Taking Up Your Cross (GG)
TAKING UP YOUR CROSS
All our problems are theological ones, William Temple said. All of them have to do with our relationship to God and His to us, and this is precisely why it makes sense to come to God with them.
The taking up of the cross will mean sooner or later saying no to self. But it is also a resounding yes. It means saying yes when everything in us says no. To decide to do the thing that we (and, it will seem, everybody else in the world) do not want to do because it is not “natural.” And in our giving of wholehearted assent, we find to our amazement that the impossible becomes possible and the things we were sure were beyond us are now within reach, for God’s command is His enabling. Never has He given an assignment that was not accompanied by the power to accomplish it.
The cross entails sacrifice, too. There is no getting around this. Christianity has been criticized and rejected by many as an “unnatural” religion, a life that denies living, a negation and not an affirmation. Jesus never tried to make it look easy. The principles He taught cut across the grain of human nature: lose your life in order to find it; be poor in spirit if you want to be happy; mourn if you want to rejoice; take the last place if you want the first. The corn of wheat must first fall into the ground and die if it is ever to produce anything.
What we must not forget is that He traveled this road before us. “He himself endured a cross and thought nothing of its shame”—not because He had a particular liking for self-denial and suffering but “because of the joy he knew would follow his suffering . . . Think constantly of him enduring all that sinful men could say against him, and you will not lose your purpose or your courage” (Heb. 12:2-3 PHILLIPS).