This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) - Wanna welcome you to our last day of our look through Matthew
chapter 16, day five. And as we start today, let me tell you a story from a few
years ago in my life. Cell phones don't work this way anymore, but I once had a
cell phone that something happened to it and it got locked.

And I didn't know how to unlock it. And it wasn't something where I'd set a
number or anything. So I had to call in.

I tried this number or that number. I tried to figure it out. I had to finally
call in and say, well, how do I unlock this?

And they told me, well, it's the last three numbers of your phone number. That's
what unlocks any of our phones. So I had the number in front of me all the time.

It was three simple numbers. I just didn't understand what I had in front of me
all the time. When you look at your life in Christ, real growth in Christ,
living a life of faith, living a life of discipleship, sometimes it can seem
like a puzzle to us.

How do I really start growing? How do I unlock the life of faith, the life of
growth that I really want to live? But the truth of the matter is it is pretty
simple.

It is right in front of us. It's not like we have to chase after some new thing
to find out how to grow. What we need to do is the thing that Jesus taught us to
do.

And that thing that Jesus taught us to do, how to grow, in verse 24, it's as
clear as anywhere. What does it take to be a disciple? Verse 24, Jesus said to
his disciples, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his
cross, and follow me.

Jesus said, you want to live my kind of life, here's the three things you do.
Here's the three essentials. Now I want to put this in some context, what happens
before and what happens after.

Right before this, verse 23 reminds us right before this, Jesus is talking to
Peter and he says, you don't have in mind the things of God, but the things of
men. So these three things he's talking about here, this is how to get our mind
back on the things of God. Deny yourself, take up your cross, follow him.

And in the verses right after this, Jesus is going to say, well look at this in
just a minute, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. So these three
things, this is how to find yourself. This is how to find your life.

You deny yourself, take up your cross, follow him. Three things, first you deny
yourself. That means you say no to yourself, your selfishness.

You'll never grow in commitment unless you learn to say no to yourself. Now
notice this doesn't say, say no to Satan, it says say no to yourself. There are
invitations that get sent into your mind.

It could be from Satan, it could be from the world around you, it could be from
the way you've done things always, your patterns, your past. So Jesus says,
let's be honest, it's in you. So let's not put all the blame out there now,
let's talk about you.

You gotta say no to yourself. Have you discovered that what you want is not
always what God wants? What you think is not always what God thinks.

What you feel is not always what God feels. It's not easy, it's not easy
sometimes when you've been a Christian a long time to admit that. Before you're
a believer you realize of course that's true.

As a new believer you think, well yeah that's true. But sometimes when you've
been a believer a long time you stop admitting that. And the truth is what you
want is not always what God wants.

What you think is not always what God thinks. What you feel is not what God
feels. So you have to learn to say no.

Now knowing how to say no is one of the keys. And one of the keys to saying no
to yourself in the right way is learning to say yes as you're saying no. In
order to say no to yourself you have to know what to say yes to.

Unless you have something bigger, greater to say yes to, you can't really say no
to yourself. It's like a diet. If you're sitting in a room and you're hungry and
all you've got is a piece of chocolate cake in front of you and that's all
that's going to be there with you for the next two or three hours.

Just you and the chocolate cake. You've got no choice at all. You've got no
other thing to say yes to.

You could look at that chocolate cake, get closer and closer to that chocolate
cake. You could say no the whole time. No chocolate cake, no I'm not going to eat
you.

But it's the only thing there to say yes to. What do you gotta do? You gotta get
up, go out of the room if you can and find a place to say yes to something else.

So what do you say yes to? Take up your cross Jesus said. You say yes to the
cross.

Take up your cross Jesus said. When you picture the cross, what do you see? When
I think of the cross of Christ, I think of Jesus dying there.

I think of the suffering that he endured there for me, the torture that he
endured for me and you, the death that he experienced there. But let me invite
you to see something else. Let me invite you to see the choice of Jesus.

The yes of Jesus. Remember in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed not my will
God but your will be done. Jesus said yes to the cross, to his cross.

Yes to God's will in his life. Even though it's not what he might have wanted to
do physically or emotionally 'cause he knew of the torture, he said yes to it.
What does it mean to say yes to the cross in our lives?

Well for Jesus it meant doing whatever it took to do God's will. Means the same
for us. To say yes to the cross means I'm willing to do whatever it takes to do
God's will in my life.

When you say yes to that, that gives you the power to say no to yourself because
now you have a greater thing to say yes to. If you're just struggling with
temptation, trying to overcome a temptation, without saying yes to the will of
God in your life, you're never going to overcome that temptation. It takes the yes
to empower the no.

Now there's a third thing that Jesus says here. Deny yourself, take up your
cross and then he says, follow me. Third thing you've gotta say is you say now.

You say now to the Lord. Follow me now. You don't do it someday.

Yes, someday I'm going to do whatever it takes. You do it now. It's like the game
follow the leader.

Jesus says follow me, follow the leader. Whatever the leader does, that's what
you do. You don't do it later, you do it now.

You don't take a break, you do it now. So you're following the leader, they make
a right turn, you make a right turn. They stop, you stop.

They run ahead, you run ahead. Jesus says do that. Follow me.

Follow me. Now when you follow him, he's not going to wear you out. Jesus rests
sometimes.

You can see that clearly in scripture. So if you're going to follow him, he's going to
cause you to rest sometimes in him, to worship him sometimes. As you follow him,
he's going to cause you sometimes to share him with others, to minister to hurting
people.

He's going to cause you as you follow him to be the kind of person who is growing
in him as you trust in him, who is loving the believers who are around you. You
follow him. I am convinced that although growth is a lifetime process, there is
an incredible difference that comes into our lives as we see it as a now
process.

Yeah, it's about the journey. Yeah, it's about what's going to happen for the rest
of my life. But the only time I can obey Jesus is right now, in this moment.

I can't obey Jesus tomorrow yet. And I can't go back to yesterday and obey him
where I wished I would have obeyed him. The only time I can obey him is right
now.

And the power to obey him is in following him. The power to obey him is in him.
In your relationship with him.

You don't obey him apart from him. You obey him in following him. And as you do
that, as you do these three things that we've just talked about, Jesus says it
changes everything.

It changes eternity. Verses 25 to 28, he says here's what happens. For whoever
wants to save his life will lose it.

But whoever loses his life for me will find it. For what good will it be for a
man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man
give in exchange for his soul?

For the son of man is going to come in his father's glory with his angels. And
then he will reward each person according to what he's done. I tell you the
truth.

Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the son of man
coming in his kingdom. And we're going to talk about Jesus coming in his kingdom in
the later chapters of Matthew. So I'll save some of our comments about that for
there.

Here I want you to focus with me on what Jesus says here it takes to follow him.
What does it take to follow Jesus? Three words, risk, return, reward.

Three new ways of thinking, risk, return, reward. Jesus says it takes the
greatest risk. You lose your life to find it.

It takes an unselfish risk. You let go of yourself trying to build life on who
you are and you find life in him. And the moment you do that you begin to
realize that's the life I've been looking for all along.

I thought I could find it in me. I can't find it in me. I can only find it in
him.

Jesus says you also think about the highest return. He says if you're trying to
build life somehow on how much you can gain in this world, you can gain the
whole world, he says, and still lose yourself. And the world, the things in this
world, they're not going to last.

You, your soul, that's going to last forever. So you go after the highest return.
You invest in that which is going to last forever.

Your soul, other people's souls. Greatest risk, highest return. He also talks
about eternal reward.

He says this world that you see around you, it's not what's going to last. One day
Jesus is going to come and he's going to judge. And what he wants to do is reward you.

We always think about Jesus coming in judgment as a scary thing. It can be a
joyous thing. Jesus saying here I'm going to come and reward you for what you've
done.

Reward you for the faith that you have. There is this moment in all of our lives
when we have to decide I'm going to step out and take that risk to trust in him, to
deny myself, take up my cross, and follow him. Maybe you've never done that.

I want to invite you to do that right now. I don't know if you're an Indiana Jones
fan. In the third Indiana Jones movie, there's this scene about faith.

You might remember where Indiana is standing on the edge of a cliff. And he
reads that you have to take a step of faith outward. And in order to save his
dad, even though he thinks he's going to fall to his death, he takes this step of
faith.

And he finds that there is a pathway there, invisible pathway, if you saw the
movie, you know what I'm talking about, that he couldn't see. That's not a bad
picture of faith and this moment of faith in your life. Because as you step into
this kind of faith, everything in you says, I'm going to lose everything if I do
this, because you're letting go of all the things you depended on in the past to
get you to God.

But as you take that step of faith, you find out that's the only place that real
security is found. So I want to invite you right now, trust in him. Just say,
Jesus Christ, I trust in you for life.

I want to do these very things. I want to lose my selfishness. Stop trying to build
my life on me and I want a relationship with you.

I want to look forward to the reward that you have and not the one that I'm
building. I want to live the kind of life you've made me to live. So Jesus, as
best as I know how, I invite you into my life.

I commit my life to you. And Jesus, all of us, we pray together that we could
live this life of faith you've outlined for us today to deny ourselves, take up
our cross and follow you. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

Join us next week, Matthew chapter 17. Jesus is going to teach us about faith at
the Mount of Transfiguration, in the healing of a sick boy, and in the giving of
a temple tax. See you next week for these lessons about faith.