Bonus Content from September 26th, 2021

A Note About the Intensity of Yesterday’s Scripture

In this age of the authentic self, as we teach our kids and take younger Christians under our wings to train them up in the faith, let’s not downplay this message of self-denial and death. And let’s not forget it ourselves. The gospel is good news, but to take hold of that good news, we have to be willing to die.

Maybe you heard something different from that along the way in your Christian life. We can lament that together. But watering it down doesn’t help anybody: The Way of following Jesus is both death and life.

Here’s how Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it:

“The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die… But it is the same death every time – death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call… In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die, and therefore Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death as well as our life. The call to discipleship, the baptism in the name of Jesus Christ means both death and life.”

Is it really that intense?

We’ve all been to funerals for people who showed zero evidence of any self-denial or taking up their cross to follow Jesus, and yet the minister gets up and assures all of us they were in heaven. Could those ministers really be wrong?

To frame it differently, isn’t Jesus at least as nice as the parent who threatens the loss of dessert but then relents an hour later?

As I’ve shared Jesus’ teachings about radical self-denial with North Shore kids for the last eight years, that’s often the first place they go. “But if this is true, then what about my parents? They sort of vaguely believe in God, but their faith is certainly not all radical like this says it has to be. Where does this leave them?”

The hard answer to that question: we can flip the pages of the Bible all we want looking for a version of following Jesus in which we get to keep ourselves and add him on as an accessory. It’s not there. Everywhere in scripture, the person who adds in Jesus as a cherry on top of their nice life is consistently pictured as deceived about their status as a follower of Christ and thereby in danger of an eternal version of the death they are aiming to avoid.

This deception isn’t as much of a danger for Christians in places that aren’t as comfortable as ours. David Platt insightfully comments on the comfortable American church like this:

“We are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn't mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who want us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.”

If this is the Jesus you’ve believed in, our prayer is that this sermon series will replace that misguided picture with who He really is.