In our day and age, the gospel can come of as little more than self-improvement. Our increasingly therapeutic culture regularly touts the benefits of mindfulness and gratitude, which certainly aligns with Christian practices of meditation and prayer. In that regard, Christian discipleship can easily be perceived as a helpful step in your journey of self-actualization. Following Jesus can help you “be all that you can be.”

But the gospel is less about self-improvement and self-actualization; it’s more about self-denial and self-forgetfulness. Consider the notion at the heart of Jesus’s great teaching: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Consider also Paul’s framing of the Good News: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This sounds nothing at all like modern marketing propaganda. Who starts a movement by talking about a cross? If you were going to set out to change the world, would you talk about your own death? This de-centering of self defies all logic — and yet, there it is, at the heart of the gospel.

And the glory of it all is the discovery that this is where true life occurs — not by improving ourselves or achieving our goals but in forgetting ourselves altogether.