The Order Matters: Deny, Take Up and Follow

But the order isn't random. Jesus lays these out in a sequence, and the sequence is the whole point. You can't skip ahead. You can't rearrange it to fit your comfort level. Try to run it out of order and it falls apart.

Most of us would love to start with "follow me." That's the fun part. That's the part that feels like adventure, like being on Jesus' team, like getting to watch him work up close. But Jesus doesn't lead with follow. He leads with deny.

Here's why that matters. If you try to follow Jesus before you've denied yourself, you're not really following him. You're just going wherever he happens to be headed as long as it lines up with where you already wanted to go. The first hard turn, the first thing he asks that costs you something real, and you peel off.

That's basically the whole crowd in John 6. They followed Jesus right up until his teaching got expensive, and then most of them left. They wanted "follow" without "deny." It doesn't hold.

You also can't start in the middle. You can't jump straight to "take up your cross" without denying yourself first.

If you try, what you get is a lot of religious effort from someone who's still fundamentally in charge. You end up gritting your teeth through sacrifice, doing hard things for Jesus, serving, giving, showing up, all while you're still the one holding the gavel. It looks like a cross. It functions like a resume.

That was Peter's exact problem thirty seconds after nailing the right answer. He hadn't denied himself yet, so when Jesus described what the cross would actually cost, Peter's instinct was to correct him. He wanted the cross without giving up the vote. You can't carry a cross for someone else's kingdom while you're still running your own.

Denial has to come first, because denial is the thing that settles who's actually in charge. Everything after that is downstream of who's holding the gavel.

So the order looks like this:

Deny yourself settles ownership. This is where you hand Jesus the final vote. Not where you silence every competing voice in your head (comfort, fear, ambition, control), but where you decide ahead of time whose voice wins when they disagree.

Take up your cross settles the cost. Once Jesus has the gavel, he's going to ask something of you that costs real weight. Not inconvenience, actual death to the version of your life you were planning to protect. This step only makes sense after the first one. You can't agree to carry something for someone whose authority you haven't accepted yet.

Follow me settles the direction. Only after ownership and cost are settled does the actual walking start. And it keeps going. It's present tense, a road and not a moment, recalculating with every wrong turn like GPS.

Deny answers "who's in charge." Take up answers "what will it cost." Follow answers "where am I headed, and am I still headed there today."

Most people I talk to aren't stuck at follow. They're stuck at the first step, and they don't always know it.

You can be incredibly active in your faith (serving, giving, showing up every week) and still be stuck at step one. Denial hasn't actually happened. You've found ways to look like you're carrying a cross while the gavel never left your hand.

That's worth sitting with. Not "am I doing enough for Jesus," but "have I actually handed him the vote, or am I just working hard for a kingdom I'm still running?"

Because Jesus didn't say deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me in a random order. He said it in the only order that actually works. Ownership first. Then cost. Then the road.