Costly Obedience and the Way of the Cross

Today's Scripture

Luke 9:23-24 — "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.'"

2 Corinthians 12:9 — "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

The Big Idea

Jesus calls every single follower — married or single, gay or straight — to deny themselves and carry a cross. The cost is real, and it does not fall evenly; for some it is far heavier, and we must say so honestly. But the cross is not where life ends. In God's strange arithmetic, it is where real life begins.

Reflection

A call addressed "to all"

Look carefully at the first three words of today's passage. "And he said to all" (Luke 9:23). Not to a spiritual elite. Not to one category of people with one kind of desire. To all: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."

Self-denial is not a side topic in Christianity. It is the front door. The married man who must put to death his wandering eyes, the woman who aches for a marriage that has not come, the believer with same-sex attraction who embraces the historic Christian ethic, the workaholic who must lay down his career-god — every disciple is on the same road. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would eventually follow this sentence all the way to a Nazi gallows, compressed it into nine words:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

But honesty requires us to say something more. The cost does not fall evenly. A straight Christian who holds the traditional ethic may give up little; a gay Christian who holds the same ethic may be laying down romance, marriage, and children — for life. That is not a small ask, and pretending otherwise is cruel. Jesus himself named this kind of calling without blinking: some "have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:12) — a deliberate, costly singleness chosen for God. He attached no shame to it. He called it a gift some are able to receive.

Vaughan Roberts, an English pastor who has written openly about his own same-sex attraction and his commitment to celibacy — that is, to living unmarried and sexually abstinent for Christ — has spent his ministry insisting that this path is not a half-life. He stakes his existence on the claim that Jesus tells the truth in Luke 9:24: "whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." Whether the church makes that claim believable is a question we will face squarely in a moment.

The thorn that stays

Most of us keep a quiet list of prayers God has answered with "no." For the apostle Paul, it was a "thorn... in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7) — we are never told what it was, which is a mercy, because it lets every sufferer find their own name in the blank. "Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me" (2 Corinthians 12:8). Paul was not casually mentioning it. He was begging.

And God said no. But it was not a bare no. 2 Corinthians 12:9 — "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." God did not remove the thorn; he moved into it. Paul's conclusion sounds almost unhinged until you have lived it: "For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10).

This matters enormously for the conversation about sexuality. The church has sometimes promised what God did not: pray hard enough, and your attractions will change. For many, they did not change, and the false promise wrecked their faith. Scripture promises something deeper and sturdier than rearranged desires — it promises grace that is sufficient, a presence that holds when the circumstance stays. Elisabeth Elliot, who lost one husband to spears in Ecuador and another to cancer, learned to say it plainly:

"The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances." — Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart

Read that twice, because every advertisement you will see today preaches the opposite. The world says life is hiding in different circumstances — a relationship, a freedom, a fix. The gospel says life is a person, and he is already here.

A hundredfold family

But grace is not only a private feeling. Listen to what Jesus promises those who give things up for him. Mark 10:29-30 — "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life."

Do not rush past the strange phrase "now in this time." Jesus is not only promising heaven later. He is promising family now — a hundredfold of mothers and brothers and homes. Where is that supposed to come from? From the church. The local congregation is the down payment on Jesus' promise. Which means that when a church asks a gay Christian to embrace celibacy and then leaves them to eat dinner alone three hundred nights a year, the church is writing checks with Jesus' name on them and refusing to cash them. Single believers do not primarily need programs. They need keys to our houses, seats at our tables, a claim on our holidays, godchildren on their laps.

Within that kind of family, the cross becomes strangely carryable. Thomas à Kempis, a monk who wrote one of the most-read Christian books in history, put it in one sentence:

"If thou bear the cross cheerfully, it will bear thee." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

That is old English, but the meaning is fresh: the cross you take up willingly starts, mysteriously, to hold you up. This is not a grim existence. The early church father Irenaeus described God's design for us in words that still startle:

"The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

God is not glorified by hollowed-out, joyless rule-keepers. He is glorified by people fully alive — and full life, Irenaeus says, comes from beholding God, not from acquiring everything we want. Psalm 16:11 — "You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore." Fullness of joy has an address, and it is not a relationship status.

The Cross-bearer who went first

Here is where the gospel turn comes — because if this essay ended with "so carry your cross," it would just be a heavier version of try-harder religion. The whole point of the Christian story is that the call to die is issued by someone who died first, and died for us.

John 12:24 — "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Jesus said that about himself, on the way to his own burial. He is the grain of wheat. Hebrews 12:2 tells us to keep "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame." He did not deny himself an evening's comfort; he denied himself everything — and he did it "for the joy set before him," and part of that joy was you.

John Stott, who lived his own long life as a celibate man, confessed:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross… In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

The God who asks costly obedience of you is not shouting instructions from a comfortable distance. He has scars. He knows the weight of unanswered pleading — "let this cup pass" — and he carried his cross to the end so that yours would never be the last word about you. That is what Bonhoeffer meant when he said grace is costly:

"It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Paul did the math and published his answer: "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8). Everything in one column; Christ in the other; and Paul calls it a bargain. C.S. Lewis ended Mere Christianity with the same ledger:

"Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead… But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

And the road has an ending worth the walking. Paul, who knew thorns, beatings, and loneliness firsthand, did one more piece of math: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). Not worth comparing — not because the sufferings are small, but because the glory is that large. Every denied desire, every lonely evening, every unanswered plea is being weighed against a weight of glory, and the scale does not even move.

The way of the cross is costly. No one should ever say otherwise. But it is not a dead end. It is the only road that comes out the far side of the grave — because Someone has already walked it ahead of us and is waiting there.

Going Deeper

Do an honest audit of Jesus' "hundredfold" promise in your own life. If you are part of a church family: name one single or celibate person — gay or straight — and take one concrete step this week to be family to them. Not a coffee "sometime." A seat at your actual dinner table, a standing invitation, a holiday. If you are the one carrying the heavier cross: tell one trusted person what the thorn actually costs you, and let them help you carry it. Crosses were never meant to be carried alone.