Would You Die for Jesus?

The question I cannot honestly answer.

Richard Hernandez | OUTPOST 27 | The Margins / Faith & Inquiry

Would you die for Jesus?

I have heard Christians answer that question with remarkable confidence. Absolutely.

Without hesitation. Some seem almost offended that anyone would need to ask.

I understand the response. I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I believe He died for my sins, rose from the dead, and offers me something I could never obtain for myself. If those convictions are genuine, surely I should be willing to die rather than deny Him.

But I have a less impressive answer.

I don't know.

I would like to believe I would. I hope that if someone demanded I renounce Christ or lose my life, I would have the courage to remain faithful. But hoping I would do something and knowing I would do it are two very different things.

And I have begun wondering why so many of us are comfortable confusing the two.

Consider how we actually live.

We can confidently declare that we would die for Jesus and then spend Sunday morning deciding whether attending church is worth missing a football game. We say we would surrender everything for Christ while struggling to surrender an offense committed against us years ago. We promise allegiance regardless of the consequences, but sometimes become remarkably careful about acknowledging that allegiance when it might cost us someone's approval.

Not every missed Sunday represents disobedience. People have legitimate responsibilities and circumstances that prevent them from attending church.

Forgiveness is also more complicated than simply deciding to stop being upset, particularly when someone has caused genuine harm. It does not necessarily restore trust or require us to expose ourselves to further harm.

Those distinctions matter. But they do not erase the difference between being unable to obey and finding obedience inconvenient.

What interests me is how easily we can imagine surrendering the greatest thing we possess while resisting the loss of something considerably smaller.

Perhaps because the greatest sacrifice remains hypothetical.

I can imagine myself standing before someone demanding that I deny Christ. I can imagine answering with courage. I can imagine my convictions becoming stronger than the fear of what happens next.

What I cannot do is prove any of it.

The person in that imagined situation is still me, but he is a version of me whose courage I have supplied in advance. I have decided how he will respond before allowing him to experience the fear that might change his answer.

That is a convenient arrangement.

Actual death frightens me. I have people I love and would not want to leave behind. I cannot pretend the thought of losing my life, or knowing what my death would do to those people, would somehow become insignificant because the circumstances involved my faith.

Would I remain faithful with that fear in front of me?

I genuinely don't know.

I am not particularly comfortable admitting that. There is something about the way we sometimes practice Christianity that can make uncertainty feel like spiritual failure.

As though the faithful answer must always be yes.

I wonder whether some of our confidence comes from an unwillingness to imagine ourselves failing. I certainly prefer to believe I am someone who would remain faithful. I like the idea that my convictions could withstand anything.

But what am I actually trusting when I make that declaration?

I believe Christ is faithful. That is a conviction grounded in who He is and what He has done.

Believing I would remain faithful under circumstances I have never experienced is a claim about myself.

I am considerably less qualified to make that claim.

I keep thinking about Peter.

Peter did not merely suggest that he might remain faithful. He insisted upon it. When Jesus warned him that he would deny Him, Peter was prepared to argue the point. He believed himself ready for prison and death.

Then the circumstances changed.

The danger was no longer hypothetical. Jesus had been arrested. The cost of association was becoming apparent, and Peter denied knowing Him.

Three times.

I have no particular interest in treating Peter as a coward from the safety of my own life. I have never stood where he stood. I have never faced the circumstances that frightened him, and I have no evidence that I would have behaved any better.

What I find extraordinary about Peter's story is something we sometimes move past too quickly.

Jesus already knew.

He knew Peter would deny Him before Peter ever made his promise. He knew the confidence, the fear, the failure, and the grief that would follow.

And He chose Peter anyway.

Jesus did not discover Peter's weakness when it finally became visible. Peter's denial revealed something about Peter that Christ already knew.

Yet the relationship did not end with that failure.

After His resurrection, Jesus restored Peter and entrusted him with responsibility among His people (John 21:15–19). Peter's denial was not dismissed as harmless. It mattered. But neither was he treated as someone whose failure had exhausted the possibility of grace.

I find that deeply reassuring.

Because I wonder whether I have been asking the wrong question about myself.

If I cannot honestly promise that I would die for Jesus, does that make me less worthy of Him?

I don't believe it does.

In fact, I think the question exposes a problem with how I understand worthiness.

I was never chosen because I had demonstrated sufficient courage. I did not become worthy of Christ through the strength of my convictions, the quality of my decisions, or my ability to predict how faithfully I might behave under persecution.

Christ knew me before I ever claimed I would follow Him.

He knew my weaknesses. He knew the things I would be afraid to surrender. He knew the excuses I would make, the sins I would commit, and the occasions when I would understand what obedience required and still struggle to do it.

He knew all of that.

And He chose me anyway.

There is something remarkable about being known that completely and still being called to follow.

It also leaves me with very little room to pretend.

I cannot impress Christ with a version of myself that exists only in my imagination. I cannot offer Him a heroic promise and expect that promise to conceal what I am actually unwilling to surrender.

He already knows.

That knowledge does not make my decisions irrelevant. Peter's restoration was not permission to continue denying Jesus whenever the circumstances became uncomfortable. Grace does not make repentance unnecessary, and being forgiven does not make disobedience harmless.

But my uncertainty about my own courage does not make Christ's grace less sufficient.

I want to remain faithful. I want my convictions to extend beyond what I say I believe and become visible in the decisions I actually make.

Yet I am beginning to think there is something spiritually dangerous about becoming too confident in the person I imagine myself to be.

It is possible to become proud of sacrifices we have never made.

We can admire our own hypothetical courage. We can build an entire understanding of our faithfulness around circumstances that have never required us to prove anything.

And because those circumstances remain imaginary, the version of ourselves who survives them remains conveniently unchallenged.

Meanwhile, ordinary life continues.

There are apologies we owe. There are opportunities to tell the truth when lying would make things easier. There are people whose forgiveness we need to seek and others toward whom we need to extend mercy. There are moments when our desire to be accepted conflicts with our responsibility to acknowledge Christ.

These decisions may be small compared with imprisonment or death. I have no desire to insult Christians who endure genuine persecution by pretending that every inconvenience I experience deserves the same description.

But ordinary obedience still matters.

Jesus speaks of taking up our cross daily (Luke 9:23). That word brings discipleship into the present instead of allowing me to reserve it for some extraordinary future test.

Even then, I need to be careful about what I conclude.

Daily obedience is not a training program that guarantees courage under persecution. I cannot accumulate enough good decisions to make myself incapable of denying Christ.

Peter knew Jesus personally. He witnessed things I have only read about. He loved Him and believed himself prepared to suffer for Him.

And he still failed.

I do not know what fear might expose in me. Whatever courage I might need in such a moment would require more than confidence in my own character.

I would need Christ.

That brings me back to the question I started with.

Would I die for Jesus?

Perhaps I would. Perhaps I would discover a courage I do not presently know I possess.

Perhaps I would be terrified and still refuse to deny Him.

But perhaps I wouldn't.

I find that possibility difficult to admit. It means accepting that the person I hope to be may not be the person who appears when the cost becomes real.

Yet that possibility does not place me outside the reach of Christ.

He already knows the answer.

There is something frightening about knowing I cannot hide behind my own declarations. Christ knows the distance between what I profess and what I actually practice.

There is also comfort in knowing that His calling was never dependent on the image I managed to present.

He did not call Peter because Peter had accurately assessed his own courage. He called a man He knew would deny Him, and after the denial, He called him to follow again.

I don't want to use that mercy to become comfortable with failure. I also don't want to become so concerned with proving myself worthy that I forget why I needed mercy in the first place.

Perhaps I should be less concerned with confidently answering a question about how I might die and more willing to examine the decisions I am making while I am alive.

There is enough there to confront without inventing a future in which I am unquestionably brave.

I still don't know whether I would die for Jesus.

I am not going to pretend otherwise to make my faith sound stronger.

Jesus knows me better than I know myself. That includes the parts I am proud of, the parts I would rather conceal, and whatever I might do if following Him one day demanded my life.

He knew who He was choosing.

I am still learning what it means to follow Him.