I think that it’s very interesting that in Luke, chapter 22, verse 57, the Lord, in giving us the record of Jesus in Caiaphas court just after He’d been arrested—brought from Gethsemane—gave the account of Peter, who had followed afar off and finally caught up with them and was admitted to the house. And they came around and started saying, “Aren’t you one of His disciples? Didn’t we see you out there in the garden? Why, you talk like one of those Galileans.” In exasperation, Peter said, in this verse I mentioned, “And he denied, and said, ‘I KNOW HIM NOT.’”

That’s the same word “deny” here, or a form of it in Luke 22:57 that we read in Jesus’ Own Words in Luke 9:23[…let him DENY himself…”]. So, there we have the definition of “deny.” It means to say, “I don’t KNOW You.” It means to DISOWN someone that we have once known. It means to cut someone off that we have formerly embraced. It means to say, “I don’t recognize who you are.”

That’s what Jesus is saying we must do to SELF. He’s striking at the very heart of all sin here, brethren. I challenge you before this meeting is over, if you possibly can, to find a single sin—except one of ignorance—that is NOT motivated by SELFISHNESS. I don’t think you can find one, because there isn’t one. You name anything you want to—adultery, murder—just name the whole list of sins that you can think of, and SELFISHNESS is at the ROOT of it! The Lord is aiming at the very ROOT of what we must divest ourselves of if we’re really going to be His disciples; if we’re really serious about it!

That’s why He went on as long as He did in that Luke 14 passage that was read a little earlier [before Brother McClish began speaking, all of Luke 14 was read]. Unless you hate your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your husband, your wife, your son or daughter… He doesn’t mean hate in the sense of detest. But “hate” is used here, as it often is in the Bible, in the sense of loving less. “You must love ME more than ANY…OTHER…PERSON…OR…THING!” And so, He concluded the passage by saying, “If you don’t renounce everything to follow Me, you cannot be My disciple.”

And so, He says the starting place is DENYING YOURSELF, cutting off those selfish motives and ambitions to lose ourselves in service to Christ and to one another. That’s what He means by denying self. And that’s the hardest thing in the world for anyone of us to do. And there’s not a one of us that lives, even though we may live on that selfless plain for a time, but we’ll lapse back into that selfishness from time to time. We just have to work on it our entire lives.

But we must work on it! That’s what the Lord is telling us here. He’s talking about repentance when He says, “Deny self,” because repentance is an act that begins in the mind as a thought process in making a conscious decision, “I will no longer live this way. I will, henceforth, live that way. I will give up any sin, any error, anything in my life that’s out of harmony with the Will of Christ, and I will serve HIM.” The beginning point is in the mind, where the decision is made, and then the definition is finished in putting that into practice. That means the thief decides, “I’ll steal no more,” and then he quits stealing. The adulterer decides, “I will not commit adultery anymore,” and then he lives a pure life. That’s what Peter was telling the people on Pentecost to do when he said, “Repent ye and be baptized….” They had to turn away from everything that would separate them from Christ. That’s self denial. The Lord does not bat an eye as He says, “This…we…must…do.”

But He is still not through. And the next statement of this challenge may be the hardest of all. “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and TAKE UP HIS CROSS DAILY and follow Me.” Now, what does He mean when He says, “TAKE UP HIS CROSS”? We read a like expression from Luke 14, verse 27: “And whosoever doth not bear his own cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple.” The Lord said, “You cannot BE my disciple if you don’t take up your own cross and follow Me.” That’s how important this is! “You can claim to be, you can profess to be, you can pretend to be, but you cannot be My disciple, unless you bear…your…own…cross.”

Now, there are some who have the idea that “bearing a cross” is wearing a pendant shaped like a cross around the neck on a chain. We see these on some athletes—these big gold crosses they wear. That’s not what Jesus had in mind, brethren.

The Lord was looking ahead, and He knew that the instrument of His Own torture and death would be a literal cross. And He took that literal cross upon which He was going to be affixed, and He made it a “figure” of something that we must bear. Now what was it?

Someone says, “Well, it’s the suffering that we have. We have terrible diseases and pain. We have terrible accidents, and things of that kind.” No, that won’t work. That’s way too general, because atheists and infidels have all those things. We suffer those things, not because we’re Christians, but because we’re human beings. We live in a physical world. God has instituted physical laws that keep us within certain boundaries—the law of gravity, for instance. The saintliest person on earth can jump out of a 10-story building, and they’ll die just like an infidel if they don’t have some means of keeping them from bouncing off the ground. So, it’s not just the suffering that general human kind undergoes that is the “cross.”

Well, someone says, “It’s the sufferings of those kinds that Christians undergo.” Well, no, that still will not work. There’s something far more specific that the Lord has in mind, I believe.