All the above grounds and reinforces a striking conviction: that radical self-denial is the true path to genuine and lasting joy (Heb 12:2). This may be the most counterintuitive aspect of Jesus’ teaching and the most difficult for our contemporary culture to accept. We are told constantly that self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-assertion are the keys to happiness. Jesus teaches the opposite: self-denial is the route to lasting joy.
This is not masochism or self-hatred but the discovery of life as God intended it to be lived. Mortification and vivification — death to sinful self and the flourishing of new life in God through Christ — are two sides of the same coin. Selflessness, self-giving, and self-sacrifice do not diminish a human life; they fulfill it.
The Pattern of Jesus Himself
This truth is seen most clearly in Jesus’ own life and death. He ‘who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God’ (Heb 12:2). The cross — the ultimate expression of self-denial and self-sacrifice — was endured for joy. Not in spite of joy or as the price of joy, but as the very means by which ultimate joy would be secured.
Christ’s own love, poured out in suffering and death ‘for all,’ offers his followers two inseparable gifts: salvation from sin through his Lordship, and an example — a costly, luminous pattern — of service to him and to others in love (Isa 53:11; John 13:34; 2 Cor 5:15). The way of the cross is not just something Christ did for us; it is the pattern of life he calls us to follow.
The Way of the Kingdom
Jesus makes this pattern explicit in his teaching: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and the gospel will save it’ (Mark 8:34-35). This is not optional for some especially devout followers; it is the fundamental description of what it means to follow Jesus.
The logic is clear and consistent: those who try to save their life by pursuing their own interests, pleasures, and agenda will ultimately lose what they’re trying to preserve. Those who lose their life by surrendering to Christ’s agenda will discover the life they never knew they were looking for. Self-preservation leads to self-destruction; self-denial leads to self-discovery.
The Psychology of Sin and Grace
‘We gain power to grow more like God when we begin to let his self-giving love define us … For only when we look for love in the right place, will we begin to love God, others, and even ourselves — more than sin and selfishness.’1 The problem with self-focused living is not just that it’s morally wrong (though it is) but that it’s psychologically destructive.
Sin promises happiness through self-fulfillment but delivers misery through self-obsession. Grace promises joy through self-denial but delivers satisfaction through self-transcendence. The person who lives for themselves becomes imprisoned in themselves; the person who lives for God and others finds themselves liberated into a larger life.
The Love of Christ
This is beautifully expressed in Paul’s description of love: ‘Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends’ (1 Cor 13:4-8).
Notice how every aspect of this description involves some form of self-denial. Love is patient (denying the impulse for immediate gratification), kind (denying the impulse to be harsh), not envious (denying the impulse to resent others’ success), not boastful (denying the impulse to self-promotion), and so on. Yet this love is presented not as burdensome but as the ‘most excellent way’ (1 Cor 12:31), the path that leads to lasting fulfilment.
Disciplined Practice and Sustained Growth
Because Jesus reigns over all and gives the Spirit of his kingdom to accompany, empower and sustain us, the attitudes and outlooks outlined above may actively be pursued, deepened, and practiced through regular intensive discipline and training. Genuine, ongoing growth in the grace and knowledge of God does not happen by accident. It requires the persistent application of intelligent, well-directed effort over a serious and sustained period.
Even Jesus himself ‘learned obedience through what he suffered’ (Heb 5:8). Progress may not always be straightforward and linear, but it definitely is possible — through constant, deliberate immersion in the same practices and habits that Jesus and the apostles after him pursued and commended as proven pathways into fuller life in the kingdom of God (2 Tim 2:15; 4:6-8).
Some have regarded this as the most fundamental feature of all in Christian life — that self-denial, far from being the enemy of joy, is its very condition and source. This is true first in the life and death of Jesus Christ himself, and then, derivatively, and really, in the pathway and experience of every Christian who closely follows him. The paradox is profound but consistent: the way down is the way up, the way of the cross is the way of the crown, self-denial is the route to lasting joy.
- Ashley Null, Eastertide: Meditations on the Easter Collects of Thomas Cranmer (Anglican House, 2024), 10. ↩︎