6 - Daily Death and Resurrection
This is the post most people are hoping they can skip.
Jesus said it plainly, in Luke 9: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Daily. Not once, at conversion. Not occasionally, when you feel especially convicted. Every single day, you are called to die to yourself and live for Christ.
The Gospel We Didn’t Sign Up For
This is not the gospel most of us wanted. We wanted blessing and breakthrough. God improving our circumstances, giving us purpose, helping things go our way. And he does bless us, genuinely. The Christian life is one of real abundance.
But the abundant life comes through death. Through losing your life to find it. Through laying down your own agenda, your own desires, your own rights, your own control, and taking up his.
This is the narrow road. And it’s genuinely hard, not in a look-how-spiritual-I-am way, but in the way that things actually cost you something, the way your whole being wants to resist it.
What This Looks Like Day to Day
Let’s make this practical, because it’s easy to nod along to this idea in the abstract while never actually doing it.
Daily cross-bearing is mostly ordinary. In the morning, when your alarm goes off and you don’t want to get up to pray, denying yourself means getting up anyway. When someone wrongs you and every instinct says retaliate, denying yourself means absorbing the offense and choosing forgiveness, letting God be the judge while you walk in mercy. When you’re tempted, denying yourself means closing the laptop, walking away from the conversation, saying no to your desire because you’re saying yes to God.
Generosity is daily cross-bearing. So is being interruptible when someone needs you and it doesn’t fit your plans. The constant, ordinary choice of not my will but yours is neither dramatic nor glamorous. It is simply what discipleship looks like when it’s actually happening.
The Gethsemane Prayer
Jesus modeled the deepest version of this in the garden of Gethsemane. Facing the cross, knowing what was coming, he prayed: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
Notice the honesty. He didn’t pretend to want this. He didn’t perform spiritual maturity by acting enthusiastic about suffering. He was honest: if there’s any other way, please. That’s real.
And then: nevertheless.
That word is everything. That’s where discipleship becomes real, the prayer every genuine follower of Jesus has to learn in a thousand different contexts. We all have our Gethsemane moments. Situations where we know what God is asking and desperately don’t want to do it. A relationship that needs to end. A career change that makes no financial sense. Reconciliation with someone who hurt us. Releasing a dream we’ve made into an idol. In those moments, the choice is stark: my will, or his?
Cultural Christianity says: I’ll follow Jesus as long as it doesn’t cost me what I really want. Genuine discipleship says: not my will, but yours, even when it hurts.
Training for the Hard Moments
Daily death to self doesn’t happen without practice. Disciplines build the spiritual muscle required for sustained self-denial.
Fasting trains delayed gratification. When you deliberately say no to a legitimate appetite for a higher purpose, you’re building the same muscle you need to resist sin and choose obedience in every other context. Sabbath trains trust. When you rest instead of working, you’re declaring that God provides, not your productivity, a weekly act of releasing control.
Service trains humility. When you do the work no one sees or applauds, you’re declaring that you exist for others’ good and God’s glory, not your own recognition. These aren’t the goal. They’re training. They’re building something real that will matter when the actual tests arrive.
The Promise That Makes It Sustainable
Here is the truth that makes daily death bearable: death is never the end for those who are in Christ.
Jesus said it directly: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” The way to find your real life, the life your soul was created for, is to lose it. This is paradoxical but it’s persistently, consistently true across all of Scripture and all of Christian experience.
Look at the pattern in Philippians. Jesus emptied himself, took the form of a servant, humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him. Death, then resurrection. Cross, then crown. And the same pattern holds for us: if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
Every time you die to self, every surrender, every no to your flesh, every yes to God, something is resurrected. Not always immediately, not always visibly. But God is at work. You lay down bitterness and God resurrects peace. You lay down control and God resurrects trust. You lay down pride and God resurrects genuine strength.
What is God asking you to surrender today? Where is he calling you to say ‘not my will, but yours’ right now, in your actual life? Don’t answer in the abstract. Name it specifically.
