At Cross Purposes

We see crosses everywhere. Gold ones dangling between buxom breasts, wooden ones stuck to the tops of churches, and painted ones adorning business presumably owned by Christians.

Fancy, pretty, ornate crosses are clutched by the masses as though simply the shape possesses magical powers . In modern society, the cross has come to symbolize something mystical, almost like having a personal genie. Once again, Satan has twisted truth until it satisfies our basest selfishness because he rightly knows that when he makes it all about US, we buy it every time.

When Jesus told his followers that if any of them truly wanted to be his disciple, they must "take up your cross daily and follow me" he wasn't offering to be their genie.

We often assume what he meant was bearing our own burdens without complaining. Or giving up something worldly for his sake. But that's only a tip of the iceberg.

The cross always stands for death. Cruel, purposeful, agonizing death of something found to be abhorrent. The cross did not save us. It had no power in itself. It was a means to an end that Jesus chose while every fiber of his humanity cried out to do otherwise.

When he tells us that in order to follow him we must also take up our cross, he means that like him, we must die. Our self-life must be crucified along with him, or we will never be all that he calls us to be. We might look good on the outside, but until we've taken up our cross, we're just putting on a show.

We don't hear this preached much anymore--dying to SELF. It doesn't play very well in hedonistic American culture. The sermons we want are the ones about God meeting all our needs...or taking us to Heaven...or defeating all our enemies. We like those!

But Jesus preached a different sermon and his is the only way to truly experience any of the above. To take up your cross is to do as the Apostle Paul said and consider ourselves "crucified with Christ." Jesus didn't come to tame our flesh. He came to kill it. And until we allow him to kill it, we have no more power inside us than we did before. His Holy Spirit gets a chair in the corner of our hearts while our flesh rages on as before. That won't work.

If you want God to do amazing things in your life, through you and in you, then you must die. No fence-straddling. No holding on to "just a teensy gray area." No passionate interest in anything but Him.

And we cannot do it. We absolutely cannot make ourselves die to SELF.

That's why we need the cross. Remember, it symbolizes purposeful, painful killing of something we consider abhorrent. Until we recognize that all that ME we once found so appealing is really our enemy, we won't be willing to let it die. We cling to SELF like the last parachute in the biplane.

"That's what makes me ME!" we whine.
"You have to look out for Number One, or nobody else will."
"I have a right to be proud of myself for all I've accomplished."

"Take up your cross daily and follow me," Jesus said. He emphasized the word daily because he was well aware of our tendency to go back on our commitments. Dying to SELF is a daily reckoning. As an accountant tallies up the books each day, we must allow God to examine our hearts and see what might be amiss.

Have we gone back to bragging on ourselves?
Have our once-pure motives turned selfish?
Is our desire for acclaim getting out of hand?

Next time you see a cross, let it be a personal message from Jesus to you. Are you dead yet?
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