TAKING UP YOUR CROSS AND FOLLOWING JESUS

Mark 8:31-38 “Then Jesus began to tell them that the Son of Man must suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, but three days later He would rise from the dead. As He talked about this openly with His disciples, Peter took Him aside and began to reprimand Him for saying such things. Jesus turned around and looked at His disciples, then reprimanded Peter. “Get away from me, Satan!” He said, “You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.” Then, calling the crowd to join His disciples, He said, “If any of you wants to be My follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow Me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for My sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it.  And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? If anyone is ashamed of Me and My message in these adulterous and sinful days, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when He returns in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”

Just after Jesus was baptized by John and anointed by the fullness of the Holy Spirit as Messiah, He was driven into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The Lord was tempted to focus on His own personal need, bread, to let the world’s priorities of wealth and power define Him and to have success sight of others be the ground of the truth of Who He was rather than His Father’s Word to Him, “You are my Son, with You I am well pleased.” Peter’s reprimand of Jesus harkened back to the desert temptation. Jesus’ rebuke was to Satan who was speaking through Peter’s human weakness and ignorance of the plan of God for the salvation of the world. He will rebuke the same distortion in us lest we be deceived.

Sin had to be overcome by the inexpressible suffering and sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The world’s way of conquering, the transfer of power from one tyranny always results in the liberator of tyranny becoming the new version of a tyrant. The world’s way does not involve a change of heart, the transformation of life, just a transfer of power from one broken life to another broken life motivated by pride, jealousy, and envy. In Jesus Christ the tyranny of death, that thing that causes people to despair of life as ultimately, in the end, meaningless, had to be overthrown.

“If any of you wants to be My follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow Me.”  Sheep in Jesus’ day followed their shepherd. They may not have understood why or where, but they followed their shepherd because he was their shepherd. Jesus, our Good Shepherd, was heading to Jerusalem where suffering, betrayal, and death awaited Him. Taking one’s cross and following Him carried a finality we struggle to get in our day. When anyone was seen carrying a cross surrounded by Roman soldiers, it was a given that they were not coming back. Jesus Christ, our Good Shepherd, was telling all who follow Him that He was going to make a way through death to deal with sin in finality. It is written, “He Who knew no sin became sin for us that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) To follow where Jesus has led, where He leads, means that we die to self, to our old assumed ways of trying to live life, and begin to live Life from a radically different Source; to be born anew into Eternal Life. The victory Jesus would win was a cosmic one, not a temporal one. It would not bring about a change in human governance, but would establish a new and eternal Kingdom within all who would believe Him.

Peter had his focus set on worldly assumptions of what the Messiah would do. He had an earthly mind-set, a political one. Where have I set my mind; the things of God or the things of this world? Casting Satan behind me, Jesus Christ gives me an eternal reset of mind and direction, diametrically opposed to the dominate narrative of the world. We are justified by what Jesus has done and that alone. Personal approval, power or pleasure all pale and fall away as any instrumentality to define human identity or worth.

If you try and squeeze meaning from life by hanging onto it through human effort, you will lose it. You cannot make yourself fully human when you are dead in sin. You must follow Jesus in the power He provides and let the world’s reference to life die. Jesus said that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains solitary, but if it dies, it brings forth a harvest. Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh. There is Life, Eternal life in no other. So, Jesus plants His Eternal Word in us, calling us to die to self, turn from selfishness and sin, and to have His Word “germinate” in us so that His Life rises up, displacing sin and death and displaying the Kingdom of God in the Holy Spirit’s power.

Letting go and letting Jesus reign in all of life will displace those sneaky idols that still vie for control in aspects of our lives, lying that they will make us more acceptable to the world around us. The Word of God has Life in it to deliver us from the residue of that old way of thinking, being, and doing. Following Jesus into the reality of His death and resurrection, taking up our cross so that by the Holy Spirit we may die to self and the world’s distortion of life, we are being changed daily to look more and more like the One Who died and rose again to make us new creations in Him.