In Matthew 16, Jesus says to his disciples,

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

But what does that actually look like in practice? Does it mean I need to serve

more sacrificial in my church? Should I sign up to help with the food pantry down the road

each night? Or do I need to skip that vacation with my family that we were all so looking forward

to instead giving that money to missions? Or should I sell all my possessions and move to the mission field?

As Christians, we often hear the call to live radically for God.

None of us want to look back on our lives and see that we've wasted them.

And yet for most of us, our lives look relatively normal, relatively comfortable,

which can lead us to wonder, am I truly living and sacrificing

for God like I'm called?

My guest today is Amy DeMarcangelo, and she shares her own story of learning what it means

to live sacrificially for God in the everyday stuff of life, even life in the suburbs.

Amy is a wife, a mom, a writer, and the author of

Go and Do Likewise, a call to follow Jesus in a life of mercy and mission from Crossway.

Let's get started. Well, Amy, thank you so much for joining me again on the Crossway podcast. Thanks for having me.

So today we're going to talk about, I think, a dynamic that I know I've wrestled with before.

And I think other Christians, especially Christians living in the U.S. or in the West more generally,

what does it look like for us to live

faithful Christian lives, especially when it comes to pursuing justice and pursuing caring for

the downtrodden. The scripture calls refers to them as the widows and the orphans and those who

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