It was a secluded place somewhat off the beaten path where Jesus chose to reveal to His disciples what the future held. He pretty much knew how, for many, it would signal the death of their hopes and dreams. So, He opted to share these things in a quiet spot away from the hubbub of their daily lives. From the very beginning He’d been giving hints. He’d been sharing clues with His band of followers that had gradually increased in clarity. But now the time had come for full disclosure. Jesus, with a heavy secret weighing upon His heart, and His disciples, with an idea something was up but not really knowing what to make of it, gathered in the relative solitude of the country surrounding Caesarea Philippi.
He began by asking His disciples, “Who do people say I am? When people talk about me, what are you hearing? What’s the word on the street?” The question, while intended to break the ice, was also designed to help his disciples realize just how far off people were from truly grasping His significance. The masses didn’t have any real idea of who He was. “Oh, he’s the reincarnation of John the Baptist.” “He’s Elijah come back to life.” He’s the latest voice in the tradition of the prophets”.
But then, transitioning from a “them” question to a “you” question, Jesus asked His disciples to look inside and see if they had the courage to embrace a conviction of who He was in a world shrouded in faulty thinking and misconception. The surrounding people were complimentary of Jesus, but their understanding was inaccurate. Were his closest followers able to rise above the confusion and regard Him as the Messiah when the world, while adulatory, wasn’t ready to go there?
Things were quiet until Peter made the confession Jesus was hoping to hear. “You are the Christ”, he said. And Jesus, as was so often his practice when these kinds of ideas were expressed, urged them to not tell anyone and keep it a secret.
It seems so puzzling for Jesus to want to hear from His closest followers a clear expression of who He was and then, immediately upon hearing it, counsel them to keep it under wraps. It’s as though He wanted them to know who He was but didn’t want that knowledge to become widespread. And part of the reason He engaged in these seemingly contradictory actions, I’m convinced, is because of what follows. For Jesus begins a re-education process with his disciples. He shares what it means for Him to be the Christ—that He must suffer ... that He must be rejected by the religious establishment ... that He must die. It was a concept absolutely at odds with popular sentiment. The general public, and these disciples, had been taught to believe the Christ was going to be a military presence—someone who’d rally the Hebrew people and lead them in a revolt against Rome ... someone who’d mobilize an overthrow movement resulting in an independent Israel. Jesus said, in essence, “No, that’s not who I am, and that’s not what you should expect”.
To these men who’d been schooled in the other way of thinking, this didn’t sit well. It says in v. 32, “He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” The very thought of someone kind of pulling Jesus off to the side and reading Him the riot act is intriguing. But suffering and rejection had no place in Peter’s concept of the Messiah, so he reprimanded Jesus for teaching what seemed to him to be terribly wrong. Jesus responded by not only rebuking Peter for his attempts to dissuade Him from the path of the Cross and said, “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 and for the gospel will save it. (Mark 8:34b-35).
As I continue to explore the topic of renewal, I’ve talked about how it’s centered in a return to Jesus as the sole object of our faith ... how it takes place in settings where people embrace the authority of the Bible and allow the Word of God to be precisely that … and how it is more likely to occur in an atmosphere where people are truly worshipping God rather than simply going through the motions—where they’re allowing their experience of God to not just shape their thoughts, but their actions and attitudes as well.
In this post I want to focus on a fourth key to renewal—one Jesus spells out in these words in Mark 8. If I could sum up his words, perhaps the best way to put it in a nutshell would be to say this: Renewal comes to a people who are willing to pay a price ... whose faith compels them to go beyond the bare minimum because they’ve discovered it costs something to be a follower of Jesus.
The image Jesus uses is a graphic one. We’ve kind of sanitized the cross over the past two-thousand years, but everyone in the original audience knew precisely what He meant. The cross was an instrument of death. To deny yourself and take up your cross connotes images of a condemned man trudging to his execution. It meant a fully yielded, fully surrendered life. What Jesus is saying is this yielded, surrendered life is the norm for life in his kingdom. For those who claim to follow him, this is what life boils down to—the bottom-line reality for people who want the benefits of what Jesus has to offer. We can’t gain the benefits of Jesus’ resurrection life without dying first!
If we want to protect our life—clutch it to ourselves and hold on to it selfishly—then we can bank on the fact we’re going to miss out on life in the long run. But if we’re willing to fully yield our life to Jesus—if we’re willing to place it on the line, withhold nothing, and turn it over to him—we’re going to find compensation in quantities we never dreamed possible. Hold on to our life and lose it: Yield up your life and find it. The choice is up to us.
We don’t have to go the road of self-sacrifice. God is not going to make us do something we don’t want to do. His words are “If anyone would come after me”, implying there are some who will choose not to. But for those who do, He says, the rewards are rich. And for those who don’t, the negative repercussions are staggering.
If I were to construct a list of the most unpopular sayings of Jesus, these words would probably be near the top of the list. In a day in which people engage in certain pursuits because they want to “find themselves”, or “improve themselves”, or hope to “realize their potential,” Jesus’ words smack of something unpleasant and distasteful. To “deny yourself and take up your cross” has the emotional feel of “relocate to a communist country and become slave labor”. The army used to encourage young men and women to enlist with the slogan “Be all that you can be”. That byline kind of captures the spirit of our day—make something special of your life. Develop and realize your potential … through involvement in the Armed Forces.
But Jesus said the way to receive the greatest blessing and benefit in life is not through self-realization but through eliminating self from the equation. The way to reap God’s blessing is not through the path of self-actualization but through the path of the Cross—the path of self-denial and self-sacrifice.
I think this has profound applications related to the topic of renewal. For the one thing history has borne out time and time again is that renewal comes to people who are willing to pay a price ... people who are willing to believe, sweat, pray, give, and do whatever it takes to see the renewing presence of the Holy Spirit sweep across their life, church, and community. Renewal doesn’t come to a people who are too busy or pre-occupied with lesser things to give God their best. Renewal comes to a people who are willing to put their lives on the line—who are willing to do whatever it takes.
A church that is characterized by renewal is a church full of people that are willing to pay the price ... who are willing to deny themselves and do without for the sake of the kingdom ... who are willing to put their selfish interests and concerns on the back burner ... who are willing to go the extra mile in terms of their service ... their attendance ... their giving ... their prayer ... their intercession ... their involvement in the lives of the broken, hurting people God places in their path. For I believe that when the people of a church get serious about renewal, one of the first things people do is look inside, evaluate their lives, and ask, “What can I do to help bring it about?” They don’t think about what somebody else needs to do. They don’t try to get other people to adjust or change. They think about what they can do.
Let me ask you this: If you knew that doing without that extra $20 or $50 and putting it in the offering plate would increase the likelihood of renewal coming to your church, wouldn’t you think that would be a worthwhile investment? If you knew taking a turn every other month in the nursery … or assuming responsibility for the planning and execution of a particular church activity … or volunteering to teach a Sunday School class on a three-month rotation basis would increase the likelihood of renewal coming to this local church, wouldn’t you think that would be about the best investment you could make? If you knew that prioritizing the Sabbath into your weekly schedule and making the effort to be present and in place before visitors arrive and taking five minutes each day to pray and ask God’s blessing upon the people of your church would increase the likelihood of renewal coming to it, wouldn’t you think that would be about the best investment of your time you could make? I believe churches that are experiencing renewal are churches in which a majority of people ask and answer “yes” to these kinds of questions and then give evidence to that yes by consistently and routinely doing the little things that clear the path for God’s renewing presence to flow.
If we’re concerned about ourselves—if we are pre-occupied with what we like and what we find meaningful and are constantly measuring things on the basis of “what ministers to me”—then we’re choking the potential for renewal. But when we’re yielding up our right to ourselves and going beyond that which is comfortable or cozy ... when we’re walking the path of self-denial and sacrificing in meaningful ways ... when we’re pouring our lives into doing that which is in the best interest of God’s Kingdom—I believe we’re on the right track to experiencing a true, vital, renewing move of God.
While a lot of people bemoan, wring their hands, and complain about the changes taking place in our society, I believe God is giving us a world where the gospel can make a real difference in people’s lives. For one of the things about the gospel is that it’s at its best when it’s surrounded by a society that’s at odds with it. That’s the kind of world that is increasingly emerging, and I believe God is looking for congregations He can use to be an agent of the renewal He wants to bring to this land. But it’s not going to come through a bunch of cultural Christians. It’s not going to come through the political process. It’s not going to come by working hard to get the right people elected or the right judges appointed. Not to say those activities don’t have their place and can’t facilitate some measure of positive change. But I believe the renewing work of God is going to happen in places that are filled with people who are willing to extend themselves, go the extra mile, and pay the price.
Some of us professing Christ-followers are undoubtedly doing that—we’re doing as much as we possibly can. But there are others of us that are doing just enough to get by or just enough to not feel guilty and, as a result, there’s a great deal of untapped Kingdom potential in our lives. There are things we could be doing and ways we could be investing our lives that would enable us to be an agent of renewal. We need to ask ourselves a very simple question: “Am I doing everything I can possibly do to contribute to the potential for God to bring the breeze of renewal to this place?” If it’s going to take place, it will only happen as we make a commitment to pay the price. For renewal is costly stuff. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Renewal can happen … if we’re willing to pay the price!