Adam Hughes and Jody Dean
For understanding costly discipleship and the call to minister after Jesus, the object we are called to follow is significant. Notice the “who” of the call in verse 24. How does Jesus end his statement? We are not to pledge our allegiance to an idea. Our eyes do not look to a set of religious rites for hope and truth. Our model for life and ministry is not a philosophy or even a worldview. Instead, we look to a person. We are called to “come after” a person by “walking closely behind,” in the steps of, this very same person. This person is clearly the Christ of the gospel, and he is the one who saves us and whom we proclaim. In order to answer the call, we must follow Jesus.
The Content Is a Command to Lose Your Life (v. 24) A second detail from verse 24 is helpful for our understanding of an authentic call. An approach we could take to this passage is to examine each of the three phrases that Jesus used to describe discipleship individually and in detail. Word studies on deny, take up, and follow certainly yield some interesting and helpful results. However, for our purposes, these details may not be necessary. If we take Jesus’s statement here more holistically and collectively, his simple and overt point becomes obvious. Furthermore, this process prevents us from missing the proverbial forest for the trees. Here is why this is the case. A derivative of this same statement is recorded five times in the Gospels. Other than the present location, it is also in Matthew 10:38; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; and Luke 14:27. More significantly, each of these four times the Gospel writers record Jesus using this statement, they do so, as Matthew does in chapter 16, in the context of Jesus teaching on serving him and serving like him. This, then, is Jesus’s point: the costliness and the call to be worthy of discipleship.
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