When was the last time you did something that would make no sense if Jesus were not real? Most of us know the words "take up your cross" so well that they no longer stop us. We wear crosses on gold chains, hang them on our walls, and put them on top of our buildings where they catch the light at sunset, and somewhere along the way the most demanding symbol in history became soft enough to wear as jewelry. In Part 6 of Unfiltered, Pastor Jess DiSabatino opens Matthew 16:24-26, where Jesus tells his disciples to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. The people who first heard it had seen crosses on the roadside with bodies on them, and it stopped them cold. It is meant to stop us too.
Series: Unfiltered
Scripture: Matthew 16:24-26 | Luke 9:23
Pastor: Jess DiSabatino
Date: October 18, 2026
Key Takeaways
We have rebranded the cross until it means almost nothing. Companies do this all the time. Listerine began in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic (and was sold along the way as a floor cleaner) before it became a bathroom staple. Marlboro launched as a woman's cigarette, "mild as May," and was flipped into the rugged Marlboro Man while the product stayed exactly the same. But the cross may be the most successful rebrand of all. In the first century it was a Roman instrument of torture and execution, the functional equivalent of a lethal injection gurney, something people crossed the street to avoid. No respectable person would have hung one in their home. We have sanded off every edge, printed it on coffee mugs and tattooed it on our wrists. Then Jesus says, "Take up your cross," and we nod, because we are wearing one right now, and we have no idea what he is talking about.
The cross is not incidental to following Jesus. It is definitional. The context matters. A few verses earlier, Peter makes his great confession, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God," and Jesus tells him that on this rock he will build his church. Then Jesus explains that he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be killed, and rise on the third day, and Peter, fresh from his moment of insight, pulls him aside to set him straight. "Get behind me, Satan," Jesus answers. "You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns." In the very next breath he turns to all the disciples and calls them to take up their own cross. Peter had tried to define a Messiah who avoided suffering, and Jesus says suffering is part of his path and part of theirs. In a culture addicted to comfort, we like to say that Jesus took the cross so we would not have to. That is true about paying for our sins, but it misses what he said next: you too have to pick up your cross and follow me.
Deny yourself means stepping down from the throne of your own life, not hating who you are. This command has been badly misused. It is not self-hatred, the erasure of your personality, or a call to be a doormat. The Greek word means to disown: this life is not mine. Our culture says know yourself, trust yourself, let your feelings be your compass. Jesus comes full throttle against that and asks you to stop being the primary reference point for every decision and start asking what God wants and what faithfulness looks like here. It is reorientation, not self-destruction. On paper, Pastor Jess and Pastor Dave's yes to God never looked good: leaving teaching for a part-time church job, selling everything to move to Hong Kong less than a year into their marriage, planting a church in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, then moving to Calgary. Two nights before that move, with everything already on a truck, she told Dave she could not do it. Self-denial does not come easy for anyone. But after thirty years of saying yes to Jesus, she wakes up with a freedom she does not have words for, and denying herself did not make her life smaller. It expanded every part of it. Your yes will not look like hers, and the point is not what you say yes to. The point is trusting that Jesus can make you a better life than you could ever make on your own.
Your cross is the cost of belonging to Jesus, and you pick it up every day. In the first century, a person carrying a cross was not on the way to a difficult meeting or to Costco on a Friday afternoon. They were on their way to die publicly, with no possibility of rescue. Your cross is not your difficult marriage, your chronic illness, or your financial stress, as heavy as those are; that is the suffering of living in a broken world, and Jesus is not asking you to glorify it. Your cross is the suffering that comes not from being human but from being his, and Luke adds that you take it up daily, not in one dramatic moment. It looks like the 12-year-old who tells the truth and eats lunch alone for a week. The 24-year-old who turns down the impressive job because it would shrink her soul. The man in his 30s who refuses to round the numbers up and becomes the difficult employee. The 78-year-old who finally lays down a grudge he has every right to carry, because Jesus asked him to. Maybe we made the cross into jewelry because we wanted to wear it instead of carry it. The question is not whether you are wearing a cross. The question is whether you are carrying one.
Follow me gives the weight a destination: whoever loses their life for Jesus will find it. Carrying a 40 pound backpack for 55 laps of the church parking lot makes no sense. Carrying the same backpack up Ha Ling Peak in Canmore does, because the weight is the same but the destination changes everything. Jesus does not say deny yourself, take up your cross, and endure. He says follow me, and he has already walked the road and carried the cross through the streets of Jerusalem and risen on the third day. This is not earning: as Dallas Willard put it, grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Eric Liddell won Olympic gold in the 400 meters, and at the height of his running career he gave it up to serve as a missionary teacher in China. He sent his pregnant wife and children to Canada and never saw them again, and in an internment camp, the story goes, he gave his place in a prisoner exchange to a pregnant woman. He died there at 43, and the children he cared for remembered him for decades as Uncle Eric. We still tell his story because his life counted for more. So sit with this question, not as condemnation but as an invitation: when was the last time you did something that would make no sense if Jesus were not real? The cross is not a decoration. It is a direction.
Continue the series. Previous: Unfiltered Part 5 | The Someday List.
