Self-Denial Sermon 1: Ground Rules

Introduction

Three weeks from now, we're going to celebrate Easter — and around here, we do celebrate it. The resurrection of Jesus is the lynchpin of everything we believe, and it deserves to be marked.

But I'll be honest with you — that wasn't always my experience growing up.

I was raised in the Church of Christ in Massachusetts, and Easter was pretty much just another Sunday. No special music, no lilies at the front, no big production. We showed up, we worshipped, we went home. And honestly? There's a real theological argument for that. Our tradition has long held that every Sunday is Easter — that every time we gather around the Lord's table, we're proclaiming the resurrection. You don't need one special Sunday if you're doing it right every week. I respect that deeply, and I still think there's truth in it.

But I also grew up watching other traditions do something we didn't. The little congregation I was part of rented space from an Episcopal church, and I remember staring at their bulletin boards as a kid — Epiphany, Pentecost, All Saints' Day. All these observances I didn't understand. I'd stand there reading those words thinking — what in the world is Epiphany? Is that a holiday? Do you get presents?

And living in Massachusetts, with such a strong Catholic presence, it seemed like there was always some feast day, some season, some sacred marker on the calendar. There were Catholic schools in town and it felt like those kids had days off we'd never even heard of. We public school kids were a little jealous, I'll admit.

I didn't grow up with any of that — but it stuck with me. There was something about the way those traditions structured the whole year around the story of Jesus that I found myself drawn to, even if I couldn't articulate why at the time.

One of those seasons is the one we're actually sitting in right now. It's called Lent.

Lent is a 40-day season leading up to Easter, and it dates back to around the fourth century. It's a season of fasting, prayer, and preparation — a time to quiet the noise of life and get your heart ready for the celebration of the resurrection. The number 40 is no accident. It echoes all over Scripture — 40 days of rain, 40 years in the wilderness, 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert before his ministry began. It's a number associated with testing, preparation, and transformation. Every time you see 40 in the Bible, something significant is happening.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, when worshippers receive a cross of ash on their foreheads made from the burned palms of the previous Palm Sunday — and the words spoken over them are sobering: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." It's a striking, humbling way to begin a season. No easing in. No warmup. Just a stark reminder of our own mortality right at the front door.

Now — we don't observe Lent here, and I personally never have. I'm not against it. It's probably just the tradition I was shaped by. But here's what I do know: whether you observe Lent or not, the idea at the heart of it — self-denial— is not some religious tradition we can take or leave. It goes straight to the core of what Jesus taught.

Because look at what he said in Matthew 16:24–25:

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

And Luke records the same teaching with one word that changes everything — daily:

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."

Daily. Not once at a church service. Not during a 40-day season. Every. Single. Day.

That's what we're going to dig into over the next few weeks. Jesus is laying out a paradox here — maybe the central paradox of the Christian life. If you want to live, you have to die. If you want to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

That's where we're headed. And I think it's going to challenge all of us — including me.

So before we go any further, I want to lay down three ground rules that are going to frame everything else in this series. Think of these as the foundation we're building on.

Ground Rule #1 — Self-Denial is a Command

Let's be clear about something right out of the gate. Jesus didn't float this idea out there as a suggestion. He didn't say, "Here's something to consider if you're the spiritual type." Look at the language he uses in Luke 9:23:

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves."

Must. That's not an invitation — that's a condition.

And this is where it's worth slowing down, because we live in a culture that is deeply allergic to commands. We don't like being told what to do. We pick and choose. We scroll through the teachings of Jesus like a menu, taking what resonates and leaving what doesn't. We'll take the Sermon on the Mount. We'll take the feeding of the five thousand. We'll take "come to me all you who are weary." But self-denial? We'd rather skip that one and come back to it later.

But Jesus doesn't present self-denial as one option among many. He presents it as the non-negotiable cost of following him.

Now, that might sound harsh. But think about it this way — every meaningful thing in life comes with a non-negotiable. You want to be physically healthy? There are things you must do and things you must stop doing. No one gets in shape by doing whatever they feel like every day. You want a strong marriage? Same thing. You don't get to opt out of the hard parts and still get the reward. Any coach, any trainer, any good mentor will tell you — the results you want are on the other side of the discipline you've been avoiding.

Discipleship works the same way.

Paul echoes this in Romans 8:13:

"If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live."

Put to death. Again — strong, commanding language. This is not a lifestyle suggestion. It is the call of every person who names Jesus as Lord.

I think sometimes we've been so shaped by a consumer culture that we've started treating our faith the same way we treat everything else — we want the benefits without the cost, the destination without the journey, the crown without the cross. But Jesus never offered that. He was always honest about what following him required.

The good news is that a command from Jesus is never meant to crush us — it's meant to free us. He commands us toward self-denial for the same reason a good doctor gives hard instructions — because he can see what we cannot yet see, and he knows where this road leads. The command isn't the bad news. The command is actually the grace.

Ground Rule #2 — Self-Denial is the Pathway to Life

Now here's where I need to push back on something — because when most people hear "self-denial," their minds go somewhere pretty dark. We picture a life sentence of joylessness — no fun, no laughter, just grim-faced religion. We picture the person who looks like they're in permanent pain, walking around under a cloud.

And honestly, Christianity has sometimes earned that reputation. There's a caricature out there — maybe you've felt it yourself — that God is some kind of cosmic killjoy sitting up in heaven, watching us enjoy life and looking for ways to put a stop to it. Here come the rules. Here comes the guilt. Here comes the misery.

We have to push back on that. Because it is simply not the God of Scripture.

Jesus did not come to wrestle life away from us. He came to give us life. He said it himself in John 10:10:

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

So I want us to reframe how we think about self-denial. It is not the entrance to a dungeon. According to Jesus, it is actually the pathway to the life we were created for.

Look again at our text in Luke 9:23–24:

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it."

Self-denial, Jesus says, is the very way we save ourselves. That's a complete reversal of everything the world teaches us.

And the world teaches us a lot. Consciously or not, we are shaped from an early age to assert our rights, to put our needs first, to look out for number one. We live in a culture that tells us — loudly and constantly — to grab life by the horns and make sure we get ours. We are conditioned to make decisions based on one simple question: what gives me the most pleasure in the shortest amount of time?

Jesus looks at that impulse and says: that road leads to death. The very thing you think is going to fill you up is going to hollow you out. But resisting that impulse — choosing the way of self-denial — that is where life is actually found.

He's not trying to take something from us. He's trying to show us where we've been looking in the wrong place.

Here's the thing — our desire to live is not wrong. Jesus isn't condemning that. He's correcting our aim. Our desires aren't too strong. They're actually too weak. We're settling for so much less than what he's offering.

C.S. Lewis said it better than I ever could, in The Weight of Glory:

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

We are far too easily pleased. That's the problem Jesus is diagnosing. And Lewis puts his finger on something we need to really sit with here.

Think about the image he uses — a child making mud pies in a slum. That child isn't doing anything wrong exactly. Mud pies make sense given what that child knows. They're working with what they have, in the world they can see. But someone comes along and offers them a holiday at the sea — and the child can't even imagine it. They've never seen the ocean. They don't know what they're turning down. So they go back to the mud.

That's us. That is so often us.

We settle for the things we can see and touch and control — the approval of other people, the accumulation of stuff, the numbing comfort of our habits and routines — because those things are familiar. They're right in front of us. We know how they work. And we cannot quite imagine what Jesus is actually offering.

But here's what I want you to notice — Lewis says our desires are not too strong. They are too weak. Jesus is not looking at our hunger for pleasure and happiness and saying — stop wanting things. He's saying — want more. Want better. You were made for the ocean and you're settling for a mud puddle.

Self-denial is not the elimination of desire. It is the redirection of desire toward something worthy of it. When Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, he is not asking us to become empty — he is asking us to stop filling ourselves with things that will never satisfy so that we might be filled with something that actually will.

That changes everything about how we approach this. Self-denial stops being a sacrifice and starts being a trade. And it's the best trade you will ever make.

Ground Rule #3 — Jesus Modeled It

Here's what makes this command not just bearable, but beautiful — Jesus didn't simply teach self-denial from a distance. He lived it. Every single day. And nowhere is that more vivid than in a scene from the night before he went to the cross.

John 13:1–5:

"It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The evening meal was being served, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him."

I want you to sit with the setup John gives us here, because he is very deliberate about it. Before he tells us what Jesus did, he tells us what Jesus knew.

He knew his hour had come. He knew the Father had put all things under his power. He knew he had come from God and was returning to God. In other words — Jesus walked into that room fully aware of who he was. Full authority. Full knowledge. Full power.

And he picked up a towel.

That is self-denial. Not weakness — strength that chose to kneel. Not ignorance — full awareness that set aside its own privilege to serve. The hands that would be nailed to a cross the next day were on this night washing dirt off the feet of the very men who would abandon him before morning.

And notice — he didn't make a speech about it first. He just did it.

This is the model Jesus sets before us. And it's important that we see it clearly — because self-denial in the life of Jesus was never about self-loathing or joylessness. It was about love. It was always in service of something — and someone — greater than the moment.

And then, just hours later, in the garden of Gethsemane, we see self-denial in its rawest and most honest form. Jesus prays in Luke 22:42:

"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done."

Not my will, but yours. That is the heartbeat of self-denial. It is not the absence of desire — Jesus clearly did not want to go to the cross. It is the surrender of desire to something greater. He felt the full weight of what he was being asked to do, and he chose the Father's will anyway.

This matters enormously for us, because Jesus never asks us to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. He's not standing at a distance handing us a burden. He's standing at the front of the line, showing us the way. Hebrews 12:2 calls him the "pioneer and perfecter of faith" — he went first. He blazed the trail.

And because he did, self-denial for us is never just white-knuckled willpower. It is following someone who has already walked this road and come out the other side — not in defeat, but in resurrection.

Closing

So let's pull back and look at what we've established today, because I want you to leave here with these three things settled before we go deeper in the weeks ahead.

Self-denial is a command — not a suggestion, not an elective. Jesus was clear. If you want to follow him, this is part of the deal. But it's a command issued by someone who loves you deeply and can see further down the road than you can.

Self-denial is the pathway to life — not the road to misery. Jesus is not trying to impoverish you. He is trying to lead you to something richer and fuller than anything you've been chasing on your own.

And self-denial is something Jesus himself modeled — all the way to an upper room with a towel, all the way to a garden with a prayer, all the way to a cross. He didn't ask anything of us that he wasn't willing to do himself.

Here's where I want to land today. We are three weeks out from Easter. In a few weeks we are going to celebrate the resurrection — the moment where self-denial met its ultimate vindication. Because what did the cross look like on Friday? It looked like defeat. It looked like loss. It looked like everything Jesus gave up and nothing he gained.

But Sunday came.

And that is the promise underneath everything we are going to talk about in this series. The way of self-denial — the way of the cross — does not end in loss. It ends the same way Jesus' story ended. In life. In resurrection. In more than we could have ever held onto if we had kept our grip tight and refused to let go.

So as we head into these weeks leading up to Easter, I want to invite you to do something. Don't just think about self-denial as a concept. Ask yourself honestly — where is Jesus calling me to loosen my grip?

Let me make that concrete for a moment, because it's easy to nod at this in church and walk out the door unchanged.

For some of us, self-denial looks like putting down the phone and being fully present with the people in front of us — because we've been so conditioned to the constant scroll that we've lost the ability to just be with someone without reaching for a screen.

For some of us it looks like having a conversation we've been avoiding — with a spouse, a child, a friend, a coworker — because self-denial sometimes means choosing honesty and reconciliation over the comfort of keeping the peace.

For some of us it looks like what we do with our money — loosening our grip on financial security enough to be genuinely generous, trusting that God can be trusted with what we give away.

For some of us it's subtler than any of those things. It's the quiet daily choice to stop insisting on our own way. To stop needing to be right. To stop making every decision through the filter of — what do I get out of this?

Jesus said it plainly — whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.

That's not a poem. That's not a metaphor to admire from a distance. That is a promise to be lived. And I believe if we're willing to take him at his word over these next few weeks — if we're willing to sit with this honestly and let it actually change something — we are going to find exactly what he promised.

Not less life. More.

Let's pray.