Deny Yourself

“Then Jesus said to His disciples, If anyone desires to be My disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” – Matthew 16:24 (AMP)

The call to deny yourself is central to the Christian faith. Although it is something we do not like to talk about, denial of ourselves is a fundamental requirement of following Jesus. Most of us read this verse and immediately consider the obvious things that we are called to turn away from. Most of these things are external and obvious sins of the flesh.

The problem is that in our basic understanding of this directive, we often fall short of what God is actually aiming at. We are so used to external religion that we read this statement and our mind immediately filters through all the fleshly, outward things that we need to contain or even purge from our lives. While this is helpful to be sure, this is just the first stage of what God is wanting to do and if we do not push beyond the outward observance of this commandment we will miss something that is vital if we are to truly know God. Missing this thing can be the difference between living as a nominal Christian and living as one that knows God.

Art Katz used to say that “God is other.” The statement sounds so incomplete and it leaves us wanting to ask, “other than what?” We long in our hearts to make a comparison when the whole point of the statement is that when dealing with the issue of God, there is no comparison. This is what it means when the Scriptures say that God is Holy. To be sure holiness includes the aspects that we traditionally consider like purity of heart and action, but the word used in the original language is intended to convey that God is apart, He is totally different than us. In other words, “God is other.”

When we say that God is holy, we are saying that He is totally apart and different from us in every way and this difference is so great that we have no point of comparison for Him. The difference is that great. The shocking thing is that God then invites us to be holy which means that we must become something that is totally other and totally different from the way in which we were born. This is the goal to which Jesus’ command of denial is aiming at. As we already mentioned, the denial of external sins is a given so we do not need to spend any time on that issue. The internal denial is where I fear we fall too short.

Do we truly consider the fact that man is fallen? Do we consider the fact that Eve’s great mistake in the garden was deciding that she could have the capacity to define things like what is good and what is evil when God had clearly said she did not have that ability when He commanded her and Adam to avoid that tree? She, and man with her in his fall, took on a capacity that is not ours to have.

If you are going to know God, God must be known as He is, not as we thinking Him to be, not as we wish Him to be, and not as we ourselves are. This is foundational and yet I fear lost on us as we develop theologies and paradigms for life and ministry that amount to us outlining and explaining God in models that man can understand. We have great difficulty dealing with the unknown and unexplainable and so we are very uncomfortable with a God we cannot explain, outline, or diagram.

In the pursuit of the knowledge of God then, we must enter the school of inward denial. Just as the prophet said that a day was coming when the external law of God would be written on the inward hearts of men, so too the denial of one’s self must proceed from external observances to the inner realm of the heart

If you are going to know God, He will bring you to the crisis point where you begin to deny your inner self. God will come in such a way that He conflicts with your emotions and you will have to learn to trust and know Him by your spirit beyond what your emotions will say. There will come a point where your emotions will scream at you to either do something or not do something but God will put the opposite inclination in your Spirit. This is the place of denial. You must begin to trust the impulses of God’s Spirit over your own inner emotions.

God will not leave out the will and the intellect, but likewise will challenge each area of your soul. God will present a truth about Himself or a course of action that defies your own logic or previous decisions you have made. Will you be able to deny yourself and embrace the voice of God or will you limit your knowledge of God to your own understanding?

This is the most painful place of denial because you are reaching the place where you have to deny the essence of who you are in order to learn to build your life around God Himself. This is the most painful place of denial. It is easy to see that certain “sins” are harmful and certain things must be denied as we can see God’s wisdom in His prohibitions about certain practices.

However, can we proceed with God to the place where we deny our inner man in the things that we do not understand or even find offensive? Can we reach the place of confidence in God where we begin to trust His voice above our own? Can we trust His voice beyond our own understanding and expectations? If we are going to know God, we must know Him first and foremost in our Spirit. One thing is for sure. God is going to bring us to the place of inner conflict and turmoil that we might tear down all that is built on human understanding and begin to build on the foundation of Himself.

I fear that we underestimate the damage done in the fall. There is within us a deep rebellion against God and that rebellion is deeply rooted in us. Even when we acquiesce to God, we still have within us a root that wishes to choose between good and evil and make moral judgments. We do not wish to follow God blindly or give up the right to evaluate His statements in our heart before adopting them.

If we are to come into a deep and true knowledge of God, we must come into the place where we allow God to tear out this deep root of unbelief and He will do that by bringing us to crisis points, not in external practices or sins, but in the inner man where we will be required to deny our emotions, decisions, understandings and even our own nature in order to begin to live in the Spirit out of the flow of life that comes from God and is necessarily in opposition to our own human understanding.

The four living creatures that gaze upon God constantly keep screaming, “HOLY!” as they circle Him. They are constantly finding something different and other about God. Though they are not sin stained and pure as can be they are still finding God to be totally different and apart from their own understanding and reality.

As fallen men that have been redeemed, we likewise are going to have to reach the place where we gaze upon God and embrace His holiness even though the embrace of His holiness is going to by necessity require the denial of ourselves because God at His core is “other” in every way and to live in the Spirit means to live off of God and not off of our own human understanding.

Are you ready for the pain of deep self denial as you embrace the knowledge of God over your own understanding? Are you ready to make decisions when your emotions rage against them or conversely make decisions when your own emotions and understanding give you no confirmation? This is all in the process of coming into the knowledge of God. God will deal with you as a father as he longs to bring you into this place with Him, so do not fear. He sees the pain of this thing but it must be done so that you may be freed from the bondage of human understanding and be free to explore the place of the knowledge of God. You will feel at times like you are going mad, but you are not. You are learning to live from a higher reality and understanding than your own and that is going to make all the difference in how deep you can go in the knowledge of God.