I have a friend whose husband is not a believer. The Lord grabbed her in a big way relatively recently. She had been done with the faith, decided she could do spirituality on her own, but the Lord grabbed her and brought her rather forcefully back into the body. It has been glorious to watch.
However, her husband has not understood. He knew her for several years as she was living in darkness. He married that version of her. As she works on her Christian disciplines, he watches and just shakes his head. “I don’t understand why you would deny yourself.”
She comes to me with anecdotes of her husband’s seeming inability to comprehend why she would choose such a path for herself. “What do I say to him?” she asks.
The thing is that he does understand. There is not a human alive who does not practice self-denial. There may be some who cannot manage it, but they are rather quickly killed. Everyone, pretty quickly in life, has to learn to not say some things. We have to learn not to violently attack those who offend us. We learn not to stare at people. Pretty much nobody goes through life doing exactly what they want, without self regulation (denial). While some people might have been so conditioned as to not think to do some things, that is only the byproduct of having practiced self-denial well at some point in the past.
We live in a culture that has no self-awareness. They scoff at Christians, or pretend they don’t understand us, but what is really at play is that they do not love God. They refuse to acknowledge the goodness of his ways. They would rather pretend that the Christian faith is irrelevant or impractical when the truth is that they simply hate righteousness.
The church is not in the business of sin management or affirmation. We are the army of God beating back the gates of hell. This is not done by participating in the denial of others. While they might insist that they cannot comprehend the necessity of self-denial in the line of Christ, we can and should boldly proclaim them to be fools. Speak the truth in love.
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them." - Ephesians 5:8-12