Luke 9:23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. What is self-denial in its Christian sense? For clearly when we deny ourselves we are the deniers; it is one self denying another self, the real self, clothed with Divine authority, denying the lower and usurping self. It is our soul's denial of the selfish part of us. It is the supremacy of our sense of right among the multitude of our prompters, or against the resistance of our inclinations. It is the starving and binding up of ungenerous desires, that nobler desires may have free course and be glorified. It is a command over the sensual passions of anger, fear, envy, jealousy, and irritable impatience, that other powers, which bring only strength and joy and love, maybe the masters of our being. If it mortifies a lower self-love, it is that a nobler self-knowledge may lift a meek and strong heart to God. If there were no higher demands of our nature, there would be no reason that the lower ones should be restrained. For self-denial is no monkish virtue; no recluse's safety; no ascetic's way of recommending himself to God; no pale, timid shadow shrinking from the light, and denying itself the natural joys of man; no self-inflicted pain, the price paid here for escape from pain hereafter; no abject creeping on the earth that a Power to whom abjectness is pleasing may deign to cast His eye upon us — it is the upward life of a child of God, loving what God loves, refusing to be in bondage to anything that would remove him from the light of his Father's face. (J. H. Thom.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. |
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