Becoming a child of God involves a series of commitments. I suppose, in the big picture, there’s only one commitment that counts and that’s the decision you make to put on Christ and serve Him unendingly. Still, that one decision, if you think back, involved several small occasions where you drew a line in the proverbial sand and declared “that was then, and this is now.”

Maybe you were someone who grew up hearing Gospel sermons. Maybe you never attended a “church service” for the first part of your life. However it began, it doesn’t matter: Focus on the day when you first believed the Gospel: Even if you didn’t completely fathom the ramifications of your newfound faith, you still had the idea—even if only implicitly—that your life would never be the same.

Faith in Jesus compels us to respond with action. It is no coincidence and it is not without reason that those actions a faith-filled person undertakes are often described in the New Testament in terms of mortality.

Jesus tells us to “deny ourselves.” The phrase implies we stop putting our own self-interests at the top of our mind. That’s a radical idea, since it is almost hardwired into us as people to follow after “self-preservation.” Yet, here is Jesus—this new Master to whom we have committed our faith—telling us to shed the instinct of “staying alive at all costs.”

What follows that phrase? Jesus tells us to “take up our cross…” Only then, after we have done those two things can we obey the last command: “…and come follow me” (Mark 8:34). And what does it mean to take up the cross? Consider that, to Jesus, taking up the cross meant trekking up Golgotha’s hill and dying for all humanity. What else could it mean but for us to take up our instrument of death and die for Him? Does He mean for us to give up our physical lives? If it comes to that, maybe, but it may not ever come to that. There is a death, however, that we must submit to.

Paul writes that Christians are to be a people who have put to death any and all aspects of our lives that harm our soul’s salvation (Colossians 3:5). It can be hard to let go of the sins we spent so much of our life pursuing, but that’s why we have to deny ourselves. We must let go of those sins if we want to follow Jesus, which is why Jesus commands us to pick up our cross. And we must not just set them aside for later enjoyment but must, as Paul said, “put them to death.”

When we “believe in Jesus,” what we are actually doing is making a commitment to put our old lives to death. It’s no coincidence, then, that the very next thing that happens, after a person believes the Gospel, is repentance of sin. What is repentance, in that case, but the actual putting to death the sin that separates us from Christ?

Repentance is the denial of self. Repentance is the taking up of the cross. Repentance is the moment when a person says “I am no longer following my own ways: I have made the decision to follow the ways of Jesus.” What follows repentance? What else but baptism (Acts 2:38)? It is at the point of baptism when those sins are buried in a watery grave and, though you—the baptized person—went down into the water, it is not the same “you” that rises. In being baptized you have buried your old, sinful life and are now freed from sin (Romans 6:3-7).

Belief in Jesus (carrying with it the recognition of His perfection, our imperfection, and His dying for us)) is the acknowledgment that you are a criminal worthy of death. Repentance is akin to the judge signing the order to execute the criminal (yourself). Baptism is the moment when the execution (and the burial) takes place.

All that adds up to this fact: Becoming a Christian, in a lot of ways, amounts to the deliberate, meticulous, and coordinated “death of self.”

No wonder our Master put it the way He did…

If any would come after Me, let him deny yourself, take up his cross, and come follow Me.

(Mark 8:34)

~ Matthew