Embrace The Negative

If madison avenue executives were trying to attract people to the Christian life, they would stress its positive and fulfilling aspects. They would speak of Christianity as a way to wholeness of life and all happiness. Unfortunately, we who live in the West are so conditioned to this way of thinking (and to precisely this type of Christian evangelism or salesmanship) that we are almost shocked when we learn that the first great principle of Christianity is negative. It is not, as some say, “Come to Christ, and all your troubles will melt away.” It is as the Lord himself declared, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Mt. 16:24–26).
If I were writing of Christianity the way our culture writes, I might produce a poem such as this one, found on the wall of a guest room on a Christian college campus:

May the years of your life be pleasant;
May your beautiful dreams come true,
And in all that you plan and practice
May blessings descend upon you.
May the trail of your life beat onward
With many surprises in store,
And the days that are happy with memories
Prove merely the promise of more.

If we are true to the Word of God, we will speak as Jesus did: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.… So therefore, whoever of you does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26–27, 33); “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12:24–25); “Blessed are the poor in spirit.… Blessed are those who mourn.… Blessed are the meek.… Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.… Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Mt. 5:3–5, 10–11).

We recognize that there is a certain amount of Semitic hyperbole in these statements. The One who told us to love each other is not advocating that we cultivate a literal animosity toward the members of our own family. Moreover, this is only one side of the story. Jesus also said, “There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mk. 10:29–30). But even this is to be with persecutions, and it does not eliminate the element of death and denial.
We do not work ourselves up to death and denial, however. Rather, we need them before we can start out at all. Paul shows this by introducing self-sacrifice as the initial principle of the Christian life in his most formal treatment of that life. “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).
Calvin understood this theme well. In his comments on Romans 12:1–2, he provides us with some of the most moving appeals in the Institutes of the Christian Religion:
If we, then, are not our own (cf. 1 Cor. 6:19) but the Lord’s, it is clear what error we must flee, and whither we must direct all the acts of our life. We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours.

Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal (Rom. 14:8; cf. 1 Cor. 6:19). O, how much has that man profited who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion and rule from his own reason that he may yield it to God! For, as consulting our self-interest is the pestilence that most effectively leads to our destruction, so the sole haven of salvation is to be wise in nothing and to will nothing through ourselves but to follow the leading of the Lord alone.
This idea of death in Christ is repeated with slight variations in other places in the Gospels.2 So it is worthwhile to consider its three parts: (1) we are to deny ourselves, (2) we are to take up Christ’s cross and (3) we are to follow Jesus.

Denying Ourselves
Self-denial should not be difficult for any Christian to understand for this is what it means to become a Christian. It means to have turned your back on any attempt to please God through your own human abilities and efforts, and instead to have accepted by faith what God has done in Christ for your salvation. No one can save himself or herself. So we stop trying. We die to our efforts. We must say no to them. When we have done this, we receive God’s salvation as a free gift. Living the Christian life is, therefore, only a matter of continuing in the way we have started. Yet this is difficult to apply. This principle is so uncongenial that even Christians quickly forget it and try to live by other standards.
It can hardly be otherwise, given our own natural dispositions and the culture in which we live. “We are surrounded by a world that says No to nothing. When we are surrounded with this sort of mentality, in which everything is judged by bigness and by success, then suddenly to be told that in the Christian life there is to be this strong negative aspect of saying No to things and No to self, must seem hard. And if it does not feel hard to us, we are not really letting it speak to us.”3
To experience death and denial means we must be willing to say no and then actually say no to anything that is contrary to God’s will for us. This includes anything contrary to the Bible. We are free from law in the sense of being under a list of rules and regulations. But we are to obey the law in the sense that it reveals the nature of God and shows us those areas of life which by the power of God we are to say no to in order that we might go on with Christ.
The first of the Ten Commandments is an example: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Here is a negative, an obvious one. It tells us that we are to say no to anything that would take God’s rightful place in our lives. Is it an actual idol? We must say no to the idol; we must burn it or destroy it, as many primitive people have done when they have responded to the gospel. Is it money? We must get rid of the money for it is better to be poor and yet close to Christ than rich and far from him. Money is not something that necessarily takes the place of God in a life. It is possible to be a devoted and deeply spiritual Christian and rich at the same time. But if money has become a god, then we must say no to it. Has another person taken the place of God? Has a business? An ambition? Your children? Fame? Achievement? Whatever it is, we must say no to it if it is keeping us from Christ.
If you want to test yourself on this, you may do so with each of the other commandments. “You shall not kill.” We are to say no to any desire to take another’s life or slander his or her reputation. “You shall not commit adultery.” We are to say no to any desire to take another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. “You shall not steal.” We should say no to the desire to take another person’s property. If we have not said no at these points, we can hardly pretend that we are living in the newness of Christ’s resurrection life. Indeed, we are not living the life of Christ at all.
To experience death and denial we must also say no to anything that is not the will of God for us. This goes beyond the previous point about the law. Not everything permitted in the Word of God is God’s will for us. For instance, there is nothing wrong with marriage. In fact, the contrary is true. Marriage has been established by God and has his blessing. Still, marriage may not be the will of God for you; and if it is not, then you must say no to marriage, consciously and deliberately. The same thing holds for a profession, our own conception of ourselves and other things.
Is this hard? Yes, it is hard. It is hard for the strongest saint as well as for the weakest sinner. Here is Augustine’s description of the struggle that went on in him:
The new will that had begun in me—and made me want to be free to worship and to enjoy you, God, the only certain joy—was not yet strong enough to overpower the old will that had become tough with age. So there were now two wills battling it out inside me, one old, one new; one carnal, one spiritual; and in the conflict they ripped my soul to pieces.
From my own experience I know, therefore, what Paul meant when he said, “The flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” I was on both sides, but mostly I was on the side that I approved in myself, rather than the side I disapproved. When I did things that I knew were wrong I did not act willingly, but just endured them; but habit had been reinforced by that part of my will that had deserted to the enemy, so it was by my own will that I found myself in a spot I didn’t want to be in. And what point is there in complaining when a sinner gets what is coming to him? I used to excuse myself by saying I had no clear concept of truth, and that was why I still followed the ways of the world rather than serve you. Now, however, I was quite certain about the truth; and still I kept myself grounded and refused to enlist in your service. I was more afraid of getting rid of my frustrations than I was of being frustrated.
Thus I was put under pressure by the oppressions of the world, but I took it all with a light heart, like a man sound asleep. When I did think about you, my meditations were like the feeble struggles of a man who is trying to wake up but is overcome with drowsiness and falls back to sleep. I had no answer when you said, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.” You used every possible means to communicate to me the truth of your words. You had me under conviction so that I could give no reply except a lazy and drowsy, “Yes, Lord, yes, I’ll get to it right away, just don’t bother me for a little while.” But “right away” didn’t happen right away; and “a little while” turned out to be a very long while. In my inmost self I delighted in the law of God, but I perceived that there was in my bodily members a different law fighting against the law that my reason approved and making me a prisoner under the law that was in my members, the law of sin. For the law of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is carried along and held prisoner against its will, deservedly, of course, because it slid into the habit by its own choice. Messed-up creature that I was, who was there to rescue this doomed body? God alone through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Augustine’s words are a classic statement of the divided will and of the difficulty of surrendering that will to God. On the other hand, here is a classic statement of the blessing of having denied oneself for Christ—from the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis: “O Lord, thou knowest what is the better way; let this or that be done as thou shalt please. Give what thou wilt, and how much thou wilt, and when thou wilt. Do with me as thou knowest, and as best pleaseth thee, and is most for thy honor. Set me where thou wilt, and deal with me in all things just as thou wilt.… When could it be ill with me, when thou wert present? I had rather be poor for thee, than rich without thee. I rather choose to be a pilgrim on earth with thee, than without thee to possess heaven. Where thou art, there is heaven; and where thou art not, there is death and hell.”
How can you know when you have said no? When you have stopped complaining. If you are murmuring, as the Israelites murmured in the wilderness, you have not really turned your back on Egypt. If you have stopped murmuring, you are ready to press on.

Taking Up Christ’s Cross
The second expression of the principle of death and denial is death itself, which Jesus points to by saying that we are to take up our cross in his service. To understand this image we must first leave behind the meaning usually given to it. Today when people speak of bearing their cross or taking up their cross, what they usually have in mind is stoic endurance of some inescapable hardship: sickness, an alcoholic spouse, blindness, an uncongenial place of work or similar limitations. This is not what Christ meant. In Jesus’ day the cross was a symbol of death, a means of execution. So Jesus really referred to our dying, dying to self—a step beyond mere self-denial. Moreover, in saying that we were to “take up” our cross, he was indicating that our act is to be a voluntary and continuous activity.
Taking up our cross is beyond mere self-denial because it is possible to deny ourselves many things and yet not utterly give ourselves. It is possible to stop somewhere between the indecision of Augustine and that total surrender we find in à Kempis. We often do what Jacob did (in Gen. 32) when he was returning to the land of promise after twenty years of working for his uncle Laban. Jacob had cheated his brother and had to run away and live with his uncle Laban on the other side of the desert. His brother had said he was going to kill him, and he was afraid then. But twenty years had passed, and he had forgotten the force of the threat.
Yet as Jacob got closer and closer to the land from which he had fled and in which Esau was still living, he became frightened again. He began to remember what he had done. He began to remember the threats Esau had made. Every step he took became more and more difficult. Finally, he came to the brook Jabbok and looked across to where he knew Esau lived. I believe that if he could have gone back, he would have. But things were so difficult with Laban that retreat was cut off. Jacob had nowhere to go but forward. Finally he told his servants to go over ahead of him and find out what Esau was doing.
The servants went. But they had not gone very far when they met Esau coming with a band of four hundred men. This was an army. So the servants went back and said to Jacob, “Your brother knows you’re coming, all right. He’s coming to meet you. The only difficulty is that he has his army with him.” Now Jacob was truly afraid. What was he to do? Resourcefully he looked around at his possessions and decided that he would begin to give them up. He would give the things he did not care too much about.
First he took a flock of two hundred goats. He sent them over the Jabbok with his servants. He said to the servants, “When Esau sees you and asks, ‘Whose servants are you? And where are you going? And who owns these animals?’ you must say, ‘They belong to your servant Jacob; they are a present sent to my lord, Esau; and Jacob himself is behind us.’ ” Jacob thought this would soften Esau up.
But he thought, “Suppose Esau isn’t satisfied with the goats? I’d better send some ewes.” And so he sent two hundred of them. Then he sent thirty camels, followed by forty cows, followed by ten bulls, followed by twenty female donkeys and ten foals. As you read about it in Genesis 32 it is hilarious. All Jacob’s possessions were stretched out in bands across the country going toward Esau. In every case the servants were to say, “These are a present for my lord, Esau.”
Finally, all the possessions were gone. Jacob did not have any more camels or sheep or goats or bulls or cows to give up. But he still had his wives and children. So he said, “I’d better give them up too.” He took Leah, who was the least favorite wife, and he sent her first with her children. Then he took Rachel, who was the favorite wife, and he sent her with her children. And there at last, all alone and trembling, was Jacob. He still had not given himself.
That is what we do. God gets close to us, and we are a little afraid of him. So we say, “I’ll placate him; I’ll give him my money.” But God does not seem to be satisfied with that, and we do not quite understand why. We say, “I’ll give him my time. I’ll serve on the church board. I’ll teach a Sunday-school class.” At last we give him our family. But we do not give ourselves. And the time comes when we are standing alone, naked in his sight, and God sends his angel to wrestle us to the point of personal submission.
The only trouble with this illustration is that it suggests that achieving death to self and taking up our cross is a once-for-all surrender when actually it is the continuous business of daily obedience and discipline. There can be moments of important personal crisis and decision; there probably have to be. But the battle is not won even then, for these decisions must be followed by continuous daily decisions to say no to ourselves in order to say yes to God. The Greek text indicates this by the use of the present (continuative) sense: “Let him take up his cross (repeatedly and continuously) and keep on following me.”

Daily Discipleship
This leads to the next point: discipleship. For when Jesus said that we are to deny ourselves and take up our cross he obviously did not mean that we are literally to die or to cease to function. We are to enter by that gate into a path of lifelong discipleship. In that discipleship the principles with which we started out, self-denial and death to self, are determinative.
How do we learn such denial, such death to our own plans and interests? There is only one way. We must follow Jesus and constantly keep our eyes on him. He is the supreme example of self-denial. He said no even to the glories of heaven in order to become man and die for our salvation (Phil. 2:5–11). The author of Hebrews captures this solution when, in the verses immediately following his great chapter on the heroes of the faith, he writes, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:1–2).
Jesus taught this also. We notice when we study the verses on death and denial carefully that in nearly every case they are set in the context of Jesus’ teaching concerning his own suffering and death by crucifixion. Mark 10 is the clearest example. In that chapter Jesus is teaching about discipleship, showing that his disciples must all be bound by the revealed Word of God (vv. 1–12), that they must come to God with the simple faith of children (vv. 13–16) and that possessions are often a hindrance and deterrent to discipleship (vv. 17–31). In this last section he introduces the matter of loss of family and lands for his sake and for the gospel.
Then we read, “And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise’ ” (Mk. 10:32–34).
Jesus was asking the fullest possible measure of devotion from those who followed him. They were to give up everything. But he was not asking them to do something he was not willing to do himself. He was providing them with a perfect example.
He also spoke of his resurrection and thus taught that the way of denial and death, though it involves a true and sometimes painful death to our own desires, is nevertheless the way to the fullness of living. Paul writes in Romans, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). It is the same in Galatians. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). In the biblical scheme of things death is always followed by life, crucifixion by resurrection. It is this that is truly exciting and for which we are willing to die.
When we give up trying to run our own life or when we give up what seems so precious and so utterly indispensable to us, it is then (and only then) that we suddenly find the true joy of being a Christian and enter into a life so freed from obsession that we can hardly understand how it could have had such a hold on us.
This is the primary difference between a joyless and a joyful Christian, a defeated and a victorious one. Death and resurrection! Joyless Christians may have died and risen with Christ in some abstract sense, so they can in the same sense be termed new creatures in Christ. But they have certainly never known it in practice. Joyful Christians have found satisfaction in whatever God gives them and are truly satisfied. They have said no to anything that might keep them from the richness of God’s own blessing and presence and have risen to new life.

Boice, J. M. (1986). Foundations of the Christian faith