What the heck does it even mean to take up your cross? I mean seriously, where did that come from?
I have heard that phrase too many times to count. Pastors, friends, strangers in a coffee shop, I have heard all of them tell myself and others around me that we should take up our cross everyday. But every single time I had been told to do this, I found myself wondering what that phrase even meant.
Without context, it is such an unusual phrase.
A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in church and the pastor started talking about taking up your cross- and again, I was perplexed and frustrated that I had not quite grasped what this phrase meant. The pastor was talking about our role in the church and how, as a society, we often look to those who are doing really big things and question what our purpose must be when we aren't doing anything big or spectacular everyday. I mean, there are christians out there who are feeding the hungry or preaching to the lost in far off countries. Yet here we are living in Minnesota, not doing anything ground moving with our lives.
Or are we?
Everyday we wake up and we have the opportunity to make an impact with what we have been given. We can wake up and choose to make a difference in our community. The people around us, they could be just as lost as those in other countries.
While talking about this, the pastor brought up Matthew 10:38. "Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me."
That dang line. What the heck. I sat in church with an idea of what this meant but not quite a full understanding of it. For too long, my pride kept me from asking what the phrase truly meant. So like any good millennial would do, I pulled out my laptop, googled the phrase, and found that in 3 of the gospels, the same line is recorded.
Matthew 16:24- "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"
Mark 8:34- "Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"
Luke 9:23- "Then he said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.'"
Holy dang wow. Think about that for a second- in 3 different accounts of Jesus' life, his disciples felt it was necessary to record this simple phrase from Jesus. Wow.
By no means am I a biblical scholar, I think that is pretty clear by now. But I think that Jesus was trying to tell us that we need to wake up every day and choose to follow him. You don't need to wake up and wonder how you can change the world. Wake up and wonder what you can do with what you have been given.
As I've thought about this over the past couple of weeks, I've been reminded of a verse I read years ago. Ephesians 4:1 says, "As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received." This verse has stuck with me because of how the word 'for' is used. As a prisoner FOR the Lord, it says. FOR the lord, we are called to live a life worthy of the calling we've received. Jesus so clearly told his disciples that if anybody wanted to follow him, they needed to take up their cross daily. We can all decipher what living a life worthy of our calling means and we would all come up with a different answer. But what if on the most basic of levels, the calling we've received is to take up our cross every single day and choose to follow Jesus? What if that calling was to choose Jesus daily and make an impact in our own community?
I don't really have a good way to wrap of these thoughts because this isn't something that I have the answer to. I'm wrestling with what this means in my own life and am daily having to remind myself to take up my cross. As I continue to do so, I want to challenge you to do the same. Every single day, choose to live the day for Jesus.
Choose to live your life worthy of the calling that you have received.