Are You Willing to Carry Your Cross?

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25)

When Jesus carried His cross up Golgotha to be crucified, no one considered the cross a symbol of carrying a burden.  To a person in the first-century, the cross meant only one thing, and that one thing was death by the most painful and humiliating way human beings could conceive.  

Because the Romans forced convicted criminals to carry their own crosses to the place of crucifixion, bearing a cross meant carrying their own execution device while facing ridicule along the way to dying.  Two thousand years later, Christians view the cross as a cherished symbol of atonement, forgiveness, grace, and love. 

There are many verses that speak of carrying our cross:

   1) Mark 8:34: " Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

   2) Luke 9:23: "Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."

What did Jesus mean when He said we have to carry a cross?  Jesus meant something far deeper than this when He told His disciples to carry their cross.  Jesus was telling them is that they needed to put to death their own plans and desires, and then turn their lives over to Him and do His will every day.

When we look at the call to take up our cross, we tend to think of the way God asks us to accept and embrace the sufferings and hardships that come from living in this fallen world.  While we have a difficult time understanding why a good God allows His people to suffer, we all know what suffering feels like, and we can understand how it can be linked to the cross.

Suffering can be physical, spiritual, or psychological.  It can range from cancer to the inner wounds caused by someone who persecutes you because of your faith.  It can come from our standing up for innocent life in a culture of death, or it can come from having to endure the pain of a broken relationship.  Whatever its source, we all have situations in our lives that we could honestly call “crosses” that we have to bear.

This is where the “empowered” position of faith comes in.  God wants to give us His divine grace to help us embrace the crosses of life.  Jesus once told the Apostle Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  These words so moved Paul that he was able to write, “…for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10b)

Commitment to Christ means taking up your cross daily, giving up your hopes, dreams, possessions, even your very life if need be for the cause of Christ.  Only if you willingly take up your cross may you be called His disciple. (See Luke 14:27)

Don’t be satisfied with anything less, for there is no greater joy in life than following Christ every day.

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