Jesus said: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." Many years ago, college president William Banowski interviewed Hugh Hefner. He wrote of this encounter:

I was made keenly aware of the universal appeal of Jesus during one of my conversations with Hugh Hefner in Chicago. As we talked, Mr. Hefner surprised me by saying, "If Christ were here today and had to choose between being on the staff of one of the joy-killing, pleasure-denying churches, he would, of course, immediately join us." What most offended Jesus' contemporaries, and what modern men find even harder to accept, is His insistence that to find life we must first lose it. Hugh Hefner writes: "We reject any philosophy which holds that a man must deny himself for others."The playboy cult holds that every man ought to love himself preeminently and pursue his own pleasure constantly. Nowhere is the clash between popular playboyism and the ethical realism of Jesus any sharper than over how the good life is to be achieved. Hugh Hefner tells us to get all we can.

Jesus tells us to give all we can. Because the clash is total, there is no way to gloss over it. The popular philosophy teaches that to gee life you must grab it; Jesus taught that to win we must surrender. The conflict is absolute and irrevocable.