The Way of Self-Denial | Jon Tyson

the teaching text from the word today comes from the gospel of matthew chapter 16 verses 21 to 27. from that time on jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders the chief priests and the teachers of the law and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life peter took him aside and began to rebuke him never lord he said this shall never happen to you jesus turned and said to peter get behind me satan you are a stumbling block to me you do not have in mind the concerns of god but merely human concerns then jesus said to his disciples 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 will find it what good will it be for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul for the son of man is going to come in his father's glory with the angels and then he will reward each person according to what they have done this is the word of the lord well good morning welcome we are continuing our series in discipleship today last week we did an overview where we talked about the way of the world the way of religion and then the way of jesus and hopefully this past week you felt you know deep desire and deep resonance the way of jesus is the way of life the challenge of all that resonance though is that you probably also bumped into a problem in living the way of jesus you know what that problem is that problem's you the problem is you the problem with discipleship is you the problem with discipleship is me there is a fundamental sense of self that we have to get rid of to crucify that has to die in order for our true self to live and so it's no good just talking about how exciting it is to live the way of jesus because if we're not careful we would just take that idea and import it into project self we will use practices of discipleship for just practices of self-maintenance and instead of practicing the sabbath of god's glory it will just be self-care there's a thousand ways we reduce a robust vision of discipleship down to ourselves so we want to confront that so we can actually be followers of jesus and there's no better place to start than is this particular passage now let me give you a little bit of the context of this passage the jewish believers at the time expected fully an earthly kingdom so their whole vision was based on a vision of king david this is what the old testament prophet sort of pointed to someone who would rule and reign in the spirit of david so david was a worshiper david was a warrior and so they and he he was one of the most successful kings he he defeated the philistines and the enemies around him he ushered in a time of peace in the time of god's presence and the messiah was going to be a warrior worshipper like him and so when jesus comes along he's even better than david because he has massive supernatural power and you so they're thinking yeah but the philistines are a bit of a challenge they had one goliath but the roman empire is a nation of goliath and now we've finally got a king who's going to be able to set up his kingdom and he's going to he's going to have power and glory he's going to be able to do this and peter's got to be thinking gee did i pick the winning ship by saying yes to jesus like i'm on board this journey like up into the right of success and prosperity and he believed as the disciples did that they would they would rule and reign in an earthly government they thought they would be like the inner core and that probably came with privilege and power and respect recognition and so even though jesus said a few little wonky things every now and then that just sort of made him go well maybe he doesn't understand they knew in their heart from their cultural script that this is where they were headed so then here is jesus again towards the end of his ministry and there's a massive conflict that occurs four times jesus would tell the disciples it's not just about this earthly kingdom that you think it's about an eternal kingdom and four out of four times they fail to understand what he's talking about this produces a conflict and so jesus comes along and says to his disciples particularly into peter in this moment that you have to deny yourself take up your cross and follow me because there's something in you that is at war with my purposes now when peter rebukes jesus this is so inappropriate in the first century a disciple would never rebuke a rabbi and tell him his teachings are wrong and yet this just tells you the kind of personality and unction that peter had hey jesus i appreciate your lord and the miracles are fantastic and all of that but trust me this is not going to happen to you and then jesus just rebukes him get behind me satan this is a very very harsh rebuke peter rebukes jesus jesus rebukes back and i want you to see this peter has a self that jesus says must be denied and jesus has a problem with peter's self peter's self is getting in the way of god's kingdom mission now when we talk about the self in our modern society what do you think of here's what i think of when i think about the self we put that picture up this is the self the selfie the selfie apple released a new camera this past week i have a fanboy i have shares in apple one of the things they always highlight you know what it is the quality of the front-facing camera the quality of the front-facing camera because we want to get pictures of ourselves this is i was up until recently the most famous selfie of all time you want to know what's ironic this is actually an ad for a galaxy smartphone this is just propaganda and uh so galaxy paid the way to be here and get them to take the photo on their phone there was a fascinating book taking this idea which is sort of a parable of modern society our obsession with ourself if we can show that book on selfies and basically it looks like a little bit of a sort of like a shallow critique of social media but this is a profound history of different kinds of cells and how we've come to be obsessed with ourselves and you read it and it's honestly kind of heartbreaking because it just talks about the ways that this particular time in history that you and i live we are forced and confronted to live with ourselves the average american touches their phone each day 2 617 times 2 617 times a day and you're not just checking the email friends most of that is a carefully curated reinforcing stream of the self so social media you get to control social media you have godlike powers you unfollow someone and it's like they cease to exist enough of your triviality and your not positive comments boom be gone and they just disappear and you can bump into them years later and be like i actually forgot you existed there's so much power but it's a constant it's like thousands of times a day a constantly reinforcing mechanism about the self you don't think this impacts you what if six 2600 times a day you took a verse of scripture would that impact you the lord is my shepherd the lord is my shepherd it's like excuse me yeah the lord is my shepherd keep going mate lord is my love the lord is my shepherd mate what's up if we just continually had a stream reinforcing the centrality of god our lives under his kid do you think we would be different of course we would but here we are in a world that is consciously and continually pushing this onto ourselves now i want to just take a moment here to get a touch philosophical because you happen to live right now particularly if you're young if you're in your 20s like this is it's very very hard to actually think about another reality particularly if you're here in the west but i want to talk to you about how we get our modern sense of self and why it's so detrimental to following jesus and how you have been manipulated to have this view of yourself so i have to go back about 500 years i'm going to have to dip into a little bit of philosophy but i want to expose this to you because i want you to see the world has an agenda to activate the worst version of you and god has a vision to free you from the tyranny of our culture so i want to just take a moment to sort of get underneath this and explain our sense of self so when we talk about the self what are we fundamentally talking about what we are talking about is the truest thing about us that demands affirmation that from those who are around us it's the truest thing about us all we live in a very very in some sense fragment and complicated world so i'll just use my life for an example i'm up here preaching right now after this i'm going to go and have lunch so in here i'm a spiritual authority at lunch i'm a customer tomorrow i'll go to church i'll go to our staff offices and i'll be an employee of a church but then tomorrow i'll go back to my place and then the person who lives next to me is just going to perceive me as a neighbor i have a i'm a father i'm a husband i'm an author i do a bunch of different things now i don't care about all of those things equally so you may perceive something about me and think oh john must think that that's very important but it's just something i do but there's other things that like like there's this true true deep deep deep things about me and your sense of self is that deep inner person who is the same in all of those worlds and so the in every environment there's going to be some core identity that says this is me and that identity that consistent person that inner sense of awareness despite the circumstances and roles you play will require people to validate that in order for you to thrive no no i don't need anything i'm good on my own you're exaggerating we are social creatures we require validation that's so our sense of self is our security it's like that deep sense of who we are and it's significant it's our sense of worth as given to us by the people who are around us now in this passage there's a challenge because the sense of self that peter has is at conflict with god's purposes for his life and the kingdom and i wanted to use the phrase that the bible uses this that peter is talking about here the old self or the false self and this is this is the person that god doesn't want him to be that peter is deceived in that god wants to liberate him from and jesus critique is this that this old self this false self is driven by merely human concerns get behind me satan you're a stumbling block to me you do not have in mind the concerns of god but merely human concerns so the self that jesus is at war with in peter's life is a self that is only concerned about human concerns it has no divine reference point it is a self identification devoid of any divine connection this has been so built into our world today ain't ran says this the first right on earth is the right of the ego she goes on and says this i am done with the monster of we the word of serfdom of plunder of misery falsehood and shame and now i see the face of god and i raise this god over the earth this god whom men have sought since men came into being this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride this god the one word i and this is like a vision of sort of virtuous selfishness i i've mentioned before satanism is not the worship of satan it's the worship of self ain'ran had like a little group of elites would get together here in new york maybe the most famous one is alan greenspan who's ended up exerting tremendous influence over the world in which we live but there was another man named nathaniel brandon who write a book called wrote a book called the psychology of self-esteem and in this book he tried to make the case that the most important sense you could have was a sense of self-worth generated into you now you may hear this and you're like self-esteem is like the most common obvious word that exists was not always perceived to be that way and it's actually he was in a relationship with her and then he cheated on her because her second book didn't do as well and um and then she was like you dare cheat on me on me and she had to come to terms with her own reality that her her primal eye was not enough even for her lover but this idea of self-esteem and self-worth basically became an entire generation another uh tom wolfe called this the me generation this was a generation that was just all about me and the whole goal of this is that you can't trust anyone else for your happiness certainly not god that repressive br being ignatius of loyola says sin is unwillingness to trust that what god wants for me is my only deepest happiness that's the sin i don't trust that i don't believe that it's about me now that sense of self has been solidified in the way that people your age are trained by our culture to think about who you are in the world and this is this is framed up by a an amazing uh catholic sociologist and philosopher named charles taylor and he wrote a book called a secular age which is just a staggering masterpiece explaining the time of history in which we live and he wrote another book about identity called sources of the self and if you want to do any serious thinking about how we understand our souls in our culture today you have to read his book i honestly know that most of you won't read his book so what i'm going to do right now is just give like a very very short summary of hundreds of pages of content so please just be patient and follow this along because everyone look at me here's what i'm trying to do i'm trying to explain to you how hundreds of years of thinking has all come together in this moment to make you selfish so i want to explain to you all of the mechanisms that are happening in thought in our institutions to make you think i okay so he starts off by saying for most of human history people haven't walked around wrestling with things like what is a self the cavemen weren't like what is a self who is this self that caves they weren't there wasn't like the deep sort of way of understanding their life our quest for identity for the most part is only a couple of hundred years old people always knew it intuitively but the discussion about how it's formed came into sharp contrast and so taylor basically goes back and he tries to give sort of a philosophical history of the ways that we've come to under understand ourselves in any given society are you guys with me yeah this is exciting bless god lean in stay with me okay in the last talk this is where i felt people were like let me just check my phone for the 242nd time let me curate my feed let me unfollow john this is boring whatever it is okay stay with me the traditional self had an idea where all society was driven by the idea of honor honor and honor was like the highest virtue the greatest good in any given society and so basically you would sacrifice anything personally in your life to achieve honor in the culture for women this was primarily around making children was like the woman was in the home making babies particularly male babies and her job was to contribute to creating men for the flourishing of their particular society and she did that well she had a sense of honor in her community and you look at someone like hannah in the old testament she couldn't have kids she had this sense of shame about her life so this was a society that was about honor and the woman's way of having honor was through having children and the man's way was basically sort of heroic battle and so the man's capacity to defend and fight and sacrifice and die for the sake of the community so honor was the greatest good and if you had any conflicting desires like imagine 2000 years ago a woman saying well actually i really wanted to go into baking and the thought of having kids is going to be quite problematic so i'm just not going to have any kids and i'm going to bake that's just wouldn't she would have said what are you talking about this is not the way you fit into society she would have suppressed that and just had children and so there would have been these intrusive internal thoughts that she submitted and suppressed to give herself to achieving honor in the society after the vision of honor historically the next one became basically about conforming to beauty and moral absolutes and this is sort of like the greco-realm of thought this is a lot of plato's big idea we know there's absolutes out there these pure forms and it's our job to restrain our impulses to contemplate and achieve them so if you take the four cardinal virtues these hinge virtues so you've got justice of doing the right thing in the world and and wisdom becoming the wise person and then self-restraint the the muting of your desires and not living a life of excess and then courage acting in the face of fear and these cardinal virtues were designed and your life was respected to the degree that you could deal with your inner drama and live into these public virtues and there was a group of elites that sort of controlled and in some sense voted on and graded the quality of your ethical life based on your conformity to these known and universally recognized values and so your inner self wasn't like well i feel like being selfish today you know get down selfishness i must have self restraint i must conform my inner world to external values and this is for the most part what he called what he calls the traditional sense of self it's external you sacrifice you for the sake of others and your community and he goes on and he says this traditional self over the course of time merged into what we would call the modern self and this is where it's beginning to shape you in the modern self and this is particularly western there's other parts of the world where this idea of the traditional self is still in play today and in fact a lot of immigrant children feel the tension because they come from traditional cells where their parents will say we move to this country i don't care who you want to i don't care what you want to do you're not going to be an artist you're not going to be a musician you're going to be a doctor a lawyer or an account these are your options fall on these boxes and so they even though that i may want to do some other thing i will suppress that for the sake of my community it can be very disorienting to be in a place like new york that's committed to your self-actualization but has a family with different expectations i say that just to illustrate some of you feel the tension of what i'm talking about but a change in history happened particularly in the west at the beginning of the modern age somewhere around the 1700 where our modern self versus this traditional self came to the forefront and it happened in stages number one instead of going to honor or to these virtues it went to reason so your goal was to understand science and rational thought and philosophy and to conform your inner life to these things and so for a lot of people it didn't become about religion anymore became about rationality and the degree that you thought into the enlightenment um descartes thinking through these sorts of this is the way that i achieve my sense of self but then i moved out of that into the idea of romanticism particularly through with so where you began to rely not on reason but on the heart the vision of romanticism and so with the view of reason you would go in and you would align yourself with thought and philosophy and come out and get recognized by how well you understood and aligned to it relying on your heart you would go in and you'd get in touch with your authentic feelings and your your sense of self and then you would try and project that into the world as a as a picture of beauty and art this was a big emphasis on the aesthetic primarily expressed through art and creativity rasa basically believed that human beings were fundamentally good and they were corrupted by society so you have to go into the goodness of your heart and fix society by making it beautiful through the aesthetic and then ultimately summer in the 20th century or so an epoch shaping shift happened here's what it said there are no external truths that you have to live up to it's all internal and anybody who is saying that there is an external reality you must conform your inner desires to has a power goal of oppressing you therefore the only sense of self is the heroic self that throws off any external means and makes humanity and reality a blank canvas for authentic expression any power is just socially constructed to maintain the hegemonic power of the elite and so the true quest is the quest of the authentic self throwing off and expressing what's happening and charles taylor calls this the age of authenticity and the age of authenticity says i don't care what another general i don't care what my parents have said my grandparents i don't care what religion says which religion no divine god's going to control me i don't care what politics or philosophy it says who were they traditional sexual ethics they're only there to oppress and so i've got to go in and get in touch with my deepest feelings and then i have to live those things and have to express them out so it's two shifts it's a shift from the external to the internal so instead of taking my disordered self and suppressing it and conforming it to external things i take these external things tear them down and express my internal things and so this is a shift from duty to others and external means to desires so i find my deepest sense of self by what i want and i demand that you recognize it and validate this self so in the old world it was this youth sacrifice for society in the new sense of self society has to sacrifice itself for you and so for example just to to use gender identities just as a cultural example it's not enough to say you cannot say this to gender identity there's an unlimited amount and society must tear down its its gender oppressive gender structures and create space for an infinite number of self-expressive genders now that's great in a university setting but you try and implement that in the real world and you know what you come into here's what you come into conflict because at which point does one person's internal subjective sense of self get to dictate thousands of years of human history and the structures that we participate in and what we're saying right now is this one does come at me bro this one does and so that that's the conflict that we have in the world right now is these huge structural pushes now charles taylor will go on and say this what people today are is what he calls buffered selves do you think do you think of yourself as a buffered self some of you are buff cells but that's not what i'm talking about okay the buffer itself as opposed to the poorest self the poorer self used to believe that there was a spiritual realm and divine laws and my job was to open my inner being to be influenced by it to have it speak to me convict me change me and inspire me but the buff itself says nobody out there can tell me how to be me so we close off we build hard walls around and we will not let anything through to influence us the buffered self and the modern self the world that you live in is telling you all the time don't let anybody you can't trust anybody except us telling you we are here to let you be you and don't let anything stand in anything that stands in the way deconstruct it and burn it down and we're in a giant cultural experiment there's never been a society that's organized itself this way and so if you just play the tape forward with this like what you will end up with is like it would be very very hard to develop a social contract that actually functions if this is pushed to its logical extreme now the deep challenge of this and this the traditional sense of self had some very very real downsides we could do a whole thing critiquing that but most of you most of you have not been formed by that you've been formed by this mod this secular sense of self the problem is is that we know as believers that those internal desires that you're playing rousseau was wrong you're not fundamentally good you're fundamentally broken and scripture goes strong and says you're fundamentally sinful and so when you go into those desires you're not accessing neutral or unique goodness you're accessing disordered loves and that's why when you go in there like honestly honestly are you kind of surprised at times at what you find in your own heart do you ever times where you're like don't dang i better not let anyone know i think that i'll feel that haha i'm doing great oh my gosh i want to kill you it's like the lev the level the level of lust in our hearts the level of rage the level of judgment the level of entitlement is deep in us and that's what it says in ephesians chapter 4 this however is not the way of life you learned when you heard about christ jesus and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in jesus listen you were taught with regard to your formal way of life to put off your old self which has been corrupted by deceitful desires so here's what i will say i'm not here to simply critique the formation of the self that says it's all about you and you must express your desires it is what it is but what i want to say to you is when you tell people to go into their heart we're failing to take into account that the heart is wicked and so when you go in you don't pull out this beautiful selfless aesthetic world you pull out i don't know america you pull out division and hatred and fragmentation and immorality and depression it's just a million people saying kingdom of self at war with anybody who tries to block this we think what will happen by becoming a sovereign eye and going in and doing whatever we want we think that we will be a good god and create our own heaven on earth but in the confessions of dorian gray which is based on uh the oscar wilde novel he says we are each our own devils and we make this world our hell you're just not built to be a god and the universe wasn't built to revolve around you the gravity is off it will not hold it cannot stay together and ultimately do you know how much pressure this puts on people we're starting with them they have to construct ultimate reality do you know how much pressure that puts on someone saying to a little kid hey little buddy not only are you special you are special not only are you special you have to invent your own ethics morality meaning and understanding of everything and don't let anybody who tries to tell you what to do is oppressing you this is freedom the kid's like this sounds amazing can i eat whatever i want no you can't you whatever you want it's bad for you it's like immediately it's off to a bad start you know what i'm saying immediately it doesn't work they keep doing they keep doing so so what ends up happening is your identity is very fragile your sense of self is very fragile and that's why if someone criticizes you people just melt down they just do not have the inner resources because they've invented themselves and it's not rooted in anything other than their capacity to value it and so someone with a stronger opinion than you can just smash your sense of self down and that means that fragile self requires a chronic amount of legislation to protect you which ultimately leads to an authoritarian society and authoritarian friendships and nobody wants to be in a relationship with a dictator even if they're a benevolent one so it just creates a sense of fragmentation every year they do an american freshman survey to basically try and understand that the emotional mental health of folks going through college they found that since 2000 sorry they found out 51 more students felt overwhelmed in 2016 than they did in 2009 so it's like this carrying this sense of self this complexity of autonomy is like it's heavy but then it gets worse even more they found that people describing themselves as depressed has risen by 95 percent just like it's like walking around like i i don't know if i've got what it takes to be my own god and dictate all reality and have the entire united states in fact the globe honor me as a special person i've created like it's heavy and out of our hearts we have disordered love which complicate us because we can't even be the people we want to be this is the self that jesus wants you to deny and he does this by inviting us into a transformed life and that's why these words are life-giving he says jesus said to his disciples whoever wants to be on my disciple must deny themselves take up their cross and follow me for whoever wants to save their life or lose it but whoever loses their life for me will find it what good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their soul or what can anyone give in exchange for their self there's an exchange jesus wants you to see the word that's used here for exchange has the idea of something expressing incredible value and jesus is saying your soul you the true self you possess irreplaceable value why would you trade this for this this false self that is disordered and confused and arrogant and manipulative why give your true self to your false soul he's like i want i want to i want to free you from the tyranny of being your own god so that you can live an ultimate reality so he gives a little way we have to do this the first thing he says is this you have to deny yourself you have to recognize there's a you you don't want to be you'll be very clear about that and it's very hard and therapeutic and self-esteem and self-esteem oriented culture to actually help people say like there's a you inside of you that's gonna die you have to deny yourself this is the same word that is used by peter when peter denies jesus it's a strong word it means to disassociate to repudiate and so when they come to jesus and they say are you with him he's like i don't know him i'm not with him jesus uses that same word and i think there's a little bit of a word play here because i think this is the here's the idea if you don't deny yourself you will ultimately deny jesus something must be denied and if you do not deny your false self your false self will have these moments of temptation and challenge will you say i don't know him i'm not with him and he says after we have to acknowledge there's this person that we have to put to death we have to take up our cross philip reef says this when the cross becomes a symbol of power or beauty suppressing the historical reminder of a particularly brutal instrument of humiliation and death then its own moral authority under the christian rubric of cross bearing is threatened and here's his his idea do not sentimentalize the cross well i've got a really annoying neighbor who plays the violin at 2am trying to get into juilliard that's my cross i guess my new york cross that's not your new york cross well i get a little angry that's my cross that's not your cross that's your temper the cross was a real vivid thing in fact it was not even to be discussed the word cross and crucifixion was so abhorrent to the romans you couldn't even bring it up in polite conversation it would literally please don't talk about that in my presence for the jews it was a sign of being cursed by god for the greeks it was a sign of utter foolishness and for the romans it was a sign of political failure and so we have to realize that jesus is not inviting us to tweak a few things or just struggle with our discipleship he's inviting us to put to death to crucify the false self that is holding us back and i want to be very very clear here you live in a time of history particularly church history where people will soften the cross and they'll tell you you don't have to take up your cross they'll tell you you can take up politics instead of taking up your cross but you won't live the way of jesus you can take up your accomplishments you can take up your arguments you can take up legislation you can take up project self but jesus has not told you to take these things up he has told you to take up your cross have you taken it up in the book of galatians paul says i've been crucified with christ and i no longer live but christ lives in me he saw what happened to jesus in some way that's what he identified himself with that's where he's got his validation his wreck his his sense of worth was like that that cross that messiah on the cross recognizes me when i am with him on that cross the validation comes from god in galatians 5 he says those who belong to christ jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires and i want you to see that this is very very strong language bonhoeffer says when christ calls a man he bids him come and die and jesus invitation is not like hey trust me i will make your life way better i'll give you a few little life hacks and tweaks i'll give you self-care and flourishing jesus says i'm gonna put a wrecking ball through your ego so come and follow me and find freedom it will require we crucify our image management our self-preservation our personas all the things we put up in order to avoid really having to follow jesus wholeheartedly and if we're willing to take up our cross if we're willing to crucify these things then we can enter into the way of jesus one john 2 says whoever claims to live in him must live as jesus did so that means people around us must recognize the way you live i don't get it i don't even know if i like it reminds me of something what is that oh jesus and his kingdom and there's there's some strange thing when you deny yourself and you take up your cross and follow jesus there's some kind of joyful intimacy there's some kind of life that is better than the fulfillment of the self and sin i've done some sinning in my life and i can tell you that suffering with jesus is more fulfilling than sin in our culture the intimacy you get with him your insights we love the resurrection fellowship of his resurrection but paul says i want to know the fellowship of his sufferings there's something about the joy of knowing that your false self is dying and being rejected and your true self is coming to life that we get in relationship with him and jesus ultimate goal is that you would have a new self a true self he says if you try and save your life you will lose it but if you lose your life for me you'll find it and jesus knows that the secret is not in self-fulfillment the false self but it's in self-denial so that the true self can be birthed ephesians 4 again listen to ephesians 4 listen to what paul is trying to help this is written to christians wrestling with the formation of their sense of self that however is not the way of life when you heard about christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in jesus you were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires and then here's the vision to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self which is what created to be like god in righteousness and holiness god's vision is not just your authentic self it's better than that his vision is to make you like god his vision is to do away with all of your shame all of your failure all of that inner guilt and angst and replace it with righteousness and holiness it's a solid stable sense of self built on him and what he's done for you not a fragile self based on how you're performing based on your subjective desires at any given moment and so what i'm hoping has happened so far is that i'm wanting to give you the good news of self-denial and i'm betting as i'm standing here in your heart you're like yes there is a me that must die if there is a me that is only concerned about the things of men and not the things of the kingdom and god wants to free you from it well how does that happen well i want you to see this the first thing is this if you go to want it i think we don't we don't put this in perspective jesus says if anyone wants to follow me let me ask you a question do you want to follow jesus do you want to no i should not like mom and dad are going to cut off paying for college if i don't find a local church no do you want to because you're going to have to have a large yes to say a thousand knows do you want to follow jesus because if you want to and so we've got to cultivate our desire to want to follow jesus and then our vision in following jesus is the building of a cruciform life which means everything about our life then is the way of the cross not the way of the world it's the way of self-denial not the way of false self-fulfillment the idea of a cruciform life if we can put this picture up here it's an architectural idea when they would build cathedrals they would build the cathedral itself so that it was actually the shape of a cross and when you entered into it everything preached to you the cross and so the design of it the aesthetics the way they put the light in where they put the altar all of these things were designed to remind you jesus has died so that you can have life i think that's supposed to be the picture of our whole life we live lives that when people see it they say that is death to selfishness and alive to christ it is a lifestyle not just a theological commitment and when you meet someone who's really following jesus it's extraordinary when you meet a selfless person in a culture of selfishness you go what is that that's a cruciform life cruciform life then is defined by a few things it's defined by a sense of surrender a sense of surrender we talk a lot about obedience and we'll do a week on obedience but there's something better than obedience and it's the posture of surrender obedience says i'm in a war to do it or not to do it but surrender says my default posture is yes and so you can like go on those moments and and they do matter those moments of conflict but there's something better than in every time going should i show tonight should i should or not should i someone just said yes jesus the over my life is one word in response to you yes that's the posture of surrender hannah whittlesmith says this the greatest burden we have to carry in life is self the most difficult thing we have to manage is self in laying off your burdens therefore the first one you must get rid of is yourself you must hand yourself over into the care and keeping of your god he made you and therefore he understands you and knows how to manage you and him you must trust him to do it and this can be painful i want to be honest it can be painful some of you live in a world and they've told you you be you let your desires dictate your identity do not trust anything outside of yourself except us do not trust anything outside of yourself and so that can feel pretty good at first but then we get to the reality of it and it can be horrific and some of you struggle to surrender because you've been hurt or disappointed by god or wounded by the church or disappointed by human relationships the thought of literally saying to god okay you can have it whole can be terrifying but that's where life is found we have to be willing to surrender to god it is the starting point you will never be more mature than your surrender to god it doesn't matter how much you know doesn't matter how much you do it's the attitude of the heart that determines those things the second thing that needs to happen is we've got to have dramatic self-denial there's a another time of history you know what they call this the mortification of the flesh that sounds like a death metal band doesn't it honestly what are you listening to modification of the flesh it's incredible it's like it's it sounds so aggressive but they realized sin could sabotage your life don't you think king david wished he had mortified his flesh you look at the brokenness in our world today and you think don't you think they wish they had mortified their flesh when i look back on my life my greatest moments of sin and shame i'm like oh i wish i had been more severe with my sin colossians 3 says put to death therefore whatever belongs to your earthly nature sexual immorality impurity lust evil desires and greed which is idolatry because of these the wrath of god is coming and we've we love to soften our sin we use therapeutic language all the time i'm just struggling right now i'm struggling i'm just wrestling i'm wrestling and struggling and honestly i'm not trying to be facetious though i am being facetious i'm not trying to be underneath it if we're not careful what we're saying is i'm content to manage my sin right now the first time i really experienced someone who was willing to like shake and stir up a serious amount of modification it happened when i was dating christy we were young i was 21 she was 19. and we're going to get married you know like like all the chemicals are flowing we're addicted to each other it's just like love love love love love and we were college students so it was hard to be alone but every now and then we got alone okay chemicals in the body sexual attraction there's a lot going on for the you know things have gone pretty well i'm there to be a pastor and study the word of god and she wants to go into missions and it's all good but in a couple of those moments just you know stuff happens so i just push it a little bit too far and christy slaps me and stands up and says john tyson do you want to be a man of god or not or not we've got to be holy we don't want to poison this thing we don't want to drag the flesh into this i just remember thinking yes ma'am yes man yes man but i'm telling you don't don't stop at all the all the things we do that was the first time i was like gosh this is serious i think i wonder how different our lives would be if in the middle of it someone just stood up and said hey man i don't know how to tell you this you're about to destroy your life and i think that's an act of love we have to have serious mortification see our culture is obsessed with surface change it loves like talking around it loves virtue signaling but it doesn't want to do anything about it and the people who will encourage you to virtue signal are the very ones that will stop you from doing what's in your heart i just want to give you exhibit a okay this has happened this week and it got a lot of attention alexandria uh casio cortez i actually like like her spunk and attitude a little bit but she goes to the met gala and she's wearing a dress that wasn't purchased from target and the tickets cost 35k i don't think she paid it for a ticket i'm sure she was given it but the other people are paying 35 000 a table at the event is 200 000 and i can just tell you this that the poor weren't in the event maybe they were there handing out hors d'oeuvres to billionaires but they weren't invited if they were there they were serving the rich and everybody's like and you can imagine all of these super wealthy people funding elite culture walking around going your chick-fil-a dress is incredible that chick-fil-a font how did you match it up with your dress it's incredible love this but i promise you those rich people were not in there going hey let me call my accountant am i hiding money in the cayman islands anywhere get it out of there bring it back to america i saw the dress and i'm really convicted i want to find ways to pay more taxes so walk around oh i love your address oh this address is amazing and nobody would have thought please tax me more it's just virtue signaling and then to top it all off it turns out that the lady who made her dress has three open tax warrants for not paying her taxes in new york state no look i'm not trying to be mean here's what i'm trying to here's what i'm trying to show you our culture doesn't want deep change she makes 176 000 a year that's okay she works really hard but i'd love to see how much of it she gives away i'm simply saying this our culture loves shallow change and virtue signaling and the christian culture can be very performative too but god wants you to really change he wants you to rend your heart not paint your garment and this is a way deeper kind of change there's a story that c.s lewis tells voyage of the dawn trotter chronicles of narnia and eustace has given in to his desires and he's become a dragon in this book and he's talking about to his cousin edmund telling him how he was saved by aslan and i just want to give you a little bit of story time here's what he says he's explaining what happened i looked up and saw the very last thing i expected a huge lion coming slowly towards me and one clear thing was that there was no moon last night but there was moonlight where the lion was so it came near it near it i was terribly afraid of it you may think that being a dragon i could have knocked out any lion easily enough but it wasn't that kind of fear i wasn't afraid of it eating me i was just afraid of it if you understand well it came close to me and i looked it straight in the eye and i shut my eyes tight but that wasn't any good because it told me to follow it and i knew i'd have to do what it told me so i got up and i followed it and it led me a long way into the mountains there was a garden trees fruit everything in the middle of that there was a well the water was as clear as anything and i thought if i could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg but the lion told me i must undress first so i started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place but just as i was going to put my feet in the water i looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they'd been before then the lion said you will have to let me do this i was afraid of his claws i can tell you but i was pretty nearly desperate by now so i just lay flat on my back and i let him do it the very first tear he made was so deep i thought it had gone right into my heart and when he began pulling the skin off it hurt worse than anything i've ever felt the only thing that made me able to bear her was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff pull off i know exactly what you mean said edmund well he peeled the beastly stuff right off just as i thought i'd done it myself the other three times only they hadn't hurt and there it was lying on the grass only so much thicker and darker and more knobbly looking than the others had been and there i was as smooth and as soft as a peeled switch and smaller than i had been then he caught hold of me i didn't like that much for i was very tender underneath now that i had no skin on and he threw me in the water it smarted like anything but only for a moment and then it became perfectly delicious and as soon as i started swimming and splashing i found all the pain had gone from my arm and this is why i had turned into a boy again and this is a great parable of how our sins transform us into something that we hate that we cannot save ourselves from and how god who wants to do deep work will do a painful work but ultimately it is a work that will free us and we need to have a vision of god getting in and changing our life are you willing to let god get his claws in your flesh to free you are you willing the stakes are so high some of you have secret sin in your heart that if you keep going you will be a parable to this church there will be moments when we'll say did you hear about fill in the blank oh gosh i wish they had denied their false self and lived in their true self it's the stakes are so high how many more public failures of pastors do we have to have because god wouldn't really let them get the flesh and deny themselves i think this is what god wants us to do and ultimately this is what happened to peter peter's like no way lord but then the spirit works in peter's heart what happens at the end of his life peter literally is crucified peter chooses the way of the cross when they go to crucify him he says i'm not even worthy to die in the same way as jesus and he's crucified upside down he was freed from his need to defend and fight and he joyfully joined the way of jesus and so i want to say this it's not enough to agree with the things we're talking about it's not enough to like like the idea of following jesus jesus has a problem with you and it's your false self and he wants you to deny it so that you can exchange it for your true self and live in freedom and stability and joy and you can enjoy him you cannot be filled with jesus if you're full of yourself and i think today is one of those days of emptying where we just say lord you can have it all you can have it all so i want us to move into a time of response i want us to move into a time of worship but i want to just create a minute or two for you just to sit in the presence of god and would you just ask holy spirit will you search me maybe some of you feel really uncomfortable right now and you're like oh gosh i i didn't see this coming but i feel the holy spirit i feel that that aslanic claw in my heart and i want to say do not fear that that is the love of god the bible says that he disciplines us so that we will not be condemned with the world it's a sign that you're his the thing you need to worry about is if you can sin and feel nothing that's the danger point we are called to be a cruciform community people should step into our midst and they should see the way of the cross they should see the new self and the death of the old self so let's just take a minute and invite the holy spirit to search us and to bring to the surface anything that requires repentance and change

Channel: Church of the City New York

Views: 868

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: NXTcM2HATik

Length: 56min 0sec (3360 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021