How many times have we had an impulse to deny ourselves — put down the drink, give away the bonus, go talk to that neighbor, confess the embarrassing sin — only to have some part of us, like Peter, begin to question our good resolves? “Now, now, there’s a more comfortable way to glory, isn’t there? Surely we can grasp the crown without bearing this cross? No need to be so extreme. Moderation in all things, remember.” The devil may be a lion, but we rarely hear his roar; more often, he appears in our most plausible reasons to avoid self-denial.

When many hear Jesus’s blunt command to deny yourself and take up your cross (Mark 8:34), they hear another voice alongside our Lord’s. “In other words, be miserable,” the voice says. “Lose everything you love. Take your little portion of happiness and trample on it. Become a martyr.”

We might call this ever-available voice the New Serpent Translation (NST) of the Bible. The devil was, after all, the world’s first Bible translator and interpreter. “No eating from the tree, did he say? Yes, let me tell you what that means . . .” (Genesis 3:1–5). The experience is rarely so conscious for us as it was for Eve, of course. We don’t realize we’ve fallen under the serpent’s spell; we just walk away from hearing Jesus with the subtle sense that his commands are burdensome.

But what Satan leaves out is that Jesus came “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), including the blasphemous lie that “deny yourself” means “be miserable.” And so, he silences the serpent’s voice by telling us where self-denial really leads. When we deny ourselves, Jesus tells us, we find ourselves. We defy the devil. We join heaven’s side. We destroy our sorrow.

Find Yourself

In a society that prizes individualism as much as ours does, perhaps one fear looms largest when we hear “deny yourself”: the fear that we will lose ourselves. We will be deprived of everything that makes me me. Our dreams will be trashed, our desires blunted, our personality erased. We will become one more drop in a sea of endless gray.

The fear is understandable. “Deny yourself” requires, after all, self-denial. We must lay the axe to the root of every tree that bears bad fruit in us. Every sin must be slain, every part of me that does not reflect him must be renounced — and not just once, but “daily” (Luke 9:23). “See,” the serpent says, “lose yourself.”

To which Jesus responds, “No, find yourself — your true self.” He says, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).

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