“If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves, take their cross and follow me.” The first thing that needs to be said is that this is a difficult teaching of Jesus. We should not fool ourselves. It’s better to confess this at the beginning than to pretend otherwise and lose our way in the end. The honesty with which we hold our lives before God is the measure of our desire to be followers of Jesus and not merely religious spectators. The second thing that needs to be said is that it’s the end of our lives that Jesus is concerned about in this teaching. The end not as the last moment, but the end as in the goal of our lives. When the old Westminster catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” it wants us to consider, “What is the primary purpose of human life?” The answer is…