Not admire him. Not add him to your life. Follow him. And that changes everything.
What This Article Covers: This article explores the true biblical meaning of following Jesus, drawing from Luke 9:23, Matthew 16:25, and the life of Christ. It addresses the difference between cultural Christianity and genuine discipleship, and what it looks like in daily life to surrender, trust, and walk with Jesus even when the path is hard.
There is a question that does not get asked nearly enough in Christian circles, and yet it might be the most important one any of us ever sits with. Not "do you believe in Jesus?" Not "do you go to church?" But this: what does it actually mean to follow him?
We use that phrase so casually. Follow Jesus. It rolls off the tongue in worship songs, in Sunday sermons, in social media bios. But somewhere between the familiarity of the phrase and the comfort of our routines, the real weight of what Jesus was asking has gotten a little lost. Because if you go back and read what he actually said, he was not inviting people to a lifestyle upgrade. He was calling them to something that looked a lot more like death before resurrection.
So let us slow down. Let us take that phrase seriously. What does it mean to follow Jesus, really?
The Difference Between Admiring Jesus and Following Him
It is entirely possible to admire Jesus without following him. You can think he was a good teacher, a moral example, a revolutionary figure in human history, and still never let him near the steering wheel of your actual life. Plenty of people do. They respect what he stood for. They like his values in theory. They would describe themselves as Christian in a cultural sense. But following? That is a different thing entirely.
Jesus did not say admire me. He did not say study me or quote me or post about me. He said follow me. And following implies movement. It implies that wherever he goes, you go. It implies that when he turns left and your comfort zone is on the right, you still turn left. It implies that his direction overrides your preference.
The first disciples understood this in the most visceral way. When Jesus walked up to Simon and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee and said those two words, they did not ask for a brochure. They did not request a meeting to discuss the terms. They left their nets, right there on the shore, and they went. That kind of response is not romanticism. It is surrender. And surrender is where following actually begins.
Following Jesus means giving him your yes, not just once but daily, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it costs you.
What Jesus Actually Said About Following Him
If we want to understand what following Jesus means, we have to go to his own words. And his own words are not gentle. They are not vague. They are startlingly direct.
"If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."
Luke 9:23 (ESV)
Three commands packed into one sentence. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me. Each one is a weight in your hands. Each one requires something real.
Deny yourself does not mean punish yourself or despise yourself. It means stop putting yourself at the center of every decision. Stop making your comfort, your reputation, your preferences the highest authority in your life. There is a throne inside every human heart, and Jesus is asking to sit on it instead of you. That is not a small ask. That is the ask.
Take up your cross. We have softened this phrase into a kind of poetic metaphor for inconvenience. We say things like "my difficult coworker is just my cross to bear" and move on. But when Jesus said those words, everyone standing there knew exactly what a cross meant. It was an instrument of execution. It was the thing you carried to the place where your old life ended. Jesus was not being poetic. He was being precise. He was saying that following him involves the death of your self-directed life, your ego-driven agenda, your insistence on being the author of your own story.
And then he says follow me. Which is the most beautiful part of all, because after telling you to deny yourself and pick up something that leads to death, he says come with me. He does not point you toward a set of rules and walk away. He stays. He leads. He goes first.
Following Jesus Is a Daily Decision, Not a One-Time Event
One of the most important words in Luke 9:23 is a word we often skip past. Jesus does not say take up your cross once and be done with it. In the original Greek, the command carries the sense of daily repetition. Every day. Every morning when you wake up and your flesh wants to go one direction and the Spirit is calling you another. Every afternoon when an opportunity to compromise floats by and looks reasonable. Every evening when you are tired and grace feels expensive.
Following Jesus is not a decision you make at an altar call and then coast on for the rest of your life. It is a direction you choose again and again and again. Some days that choosing feels effortless, full of joy, rich with the sense of God's nearness. Other days it feels like pulling yourself through mud with your fingernails. Both of those days count. Both of those days are following.
This is actually good news, because it means that yesterday's failure does not disqualify you from today's faithfulness. You do not have to carry the weight of every wrong turn. You just have to turn back toward him again. That is the whole shape of discipleship. Not perfection. Direction.
It is not about getting it right every day. It is about staying close to the one who never gets it wrong.
What Following Jesus Will Cost You
Let us be honest about something the Christian greeting card industry tends to leave out. Following Jesus will cost you things. Real things. Things you are attached to.
It might cost you a relationship where staying comfortable meant staying silent about truth. It might cost you a version of your career that was built entirely on self-promotion and the need to impress people. It might cost you the approval of people who matter to you, people who do not understand why you will not just go along, why you keep drawing lines, why you seem less interested in fitting in than you used to be.
Jesus was rejected. He was misunderstood by religious people who should have recognized him. He was abandoned by friends in his darkest hour. He was mocked, he was lied about, he was killed. And he told his followers plainly: the servant is not greater than the master. If the world hated me, it will hate you too.
That is not a recruitment pitch designed to fill seats. That is the truth of what you are signing up for. And yet. And yet he also said something else, something that sits right next to the cost and transforms it completely.
"Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."
Matthew 16:25 (ESV)
There is a life on the other side of surrender that you cannot find any other way. Not through achievement or accumulation or the applause of people. The life Jesus is describing, the full, rooted, unshakeable, purposeful kind of life, is only accessible through the open hand. You have to release your grip on the smaller life to receive the larger one.
Following Jesus will cost you something. But not following him will cost you everything that actually matters.
He Leads You Into Storms, Not Away from Them
Here is something else that surprises people when they begin to follow Jesus with any seriousness. He does not always lead you to easy places. He does not promise a smooth path. In fact, some of the most significant moments of formation in a believer's life happen not when God clears the road but when he walks with you through the middle of something you would never have chosen.
Think about the disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, waves crashing, wind screaming, completely terrified. Jesus was not at home waiting for the storm to pass. He was there. He walked out on the water to them. He spoke peace into the chaos. The storm was not a sign that they had lost their way. The storm was exactly where he showed up.
This matters enormously for how we interpret the hard seasons of our lives. When you are in a season of grief, of confusion, of waiting that seems to have no end, it is tempting to read that difficulty as distance from God. Tempting to assume that if you were really following him, things would feel easier. But that is not the shape of the biblical story. The shape is this: he goes with you into the hard places, and he does not leave you alone in them.
He may ask you to forgive someone who has never said sorry. He may ask you to stay in a situation when leaving would be easier. He may ask you to give when it feels unfair, to speak when silence would cost you less, to wait when everything in you wants to move. These are not signs of a cruel God. They are the contours of a path being shaped by someone who sees further than you do.
What Following Jesus Looks Like in Ordinary Life
We have a tendency, in Christian culture, to frame discipleship in grand terms. Sold everything and moved to the mission field. Left a high-paying job to start a ministry. Dramatic testimony, radical transformation, visible sacrifice. And those stories are real and they matter.
But for most of us, on most days, following Jesus looks much quieter than that. It looks like choosing honesty in a conversation where a small lie would have been easier. It looks like picking up your phone to check on someone God brought to mind and then actually calling them. It looks like staying patient with a family member who is grinding on your last nerve, for the tenth time this week, because love is not just a feeling you have on the good days.
It looks like showing up again. To the church you almost stopped going to. To the marriage you almost gave up on. To the prayer life that feels dry and one-sided half the time. Showing up again is not a small thing. In God's economy, it is one of the most profound acts of faith a human being can offer.
Following Jesus also means living differently in a world that is moving in the opposite direction. It means walking in truth when everything around you is negotiating with lies. It means living by faith instead of by the visible, by grace instead of by status, by love instead of by strategy. That kind of life is not flashy. It rarely trends. But it carries a weight and a depth that the world is quietly hungry for, even when it does not know how to say so.
To follow Jesus is to walk with him even when you cannot see the whole path, even when you do not understand the timing. It means letting him lead.
You Are No Longer the Main Character
Perhaps the most disorienting and most liberating truth about following Jesus is this: when you genuinely follow him, you stop being the main character of your own story. And that sounds like a loss, at first. Our whole culture is built on the idea that your life is your story, that you are the hero of your own narrative, that your feelings and your goals and your personal brand are what give your existence meaning.
But Jesus offers something better than being the main character. He offers you a place in his story, which is infinitely larger, more purposeful, and more beautiful than anything you could have authored on your own. When you follow him, your gifts and your pain and your history all get taken up into something that outlasts you. Your ordinary moments become part of a movement that started before you were born and will continue after you are gone.
That is not a demotion. That is the deepest kind of promotion there is.
Following Jesus changes how you live. And it changes why you live. It is no longer about impressing the world. It is no longer about building a reputation or arriving at some status that finally makes you feel like enough. It is about pleasing the one who already said you are enough, before you did anything to deserve it, on a cross where the verdict was settled forever.
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."
Matthew 11:28-29 (NIV)
That is the invitation underneath the whole thing. Not a performance. Not a checklist. A relationship. A walking together. A learning from someone who is endlessly patient with your confusion and your slowness and your tendency to wander, someone who has never once gotten it wrong.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What does it mean to follow Jesus in everyday life?
Following Jesus in everyday life means consistently orienting your choices, your relationships, and your inner life toward him rather than toward your own comfort or the approval of others. It looks like honesty, patience, obedience in the small moments, and returning to him when you fall short. Discipleship is less about dramatic gestures and more about daily direction.
Is following Jesus the same as going to church?
Church is an important part of the Christian life, but attending church is not the same as following Jesus. You can sit in a building every Sunday and never surrender your will to him. Following Jesus is a posture of the heart that expresses itself in every area of life, not just on Sunday morning.
What does take up your cross mean in Luke 9:23?
When Jesus says take up your cross in Luke 9:23, he is using an image his audience understood viscerally. A cross was what you carried to your own execution. He is calling his followers to die to their self-centered way of living and embrace a life fully submitted to God. It is one of the most demanding and most freeing invitations in all of Scripture.
Why does following Jesus cost something?
Jesus himself was honest that following him involves real sacrifice, including misunderstanding, rejection, and the loss of certain comforts and ambitions. But he also promised that what you gain through surrender far exceeds what you give up. The cost of following him is real, but according to Matthew 16:25, the cost of not following him is everything that truly matters.
What if I do not feel close to God when I am trying to follow Jesus?
Feelings are not a reliable indicator of God's presence. The Psalms are full of believers who cried out from places of deep spiritual dryness and still chose to trust. Following Jesus is not contingent on feeling holy or strong. It is contingent on continuing to walk in his direction, even in the silence, even in the fog. He is faithful in the seasons when you cannot feel him just as much as in the seasons when you can.
SIT WITH THIS TODAY
Is there an area of my life where I have been admiring Jesus from a distance rather than actually following him?
What is the thing he is asking me to surrender right now that I have been holding onto?
What would it look like to choose his direction again today, even in one small, specific, ordinary moment?
A PRAYER FOR TODAY
Jesus, I want to follow you. Not just in the moments when it feels good or makes sense, but in the ones where it costs me something. Teach me what it means to deny myself today. Show me where I have placed myself at the center of a story that was always meant to be yours. I do not need to see the whole path. I just need to keep walking with you. Lead me. I am following. Amen.
