Deny yourself and the power of God will work
We need to launch out into the deep. To be with Jesus scourged, crowned with thorns and mocked. It is about the attitude of heart. The Apostle Paul says: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus… He humbled Himself to the point of death.” Indeed, Jesus gave us an example. He says clearly: “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me.” Self-denial is not only physical. It means above all to deny our “self”, the root of our ego, the old self which wants to take everything fully into its own hands. This self-denial also concerns our thinking, our feelings and our mental and physical discipline. Moreover, it is a question of curiosity of the eyes, a question of preferring a variety of irrelevant information to doing God’s will in a particular situation. For instance, sometimes God speaks to us and wants us to deny ourselves a little. Suddenly we have an irresistible urge to do anything else but abandon our thoughts or plans and contact God’s thoughts and God’s presence.
What God wants from us – and this is the essence of holiness – is the obedience of faith, which is usually associated with small outward self-denials, but especially with inward ones. We have a lot of ideas of doing something and we want it this or another way. God gives us these ideas so that we are not completely empty because emptiness can have a negative impact and not everyone can cope with it. That is why God gives us different ideas, but then wants us to sacrifice our Isaac like Abraham.
Surely, in the spiritual battle and evangelization we must respect certain natural physical and psychological principles, and yet we must not become materialists or rationalists or pragmatists who do a good job but according to our own reason and according to our own strength. The tragedy is that we thus push God aside and do not even allow Him to cooperate. So many times God has to break our human products, and often He does not even have to, for other people or we ourselves break them. It will all collapse like a house of cards. It was a house built on sand rather than rock. Jesus is the rock of course.
Jesus calls us to strive to be last of all. It does not mean to do nothing or to be lazy or to be late every time. This is not how Jesus understood it. To be last of all means to be willing to serve or to take the last place as a kind of cornerstone which is not seen but is the foundation of a beautiful cathedral. It means to be willing to lose for the sake of Jesus – to lose our envy, our desire to be ahead of others, but also our sadness or depression when we are not “successful”. Jesus wants our heart. And the power of God, which comes through both inward and outward self-denial, then bears the blessed fruits and will bear them even when we will be here no more. Each of us should become a grain of wheat – unless it dies, it will bear no fruit. We often forget this.
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