Just a Small Sin

Mark 8:34

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The older I get, the more I find myself making little deals with the devil. And these aren’t interesting deals at all. I don’t get any wealth or magical powers or anything like that. These are mostly deals that center around a very particular teaching of the Christian church, something called theology of the cross. The way the Bible puts it in Mark chapter eight, verse 34, it says.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Mark 8:34)

When you are a Christian, your life is going to contain some suffering that’s particular to you being a Christian. It’s colloquial if something very bad has happened to you, especially if it’s ongoing, you’ll say that you’re carrying your cross, right? You get cancer and now that’s just your cross to bear. These are definitely things that are suffering. There’s certainly the result of life living in a sinful world, but they aren’t actually crosses that we’re bearing. This isn’t suffering that’s unique to a Christian.

So what is then, this unique suffering of a Christian? Well, the core of it is that there is a tension that exists between what I want and what God wants. And oftentimes because I’m sinful and he’s perfect, those things are in direct opposition with each other, and I end up suffering as they contend with each other. My will is not in line by nature with what God’s will is, and that hurts. I end up having to deal with that my whole life. Maybe you’ve had this experience, actually. You’re sharing the gospel with somebody and you can see it’s clicking, right? Their head is nodding. You can see, man, the Holy Spirit is doing something. And then all of a sudden, there comes this moment where their face kind of falls, right? There listening, and then they go, oh, right. And we refer to that moment as cost of discipleship. But really it’s an extension of theology of the cross.

They have faith now. And the same moment that they got faith, they also got their cross. They realized there are things in their life that are not compatible with what God wants, right? That God’s will is not the exact same thing as their will, and that now they’re going to have to deal with some of that. That’s the special, unique pain of a Christian. If you don’t believe in God, there’s no reason to, you know, try to conform your life to what God wants.

And so to avoid this pain, this is where we make those little deals with the devil, right? Where I’ll say there’s some temptation that plagues me. And so I will shake the devil’s hand a little bit and say, I’m just going to go this far with this temptation, And I won’t go any further. And, God, you’re just going to have to be good with the fact that I’m not doing the big sin, the really big like noteworthy thing. But I’m going to go this far, and this idea that God’s just going to have to be happy with the fact that we are going only this far with things, and that he’s going to have to be okay with that. Reality is, he’s not.

This is one of those places where Christians end up in this bounce between self-righteousness and despair. So what’s the antidote here? The antidote is exactly what it says inside of our verses here. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me. Right? The word deny, actually, in these verses is kind of interesting. It’s just as well maybe even better to translate disown, to disown yourself. How does one even do that? How do you, how do you disown yourself? Well, the key to it is acknowledging who actually has ownership over you. You don’t have ownership over yourself. The devil, when you were born, had ownership over you to some extent, right? We were dead in sins and trespasses. But as soon as you were baptized, as soon as there was faith in your heart, that moment Jesus puts you on his father’s knee and said, look, here is another one for whom I died. Here is another one who gets the rewards of heaven.

The way in which we find our peace, and the way in which we make God happy in this is not by something we’ve done. It makes him happy that we’ve received the blessings that he has won for us in His Son, that we are the recipients of the grace that he has laid out for us. That’s what it means when he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.