In the last month of my senior year in high school, I went with my church-going friends on a mission trip to Mexico. We spent the mornings hosting a vacation Bible school for children and the evenings studying the Sermon on the Mount. I became so enthralled with Jesus’ vision of life in the kingdom of God—which simultaneously challenged and completed my picture of the world—that I decided to give my life to following Jesus and becoming like him by grace through faith.
A few years later, as an undergrad at Fresno Pacific University, I learned about the early Anabaptists. To my surprise, they had rediscovered Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. They took seriously and literally Jesus’ call to follow him as his disciples as they attempted to live in their everyday lives what they read in Scripture. The first Anabaptists discovered the cost and received the benefits of following Jesus by obeying his words and imitating his practices.
I was hooked because I desperately wanted to do the same, and I have been attempting to flesh out this vision of discipleship in my own life ever since.
So, what did Jesus teach in the first century that the first Anabaptists grabbed hold of in the 16th century that can help us in the 21st century?
Jesus’ most direct teaching on the nature of discipleship is found in Matthew 16:24-26. There are three dimensions of discipleship contained within this exchange that he invites us to consider with the utmost sincerity.
Following
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus says in verse 24.
The Greek word for a disciple can also be translated as follower, student or apprentice, my personal favorite. In the first century, a Jewish rabbi would train a group of students under the rabbi’s “yoke”—their interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. A disciple had three goals in apprenticing under their rabbi: to be with them at all times, to become like their rabbi in all ways, and to know how to do what their rabbi would do in their unique daily circumstances.
Jesus, as a first-century rabbi, follows this model by choosing and training 12 disciples. Jesus is more than a rabbi, as his first followers soon realize. Eventually, his disciples confess Jesus as the Son of God (Matt. 16:13-20). But this was—and still is—his sovereignly chosen method of teaching his heart to his people.
The challenge, however, is that Jesus tells his disciples that he will be betrayed and crucified. For his disciples, this prediction undermines Jesus’ messianic status and is deeply distressing to those who imitate his example. Does this mean that the same fate will befall them? So, Jesus clarifies. To be his disciple means picking up and carrying one’s cross daily, imitating him.
The cross isn’t only Jesus’ end; it is his means. Taking up his cross is how Jesus lives every moment of every day in loving obedience to his heavenly Father and in self-sacrificial love for his neighbor. This, however, ultimately leads to his death on a cross because of the threat it poses to the religious and cultural elite.
The early Anabaptists saw that following Jesus in their context meant following not merely the pattern of his life—as important as this is—but also the manner of his death. Faithfulness to Jesus amidst cultural or relational pressures that drifted from and conflicted with scriptural revelation resulted in their rejection and persecution. Discipleship includes taking the injustice, unrighteousness and unfaithfulness of others on ourselves, even to the point of death.
While following Jesus in our cultural moment may not require martyrdom, it does require us to bear witness to the way of self-denial in an age of self-gratification, self-righteousness and self-obsession. Bearing our cross daily means our relationships—especially with those who don’t share our faith—are defined by forgiveness, reconciliation and mercy in a world increasingly removed from the values of Jesus.
Finding
Jesus asserts in verse 25: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” Jesus understands that a fundamental human need is preserving life. So, he paradoxically says that in his upside-down kingdom, real, eternal life is found by giving it away, often at great personal expense.
Interestingly, the Greek word for “life” can be paraphrased as “inner self.” While it is impossible to save oneself, we do have many strategies for self-preservation. For Jesus, however, the path to eternal life is the way of self-denial and self-sacrifice, seen most clearly and climactically in Jesus’ crucifixion.
And yet, this cost of discipleship is easily outweighed by the cause: “Whoever loses their life for me will find it.” In other words, in return for surrendering our lives—ourselves— in discipleship to Jesus, we receive Jesus himself—being with him and becoming like him.
The early Anabaptists found that the value of community required self-sacrificial expression. Consider the story of Dirk Willems. While escaping from prison, Willems stops and turns back to save the life of his pursuing captor who has fallen through the ice, only to be taken back to prison, tortured and killed. Willems’ story is a shining example of someone who had surrendered their self-preserving impulses to Jesus and was graciously given a different, cross-shaped way of living.
Forfeiting
Finally, in verse 26, Jesus asks rhetorically: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” Here, emphasizing the word “will,” Jesus relativizes present comfort in light of future judgment.
The pleasures and promises of this world lose all value in God’s upside-down and coming kingdom, especially when the cost of these fleeting glimpses of the good life is one’s soul. Put the other way around, Jesus says all of the world’s riches are rendered ineffective to regain one’s life in the face of death. Discipleship means forfeiting the good life and gaining eternal life.
My high school basketball team once won a game without ever playing. Our opponents had to forfeit because they didn’t have enough players. Paradoxically, discipleship works to our advantage at Jesus’ expense. When we forfeit control and comfort in life, by grace through faith, we receive victory over sin and eternal security. The value of the exchange, like the pearl of great price, is worth surrendering all that we have and all that we are to gain more than we could ever ask for or imagine.
The legacy of Anabaptism is that it rejects the world’s ways and values while remaining present to the world in self-sacrificial service, Spirit-led evangelism and a cross-shaped global mission for the life of the world that God so loves.
As we celebrate 500 years of Anabaptism this year, what might be possible if we took the call to and cost of discipleship seriously in our day? How might our lives, families, churches, cities and the world itself be transformed if we stopped settling for cultural Christianity and instead pursued biblical discipleship?
May we follow Jesus, find our lives in him, and forsake all else to live with him in his kingdom, beginning today and continuing forever.
Dustin Maddox is lead pastor at North Fresno Church in Fresno, Calif.
Dustin Maddox is the lead pastor at North Fresno Church in Fresno, California.
