From Self to Others: Denying Yourself in Luke 9:23

Stepping Off the Throne

Anchor Text: Luke 9:23

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." — Luke 9:23, ESV

I. The Problem: Self as King

Let me ask you something, and I want you to ponder on it before you answer. Am I in control of my life?

Most of us would say no. We know the right answer. We have been in church long enough to know that God is sovereign and we are not. But here is what I have noticed — in myself first, and then in the people I love. We say God is in control, and then we live the rest of the week as if we are. We make the plans. We manage the outcomes. We arrange the people around us like furniture until the room looks the way we want it to look.

And we do not even notice we are doing it.

There is a throne in every human heart. It is not a metaphor you can outgrow. It is not a phase of spiritual immaturity you eventually move past. It is the permanent architecture of a fallen will — and somebody is always sitting on it. Every morning you wake up, the question is not whether someone rules your life. The question is who.

We have built entire lives around the machinery of self-rule without ever calling it that. We call it responsibility. Ambition. Planning ahead. Being a good steward. And some of those things are fine — until you peel back the layer and find what is actually driving them. Not faithfulness. Not surrender. Control.

James knew this about us. He had seen it in the early church and he named it:

"Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”" — James 4:13–15, ESV

A mist. That is what your carefully constructed plan amounts to. Not because planning is wrong — but because the illusion that you are steering the ship is a lie you have been telling yourself so long you forgot it was a lie.

And here is where it gets uncomfortable. You cannot follow Jesus and stay on the throne.

That is not an opinion. That is Luke 9:23. Jesus did not whisper it. He did not offer it as a suggestion for the spiritually ambitious. He laid it down as the cost of entry: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."

Deny himself. Not deny himself something. Not give up a bad habit for Lent. Deny the self — the whole project of self-rule, self-protection, self-promotion. The throne.

Daily.

[Pause. Let the weight land.]

II. What It Looks Like

Now, if self-rule only showed up in dramatic ways — if it looked like a man standing on a mountaintop shaking his fist at God — we would catch it. We would repent of it. But that is not how it works. Self-rule is quieter than that. It wears everyday clothing. It sounds reasonable. It sounds tired.

It sounds like this:

"I have had a hard day. You deal with the kids tonight."

Now — is that always sinful? No. Sometimes you genuinely need to ask for help. But you know the difference, do you not? You know when that sentence is a request and when it is a decree. You know when you are asking your spouse for grace and when you are informing them that your comfort comes first tonight. Marriage has a way of exposing the throne faster than anything else in your life because there is another person in the room who did not sign up to be your subject.

Paul told the church at Philippi: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3, ESV). That verse is not hanging on a wall in your house as decoration. It is a daily operational command for how you treat the person sitting across the dinner table from you.

Or it shows up at church. You have an opinion — and it may even be a right opinion — and you need everyone in the room to know it. The elders made a decision you disagree with. The song leader picked songs you do not like. The class teacher said something you think was off. And instead of approaching it with humility, you campaign. You corner people in the hallway. You build your case.

"I am right, and I need everyone to know it."

That can be the throne. Conviction submits to the body. The throne demands the body submit to you.

Or at work. Someone asks you to help with something outside your lane and the first thing out of your mouth — or at least the first thing in your heart — is, "That is not my job." And technically you are right. It is not. But since when did a Christian measure the boundaries of their service by a job description?

James put his finger on what is underneath all of it:

"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?" — James 4:1, ESV

Your passions. Not the other person’s behavior. Not the situation. Your passions. The war is not out there. The war is in here — and the general commanding the army is the self you have refused to dethrone.

[Slow down. Lower volume slightly.]

Listen — there is a quiet hum underneath all of these moments. In the marriage and in the church building and at the office. The hum is always the same frequency. It is always asking the same question: Who is in charge here?

And as long as your answer is me, you are going to keep fighting battles that were never yours to win.

III. Breaking It Down

I want to tell you something about myself that is not easy to say from up here.

Some of you were here when our preacher left. You remember what that felt like — the uncertainty, the gap, the questions about what was going to happen next. And I remember standing in that gap and thinking, Someone has to step up. And then realizing that someone was me.

I did not volunteer because I had it all figured out. I volunteered because the work needed doing and I was standing close enough to the need that I could not pretend I did not see it. And I will be honest with you — part of me resented it. Part of me thought, This is not what I signed up for.

You know what that is? That is the throne talking.

Because what I really meant was: I had a plan for my time, and this was not in it. I had a plan for my energy, and this was going to cost more than I budgeted. I had a picture in my head of what my life was supposed to look like — and serving in this way was going to wrinkle it.

And it did.

It cost time. Real time — not the theoretical kind you talk about in Bible class, but the hours-in-the-evening, weekends-in-the-study, can’t-make-it-to-the-game kind of time. It created friction at home. Not because my family did not support the work — they did — but because there are only so many hours, and when you pour them into one place, somewhere else feels the drought. My wife felt it. My kids felt it. I felt it.

And here is what I want you to hear, because I think we are dishonest about this in the church: stepping off the throne hurts. Denying yourself is not a greeting card. It is not a warm feeling you get at a lectureship. It has a cost — and the cost is real, and some days it aches.

Paul counted the cost and named it plainly: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:7–8, ESV). He calls it loss. He does not pretend stepping down costs nothing. He says it is worth it, because of who he gains.

But something shifted.

Not all at once. Not in a dramatic moment I can point to and say, "There — that is when it changed." It was slower than that. Quieter. What shifted was this: I stopped trying to control the outcomes. I stopped measuring the work by whether it was producing the results I wanted on the timeline I had set. I started — and I am still learning this — trusting that God’s understanding of what this congregation needed was better than mine.

The pain did not disappear. I want to be clear about that. Serving still costs. It still takes. But my relationship to the pain changed. It stopped being an injustice I was enduring and started being a cross I was carrying. And those are not the same thing.

Jesus told his disciples something in Mark 10 that I think about more now than I ever used to. They were arguing about who would sit at his right and left — who would get the best seat, the most authority, the highest position. And Jesus pulled them aside and said that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them (Mark 10:42, paraphrase). Then He said: “But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43–44, ESV).

And then he said this — and this is the line that undid me:

"For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45, ESV).

If the Son of God stepped off the throne of heaven to serve — if He gave not just His time or His comfort but His life — then what exactly am I protecting when I climb back onto mine?

[Pause. This question is not rhetorical. Let the silence work.]

IV. Where It Leads: Serving Others

So where does stepping off the throne actually take you?

Paul answers that in Galatians, and the answer surprises people who have been reading it their whole lives without really hearing it:

"For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”" — Galatians 5:13–14, ESV

Read that again. Freedom is not the absence of obligation. Freedom is the redirection of it. You were a slave to self — and now you are free. But that freedom is not for building a bigger throne. It is for love. It is for service. It is for pouring out what God poured into you.

And I know what some of you are thinking, because I have thought it too: "But I am already running on empty. I cannot pour out what I do not have." I hear you. And you are not wrong that you need rest. You are not wrong that you need to take care of yourself. But be careful — because one way the throne returns is dressed in the language of self-care. There is a difference between resting so you can serve and resting so you do not have to.

Paul gives us the framework for what real self-emptying looks like, and he does not pull it from thin air. He pulls it from the Christ:

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men." — Philippians 2:5–7, ESV

He emptied himself. The One who had every right to the throne — who was the throne — stepped down. Voluntarily. Not because He had to. Because love demanded it. Because we needed it. Because that is what the Father’s will looked like in the flesh.

And that is the mind Paul says should be in you.

[Shift to direct address. Eye contact. Slower.]

So here is what I am asking you to do. Not eventually. Not when you feel ready. This week.

Find one place — just one — where you are protecting the throne. One place where you have been controlling the outcome instead of trusting God with it. One place where you have chosen your comfort over someone else’s need.

It might be at home. It might be in this church. It might be at work or in a friendship that has gone sideways because you will not bend. You know where it is. You have probably known for a while.

Step off.

Not because it will feel good. It probably will not — at least not right away. Step off because Jesus did. Step off because the mist is short and the mission is eternal. Step off because the freedom you were given was never yours to hoard.

Every day you wake up, there is a throne, and there is a question. The question has never changed. It is the one Jesus put before us in Luke 9:23, and it is sitting in front of you right now:

Control — or surrender?

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23, ESV).

— Summary Arc —

I. Self as King — Problem named

II. What It Looks Like — Problem exposed

III. Breaking It Down — Problem confronted (testimony)

IV. Serving Others — Solution lived

Movement: From Self → To Others

— Scripture Index —

Mark 10:42–45 • Luke 9:23 • Galatians 5:13–14 • Philippians 2:3, 5–7; 3:7–8 • James 4:1, 13–15