You Don’t Have to Erase Yourself to Follow Jesus

The truth behind one of Jesus’s most twisted quotes

There’s a line Christians love to throw around, and if you grew up like I did, you’ve heard it more times than you can count.

“Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.”

It’s treated like this sacred badge of honor, the verse that proves you should suffer quietly, shrink yourself, abandon your desires, and call it holiness. It’s been used to guilt people into staying in toxic marriages, to convince people to tolerate abuse, even to shame people for wanting joy, freedom, or autonomy.

It’s wild how fast religion can weaponize a sentence.

But here’s the thing. That is not what Jesus meant. Not even close.

This became clearer to me when I started deconstructing Christianity. At first, I was terrified. I had spent my entire life afraid of disappointing God, of making a wrong move, of ending up in hell because I questioned (or rejected, or ignored!) the wrong verse. When the fear began unraveling, I wasn’t just spiritually confused, I was mentally spiraling. I had been told so often that doubting anything made me “backslidden” or “rebellious” that when my faith in the “Christian” version of God started disassembling itself, so did my sense of identity.

And that was the moment I realized something big. My entire spiritual life had been built on fear, not truth.

That realization caused me to ask better questions. Historical questions. Contextual questions. Real questions I never felt allowed to ask before. And one of the first teachings I revisited was this one.

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Not because I want to hide anything. If I could publish every truth I know on the front page of the internet, I would. But I have been censored, flagged, shadowbanned, and threatened enough times to know I cannot share everything publicly. Platforms are not neutral. They are controlled. And the people who control them do not want these conversations happening out loud.

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