Identity and the Call to Follow Jesus | Luke 9:23-24
Brian Hedges | July 10, 2022

Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to Luke 9:23-24.

This morning we come to the end of a series that we have called “Identity Crisis.” For eight weeks we have been looking at issues related to personal identity, beginning with talk about gender dysphoria and sexual identity and those kinds of issues; but we’ve broadened it out to talk about identity in all of its different manifestations and what the Bible has to say about identity.

I think it would be true to say that in my almost 30 years of preaching I’ve never preached a series where I’ve had more feedback than this series. I don’t think it’s because the series itself has been particularly good (there are many things I think I could do better in teaching on this topic), but I think it’s because this feels so relevant to us. It’s because these are issues that we are facing every day. We live in the age of the selfie; we live in the age of social media, where we are constantly streaming our lives, and we are thinking like never before about who we are. We’re thinking about our identity; we’re crafting and constructing a self to portray to others. We live in the age of the self, and we’re wrestling with that personally, we’re seeing our children and our friends wrestling with these issues of identity. So it’s crucial that we understand how the Scriptures address it.

I’m grateful that you as a congregation have been so receptive to this. One of the things that is impressed on me is just the need for ongoing, frequent application to this issue and other cultural relevant issues in the normal course of our teaching and preaching.

In the course of this series we have talked about identity in many different aspects. We began by talking about creation and what it means to be image-bearers of God; we’ve talked about the fall and sin and idolatry and how idols shape our identity; and we’ve talked a lot about redemption, salvation. What does it mean to be in Christ and have a new identity in Christ? How do we hang on to that and maintain that? What do we do with the ongoing division that we find in our hearts, this conflict between the old and the new?

Today I want us to go directly to the teaching of Jesus. This is the most basic call to discipleship that we have in the Gospels. You find the parallel passages in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew as well, but I want us to look at Luke 9:23-24. It’s a simple call to discipleship, to follow Christ. I think it relates directly to the issues of identity that we’ve been discussing in this series. Let me read the passage, and then we’ll dig in. Luke 9, beginning in verse 23. Jesus is the one speaking.

It says, “And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.’”

These are the words of Jesus, and this is God’s word.

I want you to see three things this morning. I want you to see:

1. The Universal Longing
2. The Way of Self
3. The Way of Jesus

There’s a universal longing that we all have—Christian, non-Christian; if you’re a human being, you have this longing—and there are two ways of trying to fulfill this longing, and those two ways are the way of self and the way of Jesus. Let’s look at each one of those things.

1. The Universal Longing

We might define it in terms of life. You see it in verse 24. Jesus says, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

This universal longing is a longing for life. We put different words on it; we call it by different names. We might call it happiness, we might call it significance, meaning, purpose. It might be a sense of security in our lives. We might think in terms of full flourishing human life. We may think of it in terms of relationships, to love and to be loved. Or we may think of it in terms of what we leave behind; leaving a legacy for others. All of these are words and phrases that we use to describe and define the greatest good, that one thing in life that we are pursuing that we believe will bring the deepest possible fulfillment and satisfaction and meaning to our lives. But if we were to put just one word on this it would be the word “life.” We long for life.

Maybe you’ve heard these words from Blaise Pascal in his Pensées. He said, “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and of others avoiding it is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action, of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”

It’s a universal longing, the deepest motivation of every human being who ever walks the face of the earth. This is why we seek relationships, it’s why we fall in love and get married, it’s why we have children, it’s why we build friendships, it’s why we pursue our ambitions, maybe in education or in career or in athletics. It’s why we strive to attain things, possessions, and it’s why we look for those deeper fundamental needs of our hearts and lives, things like approval and security and comfort.

Now, sometimes the desire is hidden, it’s more covert; it may even be inverted. It may take a negative turn, so that instead of positively looking for happiness we’re simply seeking to diminish misery. Many people who are not consciously seeking for joy, they may not consciously be doing that, but they’re still driven by a desire to find some kind of relief. They want to minimize the misery, to numb the pain, to forget the past. This is where addictions come from—drugs, alcohol, pornography, food, eating disorders. Ultimately, all of these things are attempts to find happiness or to lessen our unhappiness.

There’s a great illustration of this in one of my favorite films, Chariots of Fire. How many of you have seen the movie Chariots of Fire? Okay, that’s almost everybody. We know this film as Christians because it tells the story of Eric Liddell, the “flying Scotsman,” [who said], “When I run I feel God’s pleasure.” It’s a wonderful story about the 1924 Olympics, but there’s another character in the movie whose name is Harold Abrams. I don’t know if the movie accurately portrays this story or not, but in the film, Harold Abrams is this driven, driven man—driven by this ambition to win.

There’s a place in the film where someone asks him why he runs, and he says, “I don’t really love it; I’m more of an addict.” A little while later in the film, before running the 100-meter event, this is what he says. He says, “Contentment. I’m 24, and I’ve never known it. I am forever in pursuit, and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing. I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor four feet wide, with ten lonely seconds to justify my existence. But will I?”

He’s driven, right? He’s driven by this desire for something more significant; meaning in his life.

You also find this in the existentialist literature of the 20th century. Most people probably haven’t read this, but maybe you’ve heard of Albert Camus, the French existentialist author, who wrote a number of novels, The Stranger, The Fall, and other books. In his book The Fall is the story of Clammance, who is really a profligate. He’s a debauched, immoral man, but he’s chasing something, he’s pursuing something. There’s a place in the book where he’s essentially confessing the story of his life, and he says, “Because I longed for eternal life, I went to bed with harlots and drank for nights on end. In the morning, to be sure, my mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the mortal state; but for hours on end I had soared in bliss.”

This man is not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but still there’s the confession, “Because I longed for eternal life, I lived this way.”

This is the motive, it’s the deepest motive of every human being, all of us, everything that we do. I think this can help us in a couple of ways. These are maybe the first two application points this morning.

(1) First of all, it can help produce sympathy in our hearts with and for people who disagree on lots of different things, because we all share a common humanity, and we’re all searching for happiness. Remember this—even in people’s sins, even when people have an ideology that is completely antithetical to Christianity, even when people have different views of things like sexuality and gender and identity, the motivation behind their pursuit is this desire for life. It’s a desire for happiness and for satisfaction, for meaning and fulfillment. They want the same thing you want; they’re just going at it a different way.

(2) This can also help us with self-understanding. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m a mystery to myself. Sometimes I step back and I reflect on the activity or the thoughts or the behaviors of the last day or the last week, and I wonder, Why do I do what I do? Do you ever feel that way?

As we saw last week, there’s a division in our hearts. There’s this war, this conflict between these two principles within. Why do we do what we do? On one level, we do things even that we hate because of the principle of indwelling sin; but even deeper than that, we do what we do because we’re seeking happiness. What we need is over and over again to be called back by the words of Jesus, to be reminded that this is the way to find what you’re looking for; not this way, but that.

There is this universal longing shared by all of us in our common humanity—a longing for joy, for happiness, for satisfaction—and there are two ways of trying to fulfill that desire. There is the way of self and the way of Jesus. What I want to do in the rest of this sermon is talk about these two ways and the contrast between them, and what I want you to see is that in each one there is an underlying assumption, there is an approach (a means by which we try to fulfill that desire), and there’s an outcome. An assumption, an approach, and an outcome.

2. The Way of Self

First of all, we see it in the way of self. This is point number two. Again, you see it in verse 24, where Jesus says, “For whoever would save his life will lose it.”

The assumption in the way of self is what we might call self-belonging. The fundamental assumption in the way of self is that “my life is my own and I belong to myself.”

There’s an author that I”ve been reading in this series who’s been very helpful, a man named Alan Noble, and he’s written a book called You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. This is what Alan Noble says.

“Our society is a constructed environment built for humans who are their own and belong to themselves. Implicit in the society is the promise that you can become a fully realized human if you do three things: 1. Accept that you are own and belong completely to yourself; 2. Work every day to discover and express yourself; and 3. Use all the techniques and methods perfected by society to improve your life and conquer your obstacles.”

That’s exactly how most of the world and many of us are trying to live. We’re living on this assumption that we belong to ourselves and therefore it’s up to us to carve out meaning and life, to secure our joy, our happiness.

This is, perhaps, never more powerfully expressed than in William Ernest Henley’s famous poem Invictus. I’m sure you’ve heard the poem; maybe you’ve even seen the movie. I think there was a movie by this name, Invictus, that was about Nelson Mandela, and the voiceover in the movie is this poem. It goes like this:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

Now listen to this last stanza.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

We hear a poem like that, and I think for many people it sounds noble. Here’s a person who, in defiance of difficult circumstances, is rising above those circumstances and is pursuing a life of meaning. But the fundamental assumption of that poem is the assumption of self-belonging: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” If you have that assumption, the way in which you will try to pursue meaning, satisfaction, happiness, joy in life will be self-assertion or self-expression.

If I belong to myself, then it means it’s up to me to secure for myself the longing that I desire, this wish to be fulfilled. It’s up to me.

I think this is the key to understanding the logic of expressive individualism. I’ve used this phrase “expressive individualism” over and again in this series. Remember what it means? This is Robert Bella’s definition: “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”

We know it especially by its slogans, its mantras, its catch-phrases. “You do you.” “Follow your dreams.” “To thine own self be true.” “You can only live once.” “It’s your life; no one can live it for you, so make the most of it.” “Do whatever you can to be happy.” That’s the basic mindset.

Illustrations of this aren’t hard to find, and I’ve given you a number of them in this series. Here’s another one. There was a book written in 2006 by Elizabeth Gilbert called Eat, Pray, Love. Has anybody read this book? Okay, that’s no hands! There were actually two hands in the 9 a.m. service. I have read it, so I’m not just reporting what I have read others say. This book was 187 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and then in 2010 it was made into a movie with Julia Roberts.

Here’s the basic gist of the book. Elizabeth Gilbert is a 34-year-old very successful woman. She’s educated, she’s in a very successful career, she’s married; but she’s unhappy. Because she’s unhappy, she decides that she wants to start over. So she leaves her marriage, goes through a very painful divorce, and then she rebounds into a relationship that doesn’t work. Then, leaving her devastated and alone, she decides to take a year to kind of “find herself.”

So she travels the world. She spends in Italy eating and enjoying life—that’s the “eat” part. Then she goes to India and she explores spirituality—that’s the “pray” part. Then, in Indonesia, she meets this Brazilian businessman, she falls in love with him, and she marries him, and that’s the “love” part. (She later divorced that man, by the way.)

This is the story, and this is the story that is the basic script that most people are living by. If I’m not happy, then it’s my fault, and I have to do something to pursue happiness. But you see, there’s the underlying pursuit. The assumption is, “I belong to myself, and therefore I have to take my life in my hands, and no matter who it hurts and no matter what vows or covenants or promises or commitments it violates, I must look out for myself.”

Expressive individualism is really just the way of the self in new dress, built on this assumption of self-belonging and the pursuit of happiness through self-assertion and self-expression.

Here’s the one thing that makes it different from today. I’m drawing this from Carl Trueman. I’ll just summarize him here. This is from Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. He essentially says that three things have happened over the course of the last 300 years that have brought us to this moment. This is why we live in the culture that we now live.

The first thing that happened is that the self has been psychologized. This was from Rousseau, the French philosopher Rousseau, and then the Romantic poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who essentially just did this inward turn, where they began to look at human beings through the lens of psychology, looking at the self through the lens of psychology. Now, that’s not to say that all psychology is bad; I’m not saying that at all, and I doubt Trueman would say that, as well. But we live in a psychologized age, and the self has been psychologized.

The second move was that psychology was sexualized. This was through Sigmund Freud. Freud essentially viewed all of the psychological issues through this lens of sexuality. So we live in a hyper-sexualized culture.

Then the third move is that the psychological, sexualized self has been politicized. Here’s the deal: if who you are is essentially whoever you feel like you are, your inward psychological state, and if the most important thing about who you are is your sexuality, and that forms the basis of your identity, that means that for a society to legitimize your personhood, your sexual preferences must not only be legal, they must be celebrated. You must have that “right.” That’s what’s happened. That’s the impulse behind the whole transgender revolution. It’s why we are where we are in this moment.

But the basis of this, the basic assumption of this is that I belong to myself, and that the way to secure my happiness is through self-assertion and self-expression.

Where does it lead? Here’s the outcome. Verse 24, “For whoever would save his life will lose it.” The outcome is loss. As Jesus says in Verse 25, “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses [or forfeits] himself?” This is the paradox. Save your life, and you will lose your life. You may gain the whole world, but you will lose your soul.

In other words, this approach leads to destruction, it leads to the experience of futility. You remember the myth of Sisyphus in ancient mythology? In the myth of Sisyphus, Zeus condemns Sisyphus to this eternal task of pushing a stone up to the top of a mountain, only for the stone to roll down to the bottom and for him to have to start all over again. It’s become kind of a parable for the futile life, futility.

I think in many ways, the pursuit of happiness through the expression of self is an exercise in futility, and it’s why there’s so much heartache and dissatisfaction in the world today.

Again, to quote Alan Noble, “The responsibilities of self-belonging require godlike powers to sustain, leaving us exhausted, tired, burned out, and finally bored. We are always becoming a fully realized human and never arriving. Nobody ever arrives, because there is no destination outside ourselves to arrive at. If we are our own and belong to ourselves, then we are always only who we are; no more, no less. All we have are options and shifting opinions and an overwhelming feeling that whatever the standard might be, we aren’t measuring up. Our work is inadequate, our house is inadequate, our tastes are inadequate, our cooking is inadequate, and so on. Society cannot fulfill its promise because it never really offered a clear goal. In this sense, the promise of society is more like a warning. You will keep searching, keep expressing, keep redefining, keep striving for your autonomous personhood until you die.”

3. The Way of Jesus

In contrast to that futile approach to finding satisfaction, we have the way of Jesus, and it’s a better way. I want you to see it. Look at what he says in verse 23. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

This is the most basic call to discipleship. It’s the call to follow Jesus, to be a Jesus-follower. Jesus is explaining exactly what that entails. It’s a paradox how it works, but I want you to see what he says. Once again, I think we can detect here an underlying assumption, an approach to this way of life, and then an outcome.

Here’s the assumption. The assumption is that I do not belong to myself, but I belong to God. Now, I think this is implicit in the text. Jesus doesn’t directly say it, but it’s implied. When you look at the whole of Scripture, you can certainly see that Scripture teaches that we belong to God in a twofold sense. We belong to him by creation and by redemption. In fact, the Bible uses this language of belonging.

For example, in Romans 7:4 Paul says, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.”

In another place Paul says that “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).

Or the passage I read this morning, 1 Corinthians 6. “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.”

Remember the Heidelberg Catechism? We’re going to use it this morning. The whole catechism is framed with this question, the very first question: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The very first part of the answer is this: “That I am not my own, but belong, body and soul . . . to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

If this assumption is true (and it is), then it leads to a completely different approach in seeking life and in seeking satisfaction, seeking joy—not the approach of self-assertion and self-expression, but rather the approach of self-denial and of bearing the cross and of imitating Christ. That’s what Jesus says. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

I think the logic is this, that if I don’t belong to myself but I belong to God, then I will trust not myself, I will trust him, and I will trust that he knows the best way to live my life. He knows the way to life, he knows the way to joy, he knows the way to significance, he knows the way to meaning! He knows the way for your life to count for something! It’s not to assert your rights, it’s to deny yourself and to bear your cross and to follow Jesus down the Calvary road of love.

Let’s take it apart for a minute. “Deny yourself.” What is this? What does it mean to deny yourself? It means that you deny the natural self, the fallen self. It means that you submit yourself to God, that you subject your rights to God. Calvin called this the sum of the Christian life. He said, “He alone has truly denied himself who has so totally resigned himself to the Lord that he permits every part of his life to be governed by God’s will.”

Listen, none of us do that perfectly, but this is the call of discipleship. It’s to submit our lives to Christ, to deny ourselves. Instead of imposing my will on God or imposing my will on the world, it is to submit myself to him and to follow where he leads.

Along with that comes bearing the cross. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” The cross was, of course, in the first century, a means of execution and torture. So Jesus is literally saying, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and pick up his execution stake and follow me.”

Do you remember Bonhoeffer? “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.”

That means—and it certainly meant this for the first disciples—it meant that there was a call to follow Jesus, even if it leads to death. That has been the cost for hundreds of thousands of Christians in the history of the church. Read the stories of the martyrs.

But in Luke’s Gospel he records something that the other Gospel writers don’t record. He records one extra word. Do you know what it is? “Let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” Daily. I think he includes that because we are to understand cross-bearing not only as the call to die for Jesus if necessary, but also as the call to daily embrace the suffering and the hardship and the trials and the tribulations that come in following Jesus in the way of love. Sometimes it involves literal persecution, but for all of us it includes the trials and afflictions we endure in a fallen world, which are sanctified for our good, as we follow Jesus.

Do you remember what James said? “Count it all joy . . . when you fall into trials of different kinds, knowing that the trying of your faith works patience.” That means that following Jesus includes bearing the cross of our everyday difficulties. It may be your current health diagnosis. It may be disappointment in your life. It may be financial difficulties that you’re currently undergoing. It may mean the stress related to your job. It certainly does not mean that we never seek to alleviate those burdens, but it does mean that in doing what we lawfully can do to flourish in every aspect of our lives, we are always submitting ourselves to his sovereignty, to his lordship, to his care, and we are trusting him in our trials, to use them for our good. That’s part of cross-bearing.

The last part of this approach is following Jesus himself. “If anyone would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” What does that mean? What does it mean to follow Jesus? W.W.J.D., right? What would Jesus do?

What does that mean, though? Does that mean we’re to dress like Jesus? Does that mean you need to learn Aramaic and speak like Jesus? I mean really, what does it mean to follow Jesus?

I think what it means is we follow him in the way of love and of forgiveness and compassion, of service to others. Do you remember Paul’s words in Ephesians 5? He says, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

What’s the outcome of this way of life? The outcome is in verse 24: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” There’s the paradox. Life and salvation come to those who deny themselves, carry their cross, and follow Jesus in the way of love.

Let me give you some illustrations as we draw to a close. One of my other favorite movies—in fact, this is my favorite movie of all time—is not The Lord of the Rings, it’s not Star Wars. Some of you may be surprised to learn that. It’s actually Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life. It’s my favorite film of all time, and it is more of an artistic film. I’ve mentioned this before, and then people in church have gone and watched it and come back and said, “Really? That’s your favorite movie?” It really is. It grows on you over time. Trust me, you have to watch it more than once to get it.

This movie is something like an impressionist painting on childhood, marriage, suffering, life and death, time and eternity, nature and grace. I don’t really think Terrence Malick, the director, is a Christian, but this movie carries with it Christian themes and messages. In fact, the very first thing in the movie is a quotation from the book of Job.

There’s a place early in the film where the main woman in this film, named Mrs. O’Brien (played by Jessica Chastain) is speaking, and she’s speaking presumably to her children, or maybe even to God. This is what she says. It’s kind of a voiceover, and she says, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked; accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it too, likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who ever loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.”

Then she says, I think to God, “I will be true to you, whatever comes.”

In the very next scene of the movie, there’s a knock on the door, and Mrs. O’Brien receives the news that one of her children has died.

A lot of the rest of the movie is this family wrestling through both their memories of the past, their grief in the present moment, but also the hope awaiting them of life and of resurrection.

It’s the paradox of the gospel. The way of Jesus, the way of grace, in contrast to the way of nature and the way of self.

Nobody ever put it better than C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity said (this is the very end of Mere Christianity), “Until you’ve given up yourself to him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found among the most natural men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away blindly, so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality, but you must not go to him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality [think identity] is what you are bothering about, you’re not going to him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real new self, which is Christ’s and also yours just because it is, will not come as long as you are looking for it; it will come when you are looking for him. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom: Give up yourself, and you will find your true self. Lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death—death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day, and death of your whole body in the end—submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

Brothers and sisters, that’s the call, the call to lose your life in following Christ, with the promise that if you do so you will find it. Let’s pray.

God our Father, we thank you for the good news of Jesus. Even though it’s paradoxical to us, even though it’s a call to die to ourselves, yet it is a call to come, bringing nothing in our hands, just giving ourselves to you, and a call that comes with a promise that if we lose our lives in seeking Christ we will find everything we were ever looking for. O God, would you help us learn to walk in the way of Jesus? God, would you forgive us that we have so often walked in the way of self? Forgive us for our pretensions of self-belonging, of thinking that we own ourselves and therefore it’s up to us to pursue and to find and secure our own joy. Help us repent from that this morning and instead embrace this glorious promise from Christ that in following him, in belonging to him, we can trust his will, can trust the path that he has laid out. We can believe with all of our hearts that even in the daily cross-bearing, the ordinary hardships of life that come, when we’re faithful to Christ and when we love others, there is joy and life in the end. Lord, burn that deep into our consciousness today, and help us believe the promise that in trusting Jesus all is well.

As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, we ask you to meet us there by your Spirit. Meet us in and through the elements of the bread and the juice, and may we by faith feast on Christ, the living bread, who gave his life for ours. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.