,
our irrationality, our moral perversity, our blurring of sexual distinctives and
lack of sexual self-control, the selfishness which spoils our family life, our
fascination with the ugly, our lazy refusal to develop God’s gifts, our
pollution and spoilation of the environment, the anti-social tendencies which inhibit
true community, our proud autonomy, and our idolatrous refusal to worship the
living and true God. All this (and more) is part of our fallen humanness.
Christ came not to redeem this, but to destroy it. So we must strenuously deny
or repudiate it.
We must be true to our true self and false to our false
self. We must be fearless in affirming all that we are by creation, redemption and
calling, and ruthless in disowning all that we are by the Fall.
Moreover, the cross of Christ teaches us both attitudes. On the
one hand, the cross is the God-given measure of the value of our true self, since
Christ loved us and died for us. On the other hand, it is the God-given model for
the denial of our false self, since we are to nail it to the cross and so put it
to death. Or, more simply, standing before the cross, we see simultaneously our
worth and our unworthiness, since we perceive the greatness of his love in dying,
and the greatness of our sin in causing him to die.
From The Cross of Christ, pages 323 -330.
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