The Weight That Sets You Free: What It Means to Take Up Your Cross
On Luke 9:23–24 and the shape of a cruciform life
“And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.’” — Luke 9:23–24 (ESV)
I grew up in a home that straddled two church traditions — roughly three-quarters Catholic, one-quarter Presbyterian, which meant I knew my way around a crucifix before I knew much about the Christ it depicted. Honestly, we were what you might call “C&E” Christians—Christmas Eve and Easter morning. When I visited my grandparents in the summer, we went to church. With my mom’s dad, I was Presbyterian. With either grandmother, I was Catholic. Either way, it was high church—sacred, weighty, and, for a suburban kid from outside New York City, not entirely decipherable.
My grandmother’s house was full of crucifixes. Above bedroom doors, on plaques beside Irish prayers, tucked into the cover of the Daily Missal that lived on her coffee table. The crucifix was ambient — present enough to become invisible, the way familiar things do. When my mother began attending a Protestant evangelical church and I came with her, I noticed immediately that the cross on the wall was bare. And I noticed, arranged in the four quadrants of the cross, four letters: M, M, L, J. My thoroughly Catholic assumption was that two of them stood for Mother Mary, and the other two for Lord Jesus. I was fairly confident in this. I was also entirely wrong. They stood for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — the four Gospels.
I share that small embarrassment because it is oddly fitting. I came to the cross assuming I already understood it. Most of us do. And then the Gospels themselves reorient us. Because in three of those four accounts, Jesus uses the cross not only as the instrument of his own death but as an image for how his followers are to live. “If anyone would come after me,” he says in Luke 9:23, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
This is not peripheral theology. It is, Jesus says, the entire shape of discipleship.
WHAT THE CROSS MEANT WHEN HE SAID IT
We have to hear this the way its first audience heard it — before the cross became jewelry or wall art or the architectural feature of a chapel. In first-century Roman Palestine, a man carrying a cross was not headed toward something noble. He was on a one-way walk. The image was brutal and unambiguous: to bear a cross was to surrender all claim to your own future.
When Jesus says “take up your cross daily,” he is not reaching for a metaphor for inconvenience. He is not describing the difficult coworker or the chronic bad back. He is describing a posture of life in which self-sovereignty is the thing that dies — regularly, voluntarily, and in full view of a watching world.
N.T. Wright captures it well: the cross-shaped life is not about self-punishment but about a fundamental reorientation — a displacement of the self from the center of one’s own story and become one’s story. The “self” that must be denied is not your personality or your joy or your gifts. It is the grasping, self-protecting, self-promoting ego that insists life is fundamentally about “me.”
“Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” The paradox is not a riddle. It is a description of reality.
This is the strange arithmetic of the Kingdom. The one who hoards loses. The one who surrenders finds. The life you clutch slips through your fingers; the life you offer is returned to you, transformed.
THREE MOVEMENTS OF THE CRUCIFORM LIFE
Notice that Jesus gives us three verbs: deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me. They are not three options. They are a sequence — and each one builds on the last.
Deny yourself is not self-hatred. It is the refusal to let the self be the final arbiter of every decision. It asks: am I living to protect my comfort, my reputation, my agenda — or am I willing to lay those things aside when they conflict with love and obedience? This is daily work. It does not get easier; it gets more intentional.
Take up your cross means accepting that following Jesus will cost you something real. Not necessarily everything at once—but always something real. And often, the something is exactly the thing you were most hoping to keep.
Follow me is what keeps all of this from collapsing into stoic discipline or heroic self-improvement. The cross is not carried alone, and it is not carried toward nothing. It is carried after a Person — one who carried his own cross first, who knows the weight of it, and who walks ahead of us on the same road.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN A LIFE
I did not grow up planning to be a pastor. Business, medicine, law — these were the futures I sketched in notebooks. Ministry was not among them. What shifted was not a dramatic vision or a voice from heaven. It was quieter than that — and more disruptive. Somewhere in the process of becoming a Christian in high school and then being formed in college by people who loved Jesus without apology, I found that the life I had been designing for myself was being gently but persistently pried from my hands. The exchange felt like loss long before it felt like freedom.
My parents became serious about faith around that same season of my life, and I watched what changed in them. My mother began serving quietly at our church — missions work, discipleship, showing up where she was needed. In time she partnered with her pastor to launch a ministry that helped financially under-resourced families purchase homes. Dozens of families. No spotlight. No return on investment, at least not the kind that shows on a spreadsheet. What she modeled — without ever narrating it as a lesson — was that a life shaped by the cross looks like steady, costly availability to others. My father’s journey took a slightly different serpentine path but still toward trying to love like Jesus- he did that impeccably in my book considering his hardships- the abuses he experienced in the church and loss of his dad in his preteen years required a slightly different faith journey than my mom.
My wife taught me something similar early in our marriage, when I was still new to faith: the practice of tithing — releasing a portion of what we had before we calculated what was left. It was not natural for me. But over the years it became a kind of liturgy, a regular training of the hands to open rather than clutch. It became, in a very real and practical sense, an act of worship.
Years later, after seventeen years in large church ministry — speaking at conferences, writing, giving counsel as though the size of the platform were a measure of the man — a former student from my youth ministry days asked if my wife and I would consider leaving to help birth a second site for a fledgling church plant. The soil was about as hard as it gets: the Philadelphia Main Line, what David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise describes as the home of the Bohemian Bourgeoisie — the affluent, accomplished, intellectually confident class for whom life has largely delivered on its promises and who, as a result, tend not to feel the weight of their own need. A longtime pastor friend who labored faithfully on the Main Line for decades once told me that Billy Graham, after his Philadelphia crusades, reportedly described this corridor as among the most resistant to the Gospel of anywhere he had preached in America.
I knew all of that. I went anyway — because lost people are lost people, and Jesus came to seek and save the lost irrespective of their prestige or their awareness of their need. It felt, in its own way, like another moment of picking up the cross and stepping into the hard and the unknown. The worship space we found for those early gatherings was a small Catholic college chapel — stone, traditional, built in the architectural shape of a cross. I noticed that. It felt like a reminder.
My father was dying of cancer during that season of discernment. He passed as I was making the transition. My mother followed him fourteen years later. When the time came to settle their affairs — to sell their home, distribute their belongings to family, donate what remained, and finally call for the dumpster — I found myself sitting with something I hadn’t fully anticipated: the sheer brevity of it all. A life, distilled to what fits in boxes. Earthly possessions, here one moment and gone the next. Vapors, as the Preacher says.
I still enjoy things. My library. My bicycle. My espresso machine. The honeybees I keep and the small koi pond in my yard. I receive these as gifts and I am genuinely glad for them. But I do not find my lasting delight in them, because I know I will leave them behind — the same way I will one day leave this body behind. What endures is what was invested in things that last.
THE FREEDOM HIDDEN IN THE SURRENDER
Here is what I did not expect: the cross is not only costly. It is liberating.
When I stopped trying to build the life I had planned and started following the one I was being called to, something loosened. Not that difficulty disappeared — there have been plenty of hard seasons. But there was a lightness underneath the difficulty, a sense of being in the right story. J.I. Packer once wrote that the person who has learned to live for God’s glory rather than their own comfort has found the deepest form of freedom available to a human being. I have found that to be true.
The cross, it turns out, is not a subtraction from life. It is the door to it.
And here — in case it gets lost in all the talk of cost and surrender — is the thing the passage implies but that must not be missed: the cross we bear in this life does not lead to Calvary. Jesus completed that journey. He went there so we wouldn’t have to.
The cross we carry leads somewhere else entirely — to an empty grave, to resurrection life, to the promise of his return, to all things made new.
I will confess that I sometimes let my imagination wander there—to the streets of gold. A flat white made with local honey from my own hives. A bench by a well-stocked pond. A long conversation with Jesus, and with family and friends who came to know him in part because I followed where he led — including to hard soil on the Main Line. Perhaps our vision of what awaits us is too thin, too bound by what we can currently conceive. Perhaps it will exceed everything we imagine. But I am grateful, in any case, for the invitation: to know Jesus, and to follow him in the cruciform life.
How about you? Where is he asking you to loosen your grip?
