And He said unto them all, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. Luke 9:23
It is easy to say we need as Christians to take up our cross daily. But do we know what it means? Do we know how much is involved? Do we understand the commitment, the effort, and the dedication that is meant by taking up our cross daily? If we understood it better, maybe we could do a better job of being a follower of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Taking up our cross means self denial. In the days when crucifixion was a means of execution, taking up your cross meant you were going to follow, to the letter and to death, the orders of somebody else. As soon as you took that tree on your shoulder, you were forgetting all about whatever you were hoping or planning for that day and submitting to a one-way march to a final destination. Actually, self denial is not so bad when we think of it in eternal terms. What we are denying are the temporary pleasures of the mind and flesh, the fulfillment of temporary desires and plans, and replacing them with eternal goals and purposes. When we deny ourselves, we excuse ourselves from the temporary gain we might receive from our self serving efforts and opt into our Lord’s great system of eternal rewards for service and devotion to Him.
Taking up our cross daily also means torture. When you think about it, no great achievement is ever obtained without torture. Great athletes reach the level of greatness by punishing their bodies into painfully intense exertion; those who don’t remain mediocre. Those who achieve the highest echelons of business, art, education, and any other sphere do so only by committing to painfully extensive effort. Paul spoke of keeping his body in subjection, so that he might not be a castaway (1 Corinthians 9:7). Just as in every other endeavour, in the spiritual realm the term ‘no pain, no gain’ still applies. Except that what we are doing is allowing temporal pain to produce for us eternal gain.
Taking up our cross daily also means death. The Roman convict carrying his cross had no hope of surviving the ordeal. Nobody ever came down off a cross alive and every crucifixion victim knew that long before reaching the location for execution. So Christians taking up their cross do not look back with any hope of a return to whatever life we had before our salvation, before our commitment to take up the cross. By dismissing all thought of serving self and committing everything to serving our Lord, we become a follower of our Lord.
If we would follow the Lord Jesus, we must submit to self denial, to torture, and to death. And we must do so every day; our text says so -Jim MacIntosh