“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Such is an example of an evangelistic message frequently used by contemporary Christians. There is a sense in which this statement is true. It is true that God loves us. And there is a sense in which it is true that God has a wonderful plan for the life of each individual Christian; His plan is to use their life to advance His Kingdom and to bring Him glory, though this may mean that they will have to suffer for this cause.
However, I don’t think that is what the vast majority of people hear when they are told that God has a wonderful plan for their life. What they hear is that God is going to make their life turn out well, make them happy, and fulfill their dreams and desires. Such a message is highly misleading. It plays off the highly problematic idea that Christianity is about having a personal relationship with God, and suggests that the central point of the Gospel is the blessings promised to an individual Christian from their individual relationship with God. This is not at all consistent with the teaching of the New Testament, in which the story of the Gospel takes center stage, and the story of each individual Christian’s life becomes fully subordinated to that.
Jesus’s Call of Discipleship
To be a Christian means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, and to be baptized means to make a commitment to be a disciple of Jesus Christ (Matt 28: 19-20). What does becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ entail? According to the Lord Jesus Christ, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34, Matt 16:24, Luke 9:23). But what does it mean to deny oneself? Obviously, Jesus was not telling us that we need to stop caring for our own needs, which would be tantamount to suicide. Nor was Jesus advocating an ascetic “self-denial” of our bodily desires for its own sake, as if there were anything good per se about rejecting the enjoyment of God’s good creation. No, what Jesus was calling for here was a radical reorientation of how we look at the world and live in it in light of Him and His Gospel.
All human beings naturally view the world through the framework of the story of their own life. Since each human being can only see and experience reality from their own perspective, human beings tend to interpret and frame reality within the context of their own life story. The fulfillment of their own hopes, dreams, and happiness is what is important, and everything else has importance to them insofar as it plays a role in the story of their life. They may be a religious person, and “God” may be a significant part of their life, but their own life story is still the framework with which they view reality.
Jesus, however, calls His followers to something radically different. Instead of viewing reality with the story of their life at the center, Jesus’s disciples must decenter the story of their lives and instead view reality through the lens of the story of the Gospel, the story of God’s relationship with His creation through His covenant people Israel which has come to its climax in and through Jesus. Instead of viewing things in terms of what role they play in their own life, Jesus’s disciples must come to see their own life in its entirety as merely playing a bit part in this story. The apostle Paul speaks of this process of self-denial as a dying to oneself (Gal 2:20; Rom 6:1-23, 12:1-2; Col 3:3).
The Cost of Discipleship
Jesus’s disciples must “take up their cross” (Luke adds “daily.”). What does this mean? Christians often use the terminology of bearing their cross to refer to the various inconveniences in their lives they deal with on account of being Christians. This is rather a shallow interpretation of what Jesus is saying here. When Jesus says that His disciple must take up their cross, He is not saying that His disciples will have to deal with various first world problems; He is saying that His disciples must participate in His confrontation with the powers of evil that rule this world, even if it means their own suffering and death. He means His disciples must literally be willing to suffer and die, as He did, for the sake of being obedient to the will of their Heavenly Father. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Whoever loves his life loses it, but whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12: 25). Jesus here is not advocating self-hatred; rather, His point is that, if we want a share in the Kingdom of God, we must have our priorities straight, such that we are willing to completely give up our lives for the sake of Jesus and His Kingdom.
From the time of the apostles down to the present day, Christians have been suffering and dying because of their faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ. The first disciple of Jesus to die for his faith was Stephen (Acts 6-7). Not long afterward, the apostle James was killed during King Herod’s persecution of the church (Acts 12:1-2). Did God have a “wonderful plan” for the lives of Stephen and James? They died untimely deaths, and all their hopes and dreams for their lives, all they hoped to accomplish, died with them. I don’t think anyone (from a human perspective) would call this a “wonderful plan.” Yet Stephen and James were willing to die for Jesus’s sake, for the sake of the Gospel, because they considered their own lives and happiness as of no importance in comparison to Jesus and His Kingdom.
In the Christian tradition, those who have died because of their faithfulness to the Lord Jesus Christ are known as martyrs. The word “martyr” means “witness.” The martyrs were willing to die in order to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and His victory over all the powers of evil. Martyrs are not tragic victims. They are victors who refused to be overcome by the lies of the world, even though it meant their own deaths (Rev 12:11). Throughout church history, the martyrs have been looked to as role models for all of Jesus’s disciples, who should be willing to do what they did if faced with the same extreme situation.
If the point of being a Christian is to have God do wonderful things in one’s life, then martyrdom is unintelligible. Martyrs are willing to die, completely giving up their lives, with all of its potential goodness and happiness, in order to be faithful Christians. Such a course of action only makes sense if the Christian has ceased looking at reality from the perspective of the story of their life, and instead has come to see their life as merely one small part of God’s story.
Following Jesus
Jesus calls His disciples to “follow” Him. This does not just mean following a certain set of moral rules and practicing a certain set of religious rituals. It means a radical reorientation of one’s entire existence around the truth of the Gospel. It means completely reorienting how one views reality and thus how one lives one’s life. This is what the Bible calls “repentance.”
Repentance does not merely mean deciding to give up doing “bad” things and instead deciding to do “good” things. It means making a total commitment to submit oneself to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It means joining up with the Jesus movement, the body of Christ. It means placing one’s entire life, one’s entire being, at the disposal of the mission of advancing the Kingdom of God. Following Jesus as His disciple is not merely a “religious” commitment. It is a total life commitment which requires denying one’s self, to the point of being willing to suffer and die for the sake of the Gospel.
In their evangelistic efforts, Christians are often urged to tell people, “This is what Jesus has done in my life.” There is nothing wrong with this per se; Jesus certainly does sometimes bring blessings to us in this life. However, when such messages become the focus of our evangelistic efforts, it can become highly problematic and misleading. It sends the message that Christianity is about getting blessings for ourselves in this life, which is a severe case of false advertising. Jesus was very clear that following Him could very well mean suffering and death (Matt 10:22, John 16:2). If someone thinks that becoming a Christian means that they will be happy and have their life turn out a certain way, then they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian, and will be severely disappointed. A Biblically faithful evangelism will instead seek to make people so enthralled by the beauty of the story of the Gospel that they are willing to lose themselves in it, and deny themselves. This is the only way to make genuine converts, genuine disciples of Jesus, who no longer view reality in terms of the story of their own life, but in terms of the story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.