The essence of discipleship is to follow Jesus, which means to make Him top priority in your life. You cannot follow in two different directions, and the direction Jesus calls us to walk is different than any other direction we could ever walk in this life. Therefore, discipleship is putting Jesus’ Word and God’s glory as the number one pursuit of your life.

What we can gather from this passage is that when Jesus calls you to follow Him our response should be immediate obedience. We see in other passages, like Luke 9:57-62 and Luke 19:16-22, that making the call the follow Jesus secondary to any other priority is essentially the same as making Him last. The call to discipleship is a call to forsake everything else in comparison to following Jesus. Peter and Andrew walked away from their jobs, their reputations and their provision, simply at the invitation to “follow” Jesus. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that following Jesus would carry the same implications in our lives. He may not be calling you to quit your job, break up with your boyfriend/girlfriend, stop frequenting this place or that, change your internet browsing habits, etc. But, if He did how would you respond? Within the answer to that question lies the reality of who or what you are truly following.

What we see in the gospel accounts is a long, up-and-down, process of men and women maturing in their relationship with Jesus. We see moments of transformation followed by ongoing growth in both the knowledge of who Jesus is and the implications that has on their lives. Look at Peter. His initial encounter with Jesus leaves him humbled, bowing before this man who had stepped in to his boat, and proclaiming, “away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Later we see Peter making the proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But, in between these moments we see Peter stumbling his way through a pursuit of Christ. We see him making claims and boasting in his own abilities, and even being called Satan by Jesus Himself. We can see in most of the disciples this ongoing struggle of knowing Jesus and still getting to know Jesus, of following Jesus and still learning how to follow Jesus. We see that following Jesus, being His disciple, is both a momentary decision, and yet an ongoing and lifelong decision we continue to make and grow in on a daily basis.

to deny yourself means to put your wants, desires and needs behind God’s wants, desires and “needs”. It means to sacrifice for and love God above all else, especially yourself. To take up your cross takes this concept to another level. The cross was an instrument of death. It’s victim would be tied to, or nailed to in some cases, the cross. He would have difficulty breathing. We would be absolutely humiliated as others looked upon him while he struggled to control his bodily functions and hung naked or mostly naked on these beams of wood. So, what Jesus is telling us here is that we are to seek to live in such a way that we not only sacrifice our lives and die to self, but that we recognize our total dependence on God for life, even when it humiliates us in the eyes of others. Taking up our cross means completely losing ourselves in the glory of God.

In commenting on this C.S. Lewis wrote, “The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

Paul had been completely transformed by the power of the Gospel. He was a religious man of great reputation who persecuted Christians. He had great wealth and great comfort. But on his way to arrest some Christians in Damascus he was confronted by the resurrected Christ and converted to Christianity himself. Upon seeing Christ in all His glory, Paul’s life was flipped upside down. His value system was completely up-ended. Having received this amazing grace (meaning God saved him rather than kill him) Paul now considered all of life as an opportunity to glorify Jesus and make His glory known. So, if he was alive it was for the purpose of knowing Jesus more, and making Him more known to others. And, to die meant to enter into the very presence of Jesus in all His glory. This is what happens when you have experienced God’s amazing grace in the person and work of Jesus. Being a disciple, a follower, means you have a completely different value system, a system that puts Christ way above anything else this world has to offer, even life itself.

In commenting on this C.S. Lewis wrote, “The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

not just so we could go to Heaven, but so Heaven could once again come to earth. To restore His Kingdom both in our lives and in our world. as we grown as disciples we should see more and more of His Kingdom displayed in our lives and through our lives. Jesus did way more than just forgive us of our sins. He has overthrown the kingdom of darkness that we were once slaves to, and has ushered in His Kingdom of Light in our hope arts that we might now be subjects, and not just subjects but sons and daughters, of the King of kings, and as such, represent His Kingdom on the earth as we love Him and love others as we love ourselves. The Gospel includes us gaining Heaven, but it totality it is the story of God redeeming and restoring His Kingdom on the earth. What began in Genesis 1 with Him creating a people for His glory, continued through the call of Abraham in making a nation called by His name, continues even today in our lives as we join this story of redemptive history.