Matthew 16:24 – “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.“
By nature, we are all self-centered. Every sin has some idolatry in it, where we are self-gods (ie. God said to do or not do something, and in a certain way, and we say, “No, I know better”, which is defacto saying we will not have God be our God, but ourselves). The original sin was to be God (while the temptation was to “be as gods”, Gen 3:5, in the end, since only one God can exist at a time by definition, the reality was that they wanted to be God).
According to the above verse, we are required to deny ourselves to be a disciple of Christ. Then, it seems it would follow that we really cannot be good Christians with each other without it either, which makes sense from experience as well.
Along the lines with how important I believe Jonathan Edwards’ Charity and Its Fruits as sort of being part of “Christianity 101”, that every person claiming the name of Christ should attend to, I believe Thomas Manton’s A Treatise of Self-Denial is right up there along with it.
And so, to help make it available in audio format for those who might rather listen than read, I recently finished recording the entire treatise, which you can access as one of our Readings pages here:
And if you want to read it, you can find it here: https://www.monergism.com/treatise-self-denial-free-ebook
I cannot emphasize how important I believe Mr. Manton’s exposé is. We hope you’ll take the time to go through it, and may God guide your studies.
— David