Jesus Isn’t a Condiment
I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to food sometimes. I don’t use ketchup on my fries. I don’t put condiments on my burger. I like my food to taste like my food, not like something else.
The other day I was eating one of my purist hamburgers smoked perfectly. And as I watched the people around me applying all sorts of things to their burgers it got me thinking. Adding pickles or mustard or ketchup to a burger definitely isn’t my thing, but it doesn’t change the burger from being a burger. It’s still the same thing it was before. Now it’s just tucked under a layer of some other substance.
But looking at these burgers quickly got uncomfortable for me. Because I started thinking about how we do the same thing with Jesus.
We add Him. Like a condiment. Like something that makes the existing sandwich a little better, a little more interesting, a little more palatable. We tuck Him in alongside everything else we’ve already got going. We slap a little Jesus on our plans, our priorities, our preferences and somehow we call it faith.
Adding Jesus to a life that’s fundamentally still about you isn’t Christianity. It’s seasoning.
And Jesus never asked to be a condiment.
He said take up your cross and follow me. In first-century Palestine, nobody picked up a cross and added it to their existing schedule. A cross was a one-way walk. It meant the old direction was done.
That’s not addition. That’s surrender. And those are not the same thing.
Look, I get it. It’s easy to add Jesus to what we’re already doing. I grew up in a church culture that, intentionally or unintentionally, communicated that adding church or Bible reading or prayer would somehow make my life mysteriously and almost magically get “better.”
But I was never taught about what needed to go away first. Just adding a little bit of Jesus to a life that is all about me is like adding pickles to a burger and calling it a pancake. That’s not how it works.
Jesus teaches that we are to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. There are three parts to this that all have to be there.
He starts by telling us to deny ourselves. What are you denying yourself of by following Jesus? The point of denying yourself is that you are giving up something of comfort that allows you to follow Jesus and appreciate his sufficiency in your life.
Then he says take up your cross. The taking up of the cross is probably the least understood image in this passage. Sure, we’ve likely seen images of Jesus carrying his cross in a TV show or on a poster somewhere. But in Jesus’ day, taking up a cross had only one outcome. It wasn’t to make your day a little better. It wasn’t for a workout. It was for the sole purpose of dying. Hard stop.
Then and only then do we actually know what it means to follow Jesus. When we’ve given up ourselves and taken up the cross — knowing that following him is not comfort in this world but potentially isolation and even difficulty — then we can begin to understand what Jesus actually brings to our lives.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about surrender. It doesn’t make your life smaller. It makes it the first time your life has actually been fully alive.
Jesus said whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the whole point. The condiment version of Christianity where Jesus is added to a life still fundamentally organized around you produces exactly what you’d expect. A burger with pickles. Same burger. Maybe slightly more interesting. But essentially the same.
Surrender produces something different entirely. Not a better version of the life you were already building. A different life. One where you’re no longer the main character trying to manage Jesus as a supporting role. One where the cross you picked up has actually done its work. It’s put to death the version of you that needed to be in charge of everything. Now what’s left is someone who can actually follow.
That’s not a smaller life. That’s the life Jesus was talking about when he said he came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. Abundant life doesn’t come from addition. It comes from the kind of subtraction that makes room for something real.
So here’s the honest question. Not to make you feel bad. A question to make you think.
Is Jesus Lord of your life or is he the newest addition to it? Is he at the head of the table making the calls that cost something? You know the calls about your money, your time, your comfort, your direction. Or is he tucked in alongside everything else, seasoning a life that’s still fundamentally yours?
You can tell the difference pretty quickly. Just ask who makes the final call when following Jesus gets inconvenient.
The condiment life is comfortable. I understand the appeal. But comfortable isn’t the same as alive.
Pick up the cross. Not to add it to your existing schedule.
To let it do what it was always meant to do.
Great analogy