It seemed to be a lot of those folks around.

It is a great privilege and a pleasure for me to be here tonight for us, my husband and me.

And before I go further, let's pray.

Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight.

Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

I want to talk to you tonight about the disciples' expectations.

Disciples simply means learner.

And so I'm assuming that this entire audience is made up of people who are willing to learn.

You know the word discipline, you know that it comes from the Latin word to teach, to learn.

And so Jesus made very clear the conditions of discipleship.

He said, if you want to be my disciple, you must give up your right to yourself and take up the cross and follow me.

Those are three very simple principles, none of them easy.

But they are clear, aren't they? Denied by self.

In the world today, we hear a great deal about denial as being a very dangerous psychological problem for which we need counseling.

But Jesus makes it perfectly clear that there will be no discipleship until we have denied ourselves, given up our right to ourselves.

Which then qualifies us to receive the cross in whatever form God presents it to us.

And then the third thing is a daily putting one foot in front of the other in obedience.

The first condition is self abandonment, self donation, someone has put it self mortification.

And you Latin students know from whence comes the word mortification, it means death, death to the self.

And those are hard conditions, hard for all of us.

I often have letters from listeners who tell me that things that I say are so hard or they write to me and they say, well, I'm really having a hard time with what you said about so and so.

Of course, what I said comes out of this book, not Elizabeth Elliott books.

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