"Marching to Your Own Death" Matthew 16:24-26 Sunday Morning Worship Service

When Jesus says in Matthew 16, verse 24, if anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

Matthew 16:24

I wonder what you think those early disciples and those early followers of Christ would have thought he meant.

When you hear Jesus say, if anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself and pick up his cross, what do you think Jesus was talking about?

And I'm sure in your minds, you're conjuring up an image of the cross on which Jesus died.

After all, we're meeting in a church building that has literally a six-story cross on the roof of it.

When we think of a cross, we think of what is often around a Christian's neck or a sign on a church or something like that.

But what do you think the early disciples of Christ would have thought Jesus meant when he said, if anyone wants to come after me, he must deny himself and pick up his cross?

I mean, do you think that they thought he was talking about the cross on which he was going to die?

They were not equipped to understand that.

I'll tell you that right now.

We know that from Matthew 16, verse 21.

Matthew 16:21

At that time, Jesus began to teach them how he was going to suffer and how he was going to die.

Just that it was going to happen, and they were furious.

They rebuked him.

Peter said, May it never be.

I mean, I can assure you that they did not have in their minds a grid for Jesus being crucified on a cross.

Even though in John chapter 3, Jesus had already told them the Son of Man was going to be lifted up like Moses was lifted up in the wilderness, the disciples, that had not set in on them yet.

John 3 · chapter mention

No, when Jesus said, if anyone wants to come after me, he must pick up his cross, your typical Roman, anybody in the Roman Empire, which would include the Jews here, would have had one particular image in mind.

It was a hundred years or so before this conversation in Matthew 16 when there was a rebellion outside of Rome.

And a general named Cassius put down the rebellion with a group of Roman soldiers.

And those who rebelled were themselves also Roman Greek soldiers.

In fact, 6,000 of them were in the rebellion.

And when Cassius crushed the rebellion, he took those 6,000 rebel soldiers, he had them make their own crosses, their own crucifixes, and then he crucified them in a line from the battlefield where they rebelled along the highway back towards Rome.

And so this highway was marked out for miles and miles and miles by 6,000 crosses with rebels crucified on them.

In fact, once the soldiers had to make their own cross, Cassius made them carry it along the highway to the point where they would be crucified.

They were poked from behind by swords.

And these soldiers weren't generally familiar with crucifixion.

It was not something that had been commonly done in the Roman Empire.

Of course, we mentioned before the Assyrians used to do crucifixion, but they did it horizontally.

They would crucify you laying down on the ground.

So this is very different than what Cassius had kind of brought back from the horrors of the ancient Near East and lined a Roman highway with it.

Six thousand soldiers lifted up on a cross at equidistant markers all the way back towards Rome as a very public declaration of what would happen to you if you rebelled against the Roman Empire.

And I can assure you, word of this traveled throughout Rome.

Everybody knew about this.

That is what they associated with crucifixion.

That would have been the image in their mind when Jesus said, if anyone wants to follow me, he must deny himself and take up his own cross.

That was the model right there, that you were carrying around with you the means of your own death as a punishment, as a consequence.

This is the way that Matthew introduces the readers of his gospel to the cross.

This is the second reference of the cross in the book of Matthew.

The first was in chapter 10.

And there Matthew said, If anyone loves his father and mother more than me, he's not worthy of me.

Rather, you have to follow him and pick up your cross.

And that's all he said there.

He just dropped it as a bomb and then moved on.

And he doesn't revisit that again all the way until Matthew 16, where he tells his disciples, listen, I'm going to suffer many things and die.

Peter rebukes him, of course, Peter, and says, May it never be.

I forbid it, Lord.

And Jesus says, Get behind me, Satan, and then says, By the way, if you want to follow me, you're also going to be carrying a cross.

Jesus describes the cross here not as the way in which he is going to literally die, although certainly that's what happens.

It's interesting, fascinating to me that the description of the cross, the way the New Testament introduces the cross, it's not a metaphor, or it's not a picture for how Jesus is going to die, it's a metaphor for how a Christian is going to live.

Jesus says, if you want to be a follower of me, you're going to be carrying your cross.

That's what it means to follow Christ.

And if you're not willing to do that, you are not worthy of me, is his language from Matthew 10, verse 38.

Matthew 10:38

Jesus uses the cross in the New Testament.

This is my main point this morning.

Jesus uses the cross in the New Testament not first or initially to describe how he'll die, but as a description for how Christians are supposed to live.

And he says, if you are unwilling to carry your cross, you are not a follower of Christ.

You're not a disciple of Christ.

You're not going to heaven when you die.

You may think that you're on the same road Jesus is on, but there are lots of people on that road.

There are soldiers with swords, there are crowds that are heckling, but the only people on that road that are following Christ have a big cross on their back.

I mean, that's his point.

What it means to follow Christ is to carry a cross.

In fact, he says, whoever.

Or the ESV translates it this way in verse 24.

If anyone, this is a generic claim, if there is anyone in the whole wide world that fancies himself a follower of Christ, you can identify that person because he'll be lugging around a cross.

I mean, if Peter was upset that Jesus said he was going to die, I wonder what Peter's response would have been had he recognized that Jesus meant he was going to die on a cross.

Because in the Roman world, the cross was reserved, it was not the normal means of execution.

The cross was reserved for the most horrible criminals, the most vile criminals.

It was designed to be embarrassing, it was designed to be humiliating, and you know this.

Now you're just nailed there, and you're just left there.

Nobody can give you food or water, or they'd be guilty of aiding and abetting a rebel against the Roman Empire, and so they just leave you out there.

You die from exposure, you die from dehydration.

The birds get you.

Animals get you, jackals could tear you down.

That's what happens to people who die on a cross.

Romans would decapitate people.

That was their normal way of executing someone.

The Jews would stone them to death.

There was even strangling was a common means of execution.

There's no shortage of ways to kill people.

The cross was designed for those who had rebelled against the Roman Empire in such a public way that their death needed to be prolonged and humiliating.

And that is what Jesus says being a Christian will be like.

It'll be like that.

And the phrase that he uses here, take up your own cross, that was actually a Jewish expression, even long before crucifixion.

It's an expression that comes all the way back from the book of Genesis, chapter 22, when Isaac was, you know, marched up the mountain to his own death.

Genesis 22 · chapter mention

Remember, Abraham was marching Isaac up the mountain, and Isaac had to carry his own wood for him for the fire.

Isaac himself says, you know, I see the wood and I see the fire.

Where's the ram?

And Abraham's response is that God himself will provide a ram.

Well, the Hebrew phrase for the wood that he's carrying is the word that could be translated cross.

And so the Jews even had their own expression to carry your own cross.

And in the Jewish mind, that meant carrying around with you in an unknowing way the very means of your own death.

That's what in the when the Jews said you're carrying your own cross, they didn't have in mind Roman crucifixion.

They had your own cross.

You're carrying around with you the way in which you will die.

Jesus here, by saying you'll carry your own cross, you'll take up your cross, he's combining this Jewish metaphor about you carrying with you how you will be killed with the Roman idea that crucifixion is deserved for those who rebel against the empire.

And Jesus says, this is what it will mean to be a follower of Christ.

You'll be living your life while carrying around the means by which you will die.

It's the image Jesus gives of saving faith.

And as it's described, as he goes through this, Jesus is obviously unpacking here the theological concept of conversion.

That this is what it means to be converted to Christ.

That you go from living your own way, following your own path, you have an encounter with Christ, you are turned around, and you're now following him.

You're walking one way on a highway, and Jesus walks by the other way, and you see him, and so you stop what you're doing and you turn to follow him.

But this is the catch.

You cannot follow him unless you're carrying on your back your own cross.

Now, why is that?

Why can't you just follow him as a spectator?

Why can't you follow him to watch where he's going and see how his life turns out?

Why can't you follow him as a journalist or a student and take notes and study him?

Why do you have to follow him with a cross?

Because the very essence of what it means to be a Christian is to be united with Jesus in his own death and resurrection.

This is why when a person is converted to Christ, they are baptized.

They go under the water.

The baptism represents, it's symbolic of their own death.

As Jesus died on the cross, so you're dying to your old way of life.

Again, a picture of conversion.

If anyone wants to follow Christ, they must be converted.

And what does that look like?

It does not look like following him as a spectator.

It looks like giving up your life.

Notice the phrase Jesus says: if you want to come after him, verse 24, you first deny yourself.

That is the first condition here.

The condition of being a Christian, the condition of being a follower of Christ, the condition of going to heaven when you die, unless you think I'm using swapping some terms around here, like there's people who are on their way to heaven when they die that aren't Christians, or there's Christians that aren't disciples, or there's disciples that aren't followers of Christ, or people come up with all these like wiggle, you know, wiggle kind of words to sneak in their own sinful lifestyles.

I'm trying to close all those loopholes.

To be a disciple of Christ means to be a follower of Christ, means to be a Christian, means to be born again, means to be going to heaven when you die, means to be a follower of Christ.

There's no exceptions in that.

It's all one big group, and they all have the same initial criteria.

You must deny yourself.

That's how this starts.

That word deny, by the way, it means to renounce.

It's a public renunciation where you are crying out to the world, I no longer am who I once was.

I'm denying that old person.

I'm renouncing it.

Now, this is, I mean, understand that this is so unusual for a religious leader to say, You have to renounce your entire life and follow me.

Religious leaders don't say that.

Really in any religion, except like those weird cults where they all end up killing themselves.

And Jesus has sprinkled his ministry with these kind of lines.

I mean, he tells the richer and rulers, sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow me.

He doesn't even say give it to me.

Like the TV preachers do.

They would say, Sell all you have and give it to me.

And try really hard, and maybe I'll return your phone call.

Jesus says, Sell all you have, give it away and follow me.

In other words, he's making the point that he is more important and more significant than everything else you have.

Jesus says, if you don't love him more than your mother and father, you're not worthy of him.

It's lines like that that are everywhere.

I mean, if I got up here and said, if you want to be a Christian, sell all you have and follow Jesse, you would probably walk out.

Or if I were to say, if you want to be a Christian, you have to love me more than your father and your mother.

At the very least, that would be pretty weird.

But Jesus talks like that all the time.

And here he's ramped it up even more.

Here he says, you're denying your entire life.

You're renouncing it for the sake of following him.

It's an act of the will here.

You deny yourself, you surrender, you renounce.

It's a military term.

You're surrendering yourself.

You're giving up.

You're laying down your fight.

You're saying, I used to be fighting my life this way.

I'm surrendering.

I'm putting my sword down.

I'm turning around.

I'm renouncing my old way of life.

This is what it means to be a Christian.

You count the cost, you are converted in your heart.

You know, the Roman soldiers made the those who'd be crucified follow by poking him with a sword.

It was very much against their will.

Jesus is not calling people against their will.

He's telling you, you make this call, you figure this out in your mind, you decide in your head, you do the math, you do the calculations, you look at your life and you decide if it's worth it to keep living.

And you look at Jesus' life and you decide if it's worth it to start following, and then you make the exchange.

You surrender your life, you lay down your sword, you give up your old life, you renounce it, and you start a new life following Christ.

That's what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

You renounce yourself.

And as I said, Jesus is not making you do this against your will.

He's a shepherd who's not leading his sheep by a rope, yanking them like you would walk a reluctant dog.

No, he's a shepherd, and the sheep are following his voice.

You're doing this because your heart has been changed.

You're doing this because you were going your own way, and then you saw Christ, and you turn around and you want to follow him.

That's the big change here.

That's the point of this.

It's conversion.

A convicted criminal would carry his own cross against his will.

A Christian does it voluntarily, is the point.

And then he leads you into this paradox.

Whoever would save his life would lose it.

Whoever would lose his life for my sake, key phrase.

He's not advocating suicide here.

He's saying whoever would lose his life for my own sake, for Jesus' sake, he will find it.

This is what I mean by a paradox.

He's saying it in paradoxical terms.

If you want to gain eternal life, you have to lose this life.

If you want to protect this life, you have to leave it.

And the person who loves this life so much they don't want to lose it, guess what will happen?

They will lose it.

That's the paradox here.

And this is a paradox that is all over the Bible.

Again, salvation is absolutely free.

Amen?

But it will cost you everything.

I mean, that's the paradox in the New Testament.

Salvation, you cannot buy salvation, but it takes all that you own.

You can't earn it, but you give your life in exchange for it.

That's the paradox of salvation in the New Testament.

Because you affiliate yourself with Jesus' life and his death and his resurrection, and that requires you to renounce your own life.

You know, believers in the New Testament are called Christians first in Acts chapter 11.

Acts 11 · chapter mention

And there it's meant as a derogatory term.

They meant it as an insult.

The crowd identified followers of Christ as Christians, as little Christ is what it means.

Because they are affiliating with the death of Jesus.

And so they meant it as an insult.

Like, oh, you're following somebody who was crucified.

Are you crazy?

And the Christians took it as a compliment.

They owned the phrase.

Like, oh, you can see the death of Jesus in me.

Praise God.

That's what Jesus is talking about here.

To be a disciple of Christ means you affiliate yourself with the one who lost his own life for the sake of yours.

The point here is not that every believer would be a martyr for the gospel, but that every single believer would be willing to, would be a follower of Christ unreservedly.

This is the command to follow Jesus just as you are, but while realizing just as you are, you're not qualified to follow him.

In order for you to come to God, a change has to happen in your heart, inside of you.

It requires you to go from protecting and guarding your own life to renouncing it, abandoning your heart, abandoning your life, abandoning your goals, abandoning all that you thought you were living for, and surrendering it to Christ and following Him.

You cannot be a disciple of Jesus with a both hands kind of choice here.

You can't follow Christ while also living for your own life.

Because remember, you're renouncing the first to follow the second.

It's described as a sea change, a course change.

You're going one way and you have turned around.

And you know all this.

I mean, this is the New Testament word for repentance.

It's a change of your mind.

It's the 180.

You're living one way and you turn around and you go the other way.

That's the point of this.

And Jesus says, if you're unwilling to do that, you're not a follower of Christ.

In fact, he says, you will lose your own life.

Instead, Jesus says, Come as you are, but leave who you are behind.

You must crucify the flesh, mortify its lusts that rule over your life, oppose the devil daily, fight the flesh continually, and leave this world behind.

That's the image he gives.

You must lose your life.

You know, there's many times in Matthew's gospel where Jesus describes or compares true disciples from false disciples.

It's a common metaphor he uses.

Not everybody who's on the wide road is on the way to eternal life.

I mean, where do they think the road is going?

They think it's going to eternal life?

Oh no, they are so wrong.

Only those in the narrow road end up with eternal life, and it is so hard to find that road.

Not every tree is bearing fruit of the Spirit.

There's some trees that have dead fruit.

That's the point.

Not everyone, Jesus says in Matthew 7, who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven.

So there's a whole class of people out there.

And just think about what they believe.

They believe they're on the road to heaven.

They call Jesus Lord repeatedly.

They say they are producing fruit in their life.

But upon further inspection, they are not producing fruit.

Upon further inspection, they are not on the narrow road.

Upon further inspection, despite the fact they say Lord, Lord, Lord, Jesus doesn't even know them.

And that should be a pretty serious wake-up call.

You know, in Rwanda, at almost every store is a metal detector.

You walk through a metal detector everywhere.

And it's just a normal part of their life.

They empty everything out of their pockets to walk through the metal detector.

And after a while I thought, this is such a great analogy for salvation.

It's a narrow gate.

You're not allowed to walk in two at a time.

You can't cross through the metal detector with a friend.

And you cannot bring your stuff with you.

You can't fit your couch through the metal detector, your car.

The gospel, in a way, is like that.

You cannot follow Christ while carrying all of your stuff.

You cannot follow Christ while living with yourself.

You can't follow Christ because your friends follow Christ, or because your mom follows Christ, or your dad follows Christ, or your kids follow Christ.

It's a turnstile.

You go through single file, one at a time, with your hands empty.

That's the image here.

And there are all sorts of people who are false disciples that think they have gone through the metal of the sector, but they are so wrong because they are going through carrying everything they own.

And it beeps and the alarm goes off, and they pay no attention to that.

It's sobering to remember that even the devil and the demons believe that Jesus is Lord.

The demons in Mark's gospel, the first person who calls Jesus Lord is a demon in Mark's gospel.

Calling him Lord doesn't make you saved.

Believing the truth about Jesus Christ doesn't make you saved.

Again, demons believe that.

Judas believed that.

Judas believed that Jesus did miracles.

You heard people say, I'd be a Christian if only I saw a miracle.

Ah, I don't think so, my friend.

Judas saw more miracles than you ever will.

Seeing and believing miracles doesn't make you saved.

What makes you saved?

Well, being converted is what makes you saved.

Going from darkness to light, blindness to sight, death to life.

Having a love for Christ is what identifies you as a Christian.

Having a cross on your back.

I've told you this illustration before, but I just I like it.

The house I was renting when I was in seminary, our landlord told us they had an avocado tree, and we were supposed to care for the avocado tree.

This was gonna be the first year it was gonna grow avocados.

And so me and my roommates did dote over that avocado tree.

We dug a trench around it, we fertilized it.

I'd never had an avocado tree before from New Mexico.

But I was excited for this one.

So we fertilize it, and I'm even I name it, I'm playing classical music to it.

This thing is gonna be great.

And lo and behold, spring, there's a little fruit growing on it.

Summer.

They're green even.

Starting to turn red though.

And upon a closer inspection, they're apples.

Well, I've seen apple trees everywhere.

This is hardly special.

So what am I supposed to do at this point?

Do I buy avocados at the store and tape them to the tree?

Is that gonna make the tree an avocado tree?

Of course not.

It probably killed the tree, actually.

I mean, the landlord was lied to or deceived or made a mistake.

Who knows?

Maybe she got it from the wrong shelf at Home Depot.

I have no idea how it happened.

I think there's so many people who are stuck there with the Christian life.

They have been deceived into thinking they're followers of Christ, but they are not.

And how do they know?

Well, look at your life.

Are you producing fruit?

And it's very easy to hear that the wrong way and say, oh, the pastor's saying that you have to do good things in order to be a Christian.

No.

No more than I would say an avocado tree is not an avocado tree until it produces avocados.

Of course that's not true.

You're not a Christian because you're producing fruit.

You're producing fruit because you are a Christian.

Don't confuse cause and effect.

But also don't be foolish enough to look at a tree covered with apples and keep claiming it's an avocado tree.

Don't be foolish enough to see a life that is filled with the works of the flesh.

The person that has no cross on their back that is still flagrantly living for themselves, and say, yeah, but I mean, I'm pretty sure the guys are Christian.

I see him at church all the time.

Why else would he be there?

What does it mean to be a Christian?

It means to be born again, to be converted.

I mean, how do you know that sugar is sweet?

You taste it.

And if you can't figure it out more than that, I can't help you.

Like if you taste sugar and you're still really confused about if it's salt or sugar, I have zero ways to help you.

There's nothing else I have for you.

How do you know if a person is a believer?

How do you know if you're a believer?

Ask yourself, do you love Christ?

And if you can't figure it out more than that, again, I can't help you.

I have no other tools to help you.

I can just read this verse over and over and over again.

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

What's the difference between those with empty hearts and faithful hearts?

Between those that call Jesus Lord and those whom Jesus calls his friends?

What's the difference?

The difference is a person that has been born again, that loves Christ, that picks up his cross, that denies himself.

Bill Bright, in his book, I believe called The Spirit-Filled Life, describes it this way.

When you come to Christ, quote, you no longer think of Christ as the one who helps you live your own life.

But rather, Jesus Christ takes over your life.

Your body becomes Christ's body to use as he wills.

Your mind becomes his mind to think his thoughts.

Your will is now controlled by his will.

Your total personality, time, and talents are now completely his.

That's a description of what conversion is like.

Where you have been defeated by Christ and you're now his.

You belong to him.

And if you're not willing to take up the cross in this life, you will not wear the crown in the next life.

That's the point.

No crown without first the cross.

There's an order here.

You turn from your life, you surrender it, you follow Christ, and that leads to the crown.

And that's his point.

When you surrender your life, you will find it.

And you won't find it in this world, you'll find it in the next world.

It would be wrong to deduce that anybody who's following Christ ceases to have problems in this life.

Of course not.

You will have problems in this life.

You've got a big cross on your back, it's heavy, it's hard to carry around.

Of course, you'll have problems in this life.

But the wicked have problems in this life too.

They just don't have a cross.

And so, because of that, for the wicked, they have problems in this life, and this is their best life.

But for believers, you have problems with this life.

But you endure all things for the sake of knowing Him who gives your life meaning, who's forgiven you of your sins.

That's why you renounce your life.

Because you know where you're headed.

This world can do whatever it wants to you, it doesn't matter.

You're going to heaven when you die.

So there's a twofold exchange here.

You renounce your life, you surrender your future.

You disavow your past, you surrender your future, and in the middle, you're following Jesus Christ.

And notice what a failure to do that produces.

Look at verse 26.

What will that profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

What about a person who doesn't want to repent, who doesn't want to give his life to Christ?

I mean, that's the expression.

Do you give your life to Christ?

What about a person who doesn't want to do that?

Well, they lose it all.

They lose everything.

You know, you can get the promotion at work.

You can buy the bigger house, you can get the second house, you can get the better job, you can marry the perfect spouse and have the best kids and get the other job and get the other house and all the stuff.

You can get all the things you want.

You can win the next election, you can be the expert they interview on TV.

You can get all of that and lose your soul.

If you gain all of that and you don't have a love for Christ, what does it profit you?

You can be the most famous person in this world, and if you don't have a love for Christ in your heart, it'll just make you the most famous person in hell.

And it is sad how many people fancy themselves believers because they do come to church and yet they have never renounced their life, they've never taken their cross, they've never followed Christ.

The Christian landscape is strewn with these half-built buildings.

What I mean by that is people that start building a Christian life and give up after a few weeks or a few months because they didn't count the cost.

They didn't really think through what it meant to leave their life and follow Christ.

I mean, just imagine a person who's dropped off at the bus stop out there on Braddock.

And they're walking by and they're having a rough go in life, you know, maybe they're just coming from visiting their mom or dad at the nursing home over there and their work is not going well, and their kids are rebelling and obnoxious, and their husband is arguing with them, and it's just a it's a it's a sad, sad life.

And as they're walking by the church, they see the sign out there that says worship service, you know, come worship with us, and they they walk in and they come into church and they hear you singing and they they hear you singing, Christ is enough for me, and they sit and they listen to a sermon, and at the end of it they think, you know what, I want to try this.

I want to give Jesus a try.

My life is going bad and my life is going poorly, I want to give Jesus a try.

And so they come in and they come in again and again and again.

They even come back to night church.

Can you imagine?

Again and again and again, and weeks and months go by.

But what happens in their life?

Do their problems go away in life?

Does their mom or dad get out of the nursing home?

Does their husband stop being a punk?

Do their kids start obeying suddenly?

I mean, does that stuff just happen because they're going to church?

And the answer is no.

And so what happens is after a month or two, that person stops coming.

Of course.

So what was missing?

Would you say that person lost their salvation?

Of course not.

What was missing is that they were never saved.

They had never renounced their life.

They had never counted the cost.

They had tried out church, they had tried out Jesus because they thought it would help.

John Stott says it this way: quote, the result of that kind of scenario I just described is the great scandal of Christian civilization.

Large numbers of people who have covered themselves with a decent but thin veneer of Christianity.

They're involved with Christ, but they are never uncomfortable in life.

In contrast to that, is the person who surrenders their life, repents of their sin, and follows Jesus Christ.

What will a profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits and loses his soul?

And you think, how do you forfeit your soul?

You listen, you can murder your soul by loving the world, you can poison your soul by believing a false religion, you can starve your soul by neglecting the means of grace in the church, you can slay your soul outright by rejecting the gospel, but the most deluded thing you can do to your soul is to lose it with a lie.

To tell yourself you're a Christian, to tell yourself you're in the faith.

When the reality is you believe no more than the demons, you have no more confidence than Judas, and you've never picked up your cross to follow Christ.

There are so many ways to harm your soul, but there's only one way to save it.

You know, Esau, the book of Hebrews, says, sold his soul for a bowl of stew.

Saul sold his soul for public praise.

Ahab sold his soul for a better vineyard.

Judas sold his soul for 30 pieces of silver.

It's worth asking yourself, is your soul for sale?

Or is it off the market?

Because if it is for sale, it will be bought.

The devil will write you a check.

Your sin will claim it.

And Jesus ends this passage with this powerful question.

What would a man give in exchange for his soul?

You think of the person who loves his life so much he doesn't want to let go of it, he wants to hold on to it.

He dies and he wakes up in judgment and he is condemned to hell.

And then here's the question: at that moment, what would he give to change course?

At that moment, when he is in hell, what would he give for just one more chance to repent?

For one more chance to follow Christ?

What would he give?

I mean, he would give everything.

Everything, all the things he spent his life so afraid of losing, he would surrender all of them in an instant for the chance to follow Christ.

But of course, he doesn't have that chance.

This is the betraying power of the world.

It tells you it's worth living for, but it betrays you in the end.

All the things that people fill their life with are so ephemeral, they disappear in an instant.

What a contrast with Christ.

So this passage becomes a challenge to love Christ more than them, love Christ more than the world, love Christ more than life.

This does not mean that Christians never sin or that Christians never fail or that Christians never backslide, of course not.

I mean, who is Jesus talking to primarily?

Who's the one person he's primarily talking to?

Peter.

Did Peter ever sin?

After this?

Okay, maybe.

Did Peter ever deny Jesus, though, after this?

I mean, no.

Okay, one time.

Twice.

Okay, three times, but that's it.

The point is not that as you follow Christ, your life becomes perfect.

As you follow Christ, you no longer sin or fail or backslide.

Of course not.

But the point is when Peter did sin and when he did fail, and when he did renounce Christ, what happened to him?

He was crushed.

He was humiliated.

He was obliterated.

He was a bowl of tears on the ground, is what he was.

And of course, Jesus went and found him and brought him back.

Christ is the shepherd that leaves the 99 to go and find the one.

And listen, he always goes and gets the one.

He never goes looking for one of his children and fails to find him.

He always brings his sheep back.

But know this as you follow Jesus to his death, you follow him to glory as well.

All those who pick up the cross will follow him straight on into heaven.

When you get baptized into the death of Christ, we don't leave you under the water.

You come back up in newness of life.

And that's the promise of Jesus Christ.

Those who die with him will also reign and live with him.

Lord, we're thankful that our Christianity is precious and it costs us much.

We're also comforted by the fact that your burden is easy, your yoke is light.

Compared to the false religions of the world, those that want to work for righteousness, they are pulling an impossible task.

From that perspective, our task is easy.

Our cross is light.

We know the cross is more than the illustration for how we will live.

It is, in fact, the way in which you died.

You led a sinless life and you were crucified on the cross to bear the penalty for our sin.

So, Lord, we're thankful that the cross shows that our sins can be forgiven.

The cross shows that your love for us can change our heart, can compel us to pick up our cross and to follow you.

We give you thanks for this image in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.