Deny Yourself: The Command That Exposes the Spirit of Antichrist
A Reflection on the Third Sunday of Lent
Third Sunday of Lent – (Hebrews §311a (4:14-5:6) / Saint Mark §37 (8:34-9:1)).
Beloved in Christ,
In today’s Gospel, we hear the injunction of our Lord, God, and Saviour as He says:
“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Mark 8:34)
These words of our Lord, brethren, stand as one of the most radical and unyielding commands in all of Holy Scripture. They cut against the spirit of every age, but they stand in total and irreconcilable contradiction to our own. In the midst of Great Lent, as we venerate the Life-giving Cross, the Church places this commandment before us so that we might understand what the Cross truly demands. Self-denial is not an optional ascetic practice for monks alone. It is the very essence of following Christ. It is the narrow gate that leads to life.
The Anti-Christ Spirit of Modernity
The modern world and the spirit of Antichrist have waged relentless war against this teaching. Our age knows nothing of self-denial. It preaches self-affirmation, self-expression, and self-worship as the highest virtues. “Be true to yourself,” it cries. “Follow your heart.” “You must love yourself first.” This is the gospel of the self, and it has infected not only the secular world but large portions of what passes for Christianity in the West. Comfortable churches filled with worldly music and humanistic sermons have replaced the hard way of the Cross with a false Christianity that affirms men in their passions and calls it “grace.”
Yet the spirit of Antichrist is cunning. It does not only promote self-worship. It also perverts the very idea of self-denial and turns it into a weapon of destruction. In our time we see certain segments of society being taught a false and suicidal form of self-hatred disguised as virtue. Under the banner of “diversity,” “justice,” and “inclusion,” they are told to despise their own heritage, to dissolve their own identity, to sacrifice the future of their children and their very existence upon the altar of the stranger. This is not Christian self-denial. This is demonic deception. It is empathy turned suicidal, a counterfeit humility that leads to the death of nations and the erasure of Christian peoples. The Antichrist delights in such inversions: he takes the language of the Gospel and twists it into a noose.
The Wise Path
Against both errors, the worship of self and the hatred of self, the Church of the Fathers proclaims the true and ancient path. Our Lord does not command us to hate ourselves. Indeed, the Gospel itself rests upon a proper and ordered love of self. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). One cannot love his neighbor rightly if he has been taught to despise his own being, his own people, and the inheritance given him by God. True self-love is not vanity or pride. It is the grateful acceptance of the life, the lineage, the culture, and the faith that the Creator has bestowed upon us. Only from this healthy root can genuine love for neighbor grow.
The Order of Taking Up the Cross
Genuine self-denial, therefore, is not self-destruction. It is the disciplined ordering of the self under the will of God. It is the willingness to sacrifice personal comfort, worldly approval, and even one’s own immediate interests for the sake of higher goods, especially for the preservation of one’s people in the fear of God. To work for the existence and continuity of one’s own people, to guard the Faith and the traditions of the fathers, to labor so that future generations may still hold these treasures unadulterated, this is true self-denial when done not in hatred, but in peace of soul and in the love of God.
So also we today must stand firm in defense of each other and our Faith. We must deny the selfish impulses of the age: the desire for ease, for social acceptance, for worldly success, and this quite simply because we love God and seek to pass on the inheritance we have received, treasuring it but not thinking it ours to squander or change.
This is the self-denial that is emblematic of the Cross. The Cross is the ultimate sign of contradiction. It judges the world and all its false loves. The world hated Christ because He would not affirm its sins. It will hate us for the same reason. To take up the Cross means to deny the self that the modern world seeks to deify, and to reject the false self-hatred that the spirit of Antichrist promotes as its dark counterpart.
Our Resolve
Let us therefore approach the Holy Cross this Lent with clarity of mind. Let us reject both the self-worship of the progressives and the suicidal self-loathing they peddle to us and our children. Let us embrace the hard, ancient, but sweet and saving path of true self-denial: obedience to the unchanging Faith, love of God above all, peaceful labor for the preservation of our people, and unwavering loyalty to the Cross.
The world and its false prophets will call this hatred. The Antichrist will call it extremism. But the saints and the Holy Fathers will call it following Christ.
May the Lord grant us the courage to deny ourselves, to take up our cross, and to follow Him, even unto the end. Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.
15 March 2026