THE DISCIPLES CROSS.

DAILY DEVOTION.

DAY THIRTEEN.

LUKE 9:23.    Then He said to them all, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me."
We all know that we are saved by grace, God's unmerited favor, there is absolutely nothing that we can do to earn it, we cannot work for it. So what happens after we are saved and we want to follow Jesus, we want to be His disciple, do we have a responsibility to play in that? Jesus said here that if we desire or want to follow Him, then we must first deny ourselves. So what is self denial? It is basically laying down all our rights to live our own lives as we see fit, For Jesus said in the next verse if we try to save our own lives, we will loose it, but if we are prepared to lay our own lives down for His sake, then we will save our lives. In Romans 12:1 Paul says that we are to offer ourselves up to God as living sacrifices, that this is the very least that we can do. In 1 Corinthians 6;19-20 Paul says that we are God's temple, that His Holy Spirit lives in us, and that we are not our own, but that we have been bought with a price. We know that price was the very blood and life of Jesus, the Lamb of God. So are we prepared to deny ourselves? are we truly prepared to lay down our lives so that we can follow Jesus. The Holy Spirit challenged me some years ago when I was praying about this verse, He said to me; "David are you prepared to go to the garden?" Even writing that now, all these years later, awakens in me again that sense of the responsibility that comes with that. The reality, the self denial, dying to our own flesh is the hardest part. Jesus had spoken many times during His earthly ministry of His death and resurrection, yet on the night it was to happen we see Him in the garden praying that if there was any other way, that His Father would remove the cup from Him, He was in such anguish in His flesh that he sweated drops of blood, yet in the end He was able to surrender totally to His Father's will, and go and die the cruelest of deaths for you and for me, such was His love for His Father and for us. Jesus then says in that verse that we are to take up our cross daily and follow Him, The thing we must realise here, is that we cannot take up our cross until we have totally denied ourselves, we cannot take up our cross in our own strength. So what is the cross that Jesus is speaking of? We have all heard people say, both Christians and non-Christians, "This is just my cross that I have to bear" This is usually said about some hardship or difficult situation that they find themselves in. Quite often it might be related to some form of illness. So is this what our cross is? Let us have a look at Jesus and His life to see if we can get an answer. We know that Jesus had come to the earth as the Messiah, the One who was to redeem mankind from the curse of sin and the penalty that brought with it. He had come to redeem mankind back to God. We know for that to happen that He was going to have to offer up His life as the perfect sacrifice, as the perfect Lamb of God. Jesus spoke many times during His earthly ministry, especially towards the end, that He was going to have to suffer at the hands of men and be put to death. He knew the physical, and spiritual anguish and pain that He was going to go through, we saw that in what He went through in the garden, Yet ultimately the cross was His Father's will for Him. So what did Jesus accomplish for us through His death and resurrection? He paid for our sins, through His death and resurrection we are now the righteousness of God in Him, our sins are now forgiven, by His stripes we are now healed, we now have spiritual, emotional and physical healing available to us. He has defeated the enemy, Satan no longer has any authority over us and He promised us even though we will have tribulation and trouble in this world, He has overcome the world and that in Him we can now have abundant life. So looking at all of that, is it possible that our cross is sickness and disease, some form of hardship or tribulation, some terrible situation that God expects us to endure for the rest of our lives? I don't think so, if it were then the cross of Jesus was not a complete work, if it was not a complete work, then we are lost in the world with no hope of salvation. So what is our cross? our cross, like Jesus, is the will that God has called us to walk in. Each day we are meant to offer our lives to God as living sacrifices, yielding our wills to His will, demonstrating our love, like Jesus did, being willing to be obedient to the Father and His word. Jesus said that there is no greater love, than to lay our lives down for others. Our calling as Christians is to serve God and to serve those around us. People will tell you that the cross is where we die to self, that is not entirely true, as we have already seen, we die to self in the garden experience, where we say, "Father not my will but your will be done" Yes, as we pick up that cross, the flesh dies to itself because it is now surrendered to the will of the Father. The aspect of following is two fold, yes, firstly, we follow the example of Jesus by dying to our own wills and submitting to the Father's will and secondly, as we walk in obedience to what Jesus is calling us to do He will lead us down the path to the fulfillment of His will for our lives. So let us all be encouraged to have the boldness of heart to be prepared to lay down our own lives, to be willing to die to our desires and then to take up the calling that Christ is putting on our lives on a daily basis. Remember Christianity is not a destination, but a life journey. Let us all run the race with perseverance, reaching upward to the high call of God that is in Christ Jesus.