Jamieson, Fausset and Brown on Luke 9:24

24. will save--"Is minded to save," bent on saving. The pith of this maxim depends--as often in such weighty sayings (for example, "Let the dead bury the dead," Mt 8:22)--on the double sense attached to the word "life," a lower and a higher, the natural and the spiritual, temporal and eternal. An entire sacrifice of the lower, or a willingness to make it, is indispensable to the preservation of the higher life; and he who cannot bring himself to surrender the one for the sake of the other shall eventually lose both.