"Self-Denial"...Lent Day 7

For those of you that don't know I'm participating in a 40 days of Lent blogging for lent. You can find other posts over at A House Upon The Rock. Each day I have a button for you to click on over!

Sorry no post for a couple of days. Feeling under the weather. I have more thoughts on my day 5 post but I found a great quote this morning. This is from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship and the Cross.

I think it speaks volumes for me. We can deny ourselves (the Bible is full of that.in the form of fasting and other sacrifices, even to the point of death.) But we come up against the fact that in the end, it is, our should be, all about Jesus. All about... relationship. Here is the quote:

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself." Just as Peter, in denying Christ, said, "I do not know the man," so also should each disciple say this to herself or himself. Self-denial can never be defined as some profusion - be it ever so great - of individual acts of self-torment or of asceticism. It is not suicide, since there, too, a person's self-will can yet assert itself. Self-denial means knowing only Christ, and no longer oneself. It means seeing only Christ, who goes ahead of us, and no longer the path that is too difficult for us. Again, self-denial is saying only: He goes ahead of us; hold fast to him.