What Jesus Actually Meant by “Deny Yourself”

What a closer reading of Jesus’ words reveals about faith, certainty, and surrender.

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When I was a teenager, my friend Brett got really serious about God.

Not normal youth group serious.

Not “I bought a WWJD bracelet” serious.

I’m talking full nuclear option serious.

Brett loved heavy metal. His bedroom was stacked with CDs. Metallica. Pantera. Megadeth. The usual suspects. Then one day he became convinced that God wanted him to give it all up.

So he gathered his entire CD collection, every album he owned, smashed the CDs into hundreds of tiny pieces, and used the shards to create a mosaic cross.

It was magnificent.

I remember standing there staring at it and thinking Brett might be the most committed Christian I had ever met. Here was a man who had literally crucified Metallica for Jesus.

Now, before you laugh, you need to understand the world we grew up in.

This was the era when Christians were burning Harry Potter books, playing worship music backwards looking for hidden messages, and wondering whether the Antichrist was hiding inside the European Union. We took spiritual warfare very seriously.

In that world, sacrifice was spiritual currency. The things you gave up proved how much you loved God. The more painful the sacrifice, the more impressive the testimony.

Brett’s shattered CD cross had exactly the effect it was supposed to have.

It inspired me.

Not to smash my own CDs. Even as a teenager, that seemed financially irresponsible. Instead, I decided that from that day forward I would only listen to Christian music.

I was all in.

Every cassette tape was checked. Every radio station was carefully avoided. If a song wasn’t Christian, it wasn’t entering my ears. Looking back, it feels a little extreme.

What makes this story even more embarrassing is that I kept count.

For 273 straight days, I listened exclusively to Christian music.

Not 270.

Not approximately nine months.

Two hundred and seventy-three days.

God must have been impressed.

Then one afternoon disaster struck. Despite my best efforts to maintain a strict Christian music diet, I found myself in a car with a friend who had no such convictions. The radio was on when Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” came blasting through the speakers.

Now, if I wanted to make myself look better in this story, I would tell you that I immediately demanded that he changed the station.

I did not.

In fact, if we’re being completely honest, I kind of liked the song. Within moments I was experiencing the kind of guilt usually reserved for major criminal offences. Somewhere in my teenage brain, enjoying a catchy pop song had become a spiritual crisis.

I remember praying afterwards and asking God to forgive me.

For listening to a song.

On the radio.

By accident.

Well… mostly by accident.

The older I get, the more affection I have for that younger version of myself. He wasn’t rebellious. He wasn’t trying to get away with anything. He genuinely wanted to follow Jesus. He genuinely wanted to honour God with his life.

The problem was that he had misunderstood what Jesus meant when he said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves.”

I thought Jesus was talking about giving up things.

I now think he was talking about giving up something entirely different.

The Verse Behind It All

The verse that sat behind all of this was one I heard countless times growing up. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

It is one of the most challenging things Jesus ever said, and in the churches I grew up in, it was often treated as a kind of summary of the Christian life.

Want to follow Jesus?

Deny yourself.

The phrase became a catch-all answer for almost everything. If there was a movie you wanted to watch, a relationship you wanted to pursue, a hobby you enjoyed, or a dream you were passionate about, there was always the possibility that God might ask you to give it up. In fact, many of us quietly assumed that if we really loved something, it was only a matter of time before God put his finger on it and demanded it as a sacrifice.

The irony is that Jesus spoke those words immediately after telling his disciples something very specific. He had just explained that he was heading to Jerusalem where he would suffer, be rejected, and ultimately be killed. Peter hated the idea and tried to talk him out of it. Jesus responded by rebuking Peter and then turning to all the disciples with the famous command: deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.

For years, I assumed Jesus was talking about sacrifice. Now I suspect he was talking about something far more difficult than sacrifice. After all, Jesus was regularly accused of enjoying life too much. His critics complained that he ate and drank with the wrong people, attended too many parties, and seemed far too comfortable around those considered sinners. Whatever Jesus meant by denying yourself, it is difficult to argue that he was promoting a joyless existence.

What Was Jesus Actually Talking About?

If Jesus was not talking primarily about giving things up, what was he talking about?

The real clue lies in Peter’s reaction.

Jesus has just explained that he is heading to Jerusalem where he will suffer, be rejected, and ultimately be killed. Peter is horrified. He pulls Jesus aside and effectively tells him that this is a terrible idea. This is not how the story is supposed to go.

Peter cannot reconcile what Jesus is saying with the story he has been telling himself. In Peter’s mind, God’s Messiah does not get rejected, humiliated, and executed. God’s Messiah wins.

In many ways, Peter’s response is pretty human.

Most of us want our lives to work out. We want our plans to succeed. We want to be admired rather than criticised, comfortable rather than uncomfortable, secure rather than vulnerable. We want our story to move steadily upward. We want resurrection without crucifixion.

Jesus, however, sees something dangerous in Peter’s reaction. He recognises the voice of the self that is determined to protect itself at all costs. The self that avoids loss. The self that clings to power. The self that needs to win.

That is why I no longer think Jesus was talking primarily about sacrifice.

I think he was talking about surrender.

Sacrifice is often about giving something up. Surrender is about letting go of our insistence that things must happen on our terms.

Peter has to surrender his expectations about the Messiah.

He has to surrender his certainty about how God works.

He has to surrender the story he has been telling himself.

The reason this hits so close to home for me is that I eventually realised I had my own version of Peter’s problem.

I wasn’t trying to stop Jesus from going to the cross. I was trying to be the best Christian I could possibly be because that’s what I was convinced God wanted. I had a picture in my mind of what a committed follower of Jesus looked like, and that picture involved a lot of sacrifice. It involved avoiding the wrong things, consuming the right things, and proving my devotion through discipline.

The problem was that Jesus never actually told me to do any of that.

Somewhere along the way, I had confused my idea of discipleship with discipleship itself.

Peter does exactly the same thing. He confuses his idea of the Messiah with the Messiah standing in front of him.

Maybe that is what makes this passage so confronting.

Looking back, Brett and I were willing to give up almost anything for Jesus.

The one thing we never considered giving up was our certainty that we already knew what he wanted.

The Self at the Centre

What I find fascinating is that many respected theologians and New Testament scholars interpret this passage very differently from the way I heard it growing up.

John Stott argues that “denying yourself”is not a rejection of your personality but a rejection of yourself as the centre of life. R. T. France describes it as ceasing to make ourselves the reference point for our own existence. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that it means refusing to make ourselves the centre of our lives and instead following Christ wherever that path leads.

That is a very different idea from the one I grew up with.

Nobody ever told me that denying myself meant removing myself from the centre of the story.

Instead, I assumed it meant accumulating sacrifices.

Ironically, that approach still left me at the centre.

My choices.

My discipline.

My devotion.

My streak of 273 days without secular music.

Even my sacrifices were still, in a strange way, about me.

Peter struggles with the same problem. His objection to Jesus sounds compassionate, but underneath it sits a conviction that his understanding of God’s plan is the correct one. He cannot imagine a Messiah who suffers because Peter is still viewing the story through Peter’s eyes.

Perhaps the hardest form of self denial is not giving up something we enjoy. Perhaps it is allowing Jesus to question something we are convinced we are right about.

Jesus invites him to see it differently.

Perhaps that is what self-denial ultimately means: Not thinking less of ourselves, not hating ourselves, not giving up every enjoyable thing in life,

It means allowing Jesus to challenge our assumptions rather than recruiting him to support them.

That turns out to be much harder than smashing a CD collection.

Dan Foster is the author of “The Bible is Your Story: What the characters of Scripture reveal about the patterns shaping your life.”

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