He Said to Follow, Not to Agree
The invitation to a direction and a daily practice
There is a moment in the Gospels that functions as a kind of hinge, where Jesus describes what it means to come after Him in terms so concrete and so demanding that the people hearing it were troubled by it.
He did not describe a set of beliefs to adopt. He did not describe a religious community to join or a set of practices to maintain or a confession to make. He described a sequence of three actions: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23, NKJV). Three things, in order, all three required. None of them optional. None of them metaphorical in the comfortable sense that drains the language of any actual demand.
Deny himself. The self that is being denied is not the trivial self of minor inconveniences, the self that gives up coffee during a particular season or skips a meal for a stated purpose. The self being denied is the autonomous self, the self that has organized its life around its own preferences and judgment and desired outcomes and that experiences any competing authority as an intrusion. Denying that self is not a single decision made once at a conversion moment. It is a daily practice of not giving that self the final word. Of consistently refusing to let its appetites and preferences and assessments of what is best determine the direction of the life.
Take up his cross. The cross in its original context was not an ornament or a symbol. It was an instrument of execution, and every person who saw another person carrying one knew exactly what it meant. It meant that person was walking toward something that would cost them everything. Jesus is not describing the irritations and inconveniences of life and telling His followers to call those their cross. He is describing the willingness to walk toward the thing that costs you everything because the direction you have committed to requires walking there.
Paul describes what this actually means from the inside in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (NKJV). The crucifixion is the old organizing principle of the life, the self that was previously in charge, being put to death. And the life that follows is not the same life with religious additions grafted onto it. It is a different life with a different source, lived by faith in the One who made the whole thing possible.
Follow Me. The following is not agreement at a distance. It is movement in a specific direction behind a specific person. You cannot follow someone by standing still and watching them go. You cannot follow by approving of where they are going and remaining where you are. Following requires actual movement in the direction they are moving, at the pace the direction requires, through the conditions the path actually presents rather than the conditions you would prefer it to present.
Romans 8:13 connects this to the ongoing interior work: “if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (NKJV). The putting to death is active, ongoing, and by the Spirit, which means neither passive nor self-powered. It is the cooperative daily practice of a person who has decided that the old organizing principle of the life is not going to keep running things, and who relies on something outside themselves to sustain the decision in the moments when the old life pushes back against it.
What makes this possible, what makes a person actually capable of picking up the cross daily rather than setting it down permanently the first time it becomes genuinely heavy, is something that the three-action sequence by itself does not fully explain. The demand is clear. The mechanism by which the demand becomes livable for a person who is honestly attempting it is a question that the honest person asking it will feel pressing on them after they sit with Luke 9:23 long enough to hear it without the abstraction.
But here is what can be said right now. The person who is genuinely attempting the sequence, who is actually refusing the autonomous self and actually willing to walk toward what the direction costs and actually moving behind the One they have committed to follow, is not doing so on their own terms or from their own reserves. The following is not a solo effort sustained by willpower. It is movement in company, behind a Person who walked the path ahead, in the strength of a Spirit who is sustaining the walk from the inside.
The answer to how the demand becomes livable has something to do with what comes after the best you can bring.
Focus Verse: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” — Luke 9:23 (NKJV)
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