God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
Jesus Christ demands self-denial, that is, self-negation (Matt. 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23), as a necessary condition of discipleship. Self-denial is a summons to submit to the authority of God as Father and of Jesus as Lord and to declare lifelong war on one's instinctive egoism. What is to be negated is not personal self or one's existence as a rational and responsible human being. Jesus does not plan to turn us into zombies, nor does he ask us to volunteer for a robot role. The required denial is of carnal self, the egocentric, self-deifying urge with which we were born and which dominates us so ruinously in our natural state. Jesus links self-denial with cross-bearing. Cross-bearing is far more than enduring this or that hardship. Carrying one's cross in Jesus' day, as we learn from the story of Jesus' own crucifixion, was required of those whom society had condemned, whose rights were forfeit, and who were now being led out to their execution. The cross they carried was the instrument of death. Jesus represents discipleship as a matter of following him, and following him as based on taking up one's cross in self-negation. Carnal self would never consent to cast us in such a role. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was right: Accepting death to everything that carnal self wants to possess is what Christ's summons to self-denial was all about.
What is the goal of this warfare? To disarm angelic beings? No! Christ has already done that on the cross, as we read in Colossians 2:15: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” It is simply that we take a stand, remain immovable, and that paradoxically is to advance. You advance by standing firm – as Paul repeats in Ephesians 6:11, 13, and 14.
