Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

Matthew 16:24-26

I have a confession. The first time I ever heard Matthew 16:24-26 preached in a sermon, it was kind of a turn off! ‘Really’, I thought, ‘why would I ever want to lose myself’? The whole thing about losing myself in Jesus just didn’t sit well. I could not figure out why anyone would want to give away their identity. It seemed so contradictory to the way I had been raised to be independent and self sufficient, and even more contrary to the culture and society around me that screamed “BE somebody!”.

Over time I heard several good sermons preached on this verse and somewhat came to terms with the idea. I easily conceded that Christ was my ALL and that it was all about Him and not me, but there was always this gnawing feeling that I was having to give up who God had created me to be in order to embrace this concept fully, and it just didn’t make sense. Losing myself implied more than being a “nobody”, to me it also implied being a “nothing”. Why would I have to become a nobody and a nothing in the sense that I no longer used any of the talents or gifts I had been created to express?

Here’s a visual that may help explain what I was sensing. Imagine if this hummingbird, created by God, was weighted down and couldn’t fly? Keep this image in your mind as I move forward…

Now I want to ask a question. What happens when you are looking at a puzzle that you just could not figure out and realize you’ve been looking at it incorrectly – perhaps sideways or upside-down. When we realize it, we have this AHA moment, right? Well, I had my AHA moment regarding this verse when I realized the “self” I was being asked to deny was not what I had imagined! I was listening to a sermon where the pastor mentioned Romans 7:24 – “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?”

This pastor went on to note a particularly gruesome practice in ancient Rome of punishing a murderer by shackling him to the dead body of his victim. Whaaaat?? Oh my! That thought was so awful I just had to look it up. Here’s what I learned from a blog I read:

The poet Virgil (70 BC to 19 BC) described this practice in his The Aeneid, Book 8, starting on line 485:

The living and the dead at his command
Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand,
Till, chok’d with stench, in loath’d embraces tied,
The ling’ring wretches pin’d away and died.

The blog further notes “Shackled to his victim, eye-to-eye, hand-to-hand, waist-to-waist, and foot-to-foot, the murderer—still very much alive—was forced to live out the remainder of his life directly bearing the weight and the putrefying stench of the dead body. In time, of course, the rotting flesh of the corpse would become rife with disease, infecting the killer and leading to a most horrible and grisly end”.

Whew! I imagine you might be wondering what on earth that heinous act has to do with losing yourself in Christ? GOOD QUESTION! Let me tell you!

Just like that body of death that is shackled to the murderer, we, too, carry with us this body of sin and it’s stinky, it’s decaying, it’s oozing all manner of putrefying nastiness onto us. If that’s too much to picture, imagine the hummingbird that was created to both hover and fly – flying at top speeds and sometimes upside-down, sideways, and in other remarkable ways – imagine that hummingbird weighted down and unable to fly at all for its entire life.

Remember Romans 7:24 when Paul asked WHO will deliver? He didn’t ask WHAT will deliver, he asked who! The ONLY way we can lose this body of death, of sin, is to come into the presence of Jesus Christ, allowing Him to deliver us from it. We lose the body of sin when we come to Him. We keep it off by dwelling in Him, abiding in Him. Losing ourselves in Christ is the only thing that sets us free to fly as we were created by Him to! Outside of Him we’re vulnerable and at risk of actually picking up that dead body and shackling ourselves with it all over again. YUCK!

If we want to live in the presence of a HOLY God, we cannot be shackled to the dead body of sin. If we want to be near Him in intimacy, then we must LOSE ourselves. The life that Jesus calls us to lose is THIS sin-filled life. Until we are loosed from our body of sin, we will not be free to be all that He has created us to be. In essence we become our own stumbling block to our God-created purpose and destiny. It’s the only way I can fully partner with God in the way I was created and designed to do – the only way I can truly find myself (i.e. God designed and infused) IS to lose myself (i.e. the old, carnal, fleshly life). Who else but God knows me so intimately? He knows what fulfills me, He knows what satisfies me the most intimately, He’s the only one who truly “gets” me!