taking up the cross

Christians grow in grace as they learn what it is to take up the cross and follow Christ.   A preacher in my local church, Stephen Gamble, was preaching on this just recently.  Since it fits so well with some of the themes I have been reflecting on here, I asked if he would mind if I posted the main script of what he said.  He agreed, so many thanks Stephen.

Cross-bearing

‘What does it mean to take up your cross? I wonder how you would answer that question? Well, firstly,I want to highlight that it is a very important question to answer. It is an important question to answer because in the Gospel accounts, we read three times that the Lord Jesus Himself uses these very words as a command / a challenge to those who would be His disciples.
I am sure  all of us would agree  that the instantly recognisable symbol of the Christian faith is that of the cross. It is the central focus of the Christian faith, the central point of the NT, and the central event for which the OT paves the way – the cross of Christ is an instantly recognisable symbol with which all of us here will be familiar;  but what does it mean when Jesus tells us to take up our crosses?

To help us answer that, I want to consider a text from Mark Chapter 8.

Mark 8:27-38 (ESV)
And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.  And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”  And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” 

The Context is the Finished Work of the Cross

Mark’s Gospel is a great book  because it is a very concise summary of the life and work of the Lord Jesus, a very direct account of what He did when He walked this earth – it is believed that Mark wrote his gospel largely as a result of the preaching he had heard from the Apostle Peter. Now, many will know something of the personality of the Apostle Peter, in fact we see something of his personality in the passage that we read. Peter was a straight talking kind of man, he spoke his mind and said things just as he saw them – he was a man of action, not afraid to face a challenge and would often wear his heart on his sleeve as we would say today.
Context of the Passage

Well, in our passage, we hear Peter saying it as he saw it. The context of our passage within the chapter then is that  Jesus has just fed 4000 people with nothing more than 7 loaves and a few small fish (if you read back to Verses 1 through 10).   In fact, if we read back we would also see that He has just healed a blind man in Verses 22 to 26. Jesus has just performed great miracles or signs as the gospels would call them and so when He turns to Peter and asks him in verse 29, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ – Peter in true Peter fashion says it straight….’You are the Christ’ and Matthew’s version in Chapter 16 includes a fuller account, adding..’You are the Christ, The Son of the Living God.’ Mark is telling us that, Peter has interpreted these signs correctly and he has justifiably reached the conclusion from what he had just witnessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God. That is the context of our verses this morning.

Context of the Book

And similarly, the context of the chapter in which these verses are written, would serve to reinforce that conclusion further. If we read back through the preceding chapters of Mark’s Gospel, we would see that the disciples had been witnessing many miraculous signs performed by Jesus, including healings and the casting out of demons as well as the raising of a little girl from the dead. To the point where we pick up the story in Chapter 8 and see that when asked directly by Jesus, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter can respond without hesitation, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ That is the context of Mark’s Gospel story at the point when Christ then makes the command to ‘deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.’ And it’s important that we recognise that at the outset because, let’s face it, who else would have the authority to make such demands and to stake such claims upon our lives?? Only the Son of God (Mark tells us that in the very first verse of His book, Mark 1:1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Only Jesus, who is God Himself made flesh, can make such claims. and so we see that when the disciples have come to this realisation, Jesus then moves on to make His rightful demands upon their lives and their loyalties. So that is the context of this command of Christ, to take up your cross, within the book of Mark as a whole – we see the disciples recognising Jesus for who He is.

Context of the Bible

But, moving on, in order to set these verses / this teaching into the wider context of God’s word as a whole, I want to home in for a moment particularly on the verses immediately preceding the command to take up your cross. These preceding verses are of crucial importance and I don’t want us to miss it this morning because they are the key to answering our question. After Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ (or the Messiah, the two terms are synonymous) in verse 29, Jesus immediately goes on to tell the disciples what kind of Messiah He has come to be. This Messiah v31, ‘the Son of Man (as Jesus most often referred to Himself) must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and teachers of the law and that He must be killed, and after three days rise again’.  The context of the call to take up your cross is therefore, that Jesus Himself was about to go to Jerusalem and die on a cross taking upon Himself the punishment for sin. That is the reason Jesus was heading to Jerusalem, it was not an accident which took place because He was misunderstood or too weak to defend Himself but the very destiny of His ministry, the very reason for which He has come to earth, the very event for which the entire Bible has been paving the way as God’s plan of salvation is foretold and prophesied right throughout the Biblical history.

The Call to Take up Your Cross – A Right Response

And so I think it is important to go through that thought process before we delve in and answer our question because the verses we read are a critical turning point in the Gospel of Mark – ‘hinge’ verses is the theological jargon for it. And what we have essentially done, having examined the context, is that we have put ourselves in the shoes of the disciples and begun to see what they would have understood from what they had just witnessed and what they had just heard as well as what they would have known themselves from the OT Scriptures. And I want us to take away three things from this approach – three key things which the disciples themselves discover in our passage…..

1)      Who is Jesus? Well, the disciples discover that He is the Messiah (v 27 – 30)

2)      What kind of Messiah had He come to be? Well, the disciples are told that He has come to be a suffering               Messiah who would die and rise again (v 31 – 33)

3)      And now we come to the third part – how are we told to respond to these two things (v 34 – 38)

How are we to respond to who He is and what He has done?

Well, the reason it is important to take this systematic approach is that people have always and will always get the order of these things wrong. Even the disciples in our passage were shocked to discover that the Jesus revealed to them was not the conquering king who was going to bring them prominence like the Jesus they had tried to invent. They wanted a conquering King who had come to rule not a suffering servant who had come to die. A conquering king who would bring power and glory now, not one who spoke of suffering and death now and glory later.

And people have always tried to reinvent and misrepresent Jesus. Perhaps the error of some is to invent a legalistic Jesus who taught ritual and religious practice. Martin Luther was a monk in the 16^th century and dedicated himself to a monastic life of self denial, devoting himself to fasting even depriving himself of sleep and sitting up in the cold all night in an attempt to somehow get right with God. He later remarked, “If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them.”Luther believed that he could have in some way gained salvation by ritual and religion – denying things to himself before he realised that what he had to do was deny his very self and all his self effort and simply look to the suffering and finished work of the cross of Christ.

You see, it is only to those who will trust in His finished work at the cross that Jesus Christ makes the call to take up your cross. He doesn’t call you to take up your cross as a saving act or to redeem yourself from sin – only He could do that, that is why Jesus was going to Jerusalem to ‘be killed, and after three days rise again.’ What Jesus has accomplished in the finished work of the cross is the only place and only way to find forgiveness for sin (a truth of which Luther became a great defender). And thank God for that truth because if salvation was in any way dependent upon us and our religious living then it simply would never have happened – it was accomplished entirely by Christ.

But maybe in our day and in our culture, we have more of a tendency to reinvent Jesus in other ways. I doubt that many of us here this morning have spent the last 24 hours fasting in the cold – and if you did then I must say you are looking remarkably well for having done so! But maybe we have a tendency to create a different Jesus. The Jesus who doesn’t want our lives to be overly radical and certainly not uncomfortable. The Jesus who wants the best for us financially and the Jesus who wants the best for our safety and lifestyle. The Jesus who died for us – yes – but surely that’s the least we deserved and all we need to do is acknowledge that and say a one-off prayer before getting on with our lives in whatever way we chose. Many of us here in western culture need to be reminded of the real Jesus – the Jesus who demands a response for what He has done for us and makes exclusive claims upon our lives and loyalties. ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ It’s not exactly a call to comfort is it!? And so it would be wrong for me to reassure everyone that the real Jesus tells us that we are entitled to comfort and a life of happiness and prosperity with no need to sacrifice or suffer for Him. Maybe God has blessed us with prosperity and if he has then we should be truly thankful but the attitude of the Christian / the disciple should not be one of i deserve this but that i have been given it by God and if He asked me to give it up – even if He asked me to give up my life, then I would gladly do so for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the Gospel. I wonder if that is your attitude today? Our primary loyalty should be to Christ and true cross bearing discipleship is the only appropriate response to what He has done for us at the cross and so the order of these two things is crucial to understand. Saved by the finished work of the cross and then called to take up our cross. Three times Jesus predicts His death and suffering in Mark’s Gospel and each time He goes on to speak of the appropriate response and marks of discipleship.

Don Carson puts it another way – death to self and cross bearing is not so much a prerequisite of discipleship to Jesus as a continuing characteristic of it.

The Way of the Cross (What does it Look Like?)

And so, as we move on, I want to say something further about the way of the cross and what it means in practice to take up your cross.

Firstly, I want us to note that if you call yourself a Christian then Jesus, when He calls His disciples to take up their cross – is also talking to you. Notice the wording in verse 34, ‘if anyone would come after me…’ not just the first twelve but anyone who would come after me. If you read Acts 2, you will see that the disciples were subsequently called Christians so the two terms are synonymous, you cannot be a Christian today without being a disciple and taking up your cross! I don’t want you to think that the call to take up your cross was only for the twelve or only for those who want to be super Christians but it’s for anyone. You see it’s not so much the call to radical Christian living but more the call to normal Christian living – it’s the only Christian life, the only right response to Christ.

We see from our verses in Mark Chapter 8 that, Jesus knew what to expect when He was heading to Jerusalem. Indeed He had modelled throughout the course of His entire ministry what it meant to walk this way of the cross that He calls us to. He spoke to the disciples of denying themselves and taking up their cross to follow Him and Jesus had already modelled in His life and ministry what it meant to deny Himself and to walk the way of the cross. Jesus came down from the heights of heaven to walk the dust of this earth, He came unto His own and yet His own received Him not, the Bible tells us. He denied Himself of the glory, which was rightly His, He denied Himself of the fellowship at the Father’s side, which was rightly His, He denied Himself the very identity which was His – taking upon Himself the form of a servant.

And so when Jesus went to the cross, it was an act of fulfilment of what He had been modelling and teaching all along. He literally took up His cross on the way up to Calvary but He had been metaphorically taking up His cross all the way there by coming into this sinful and evil world – not to be served but to serve. Yes, the cross was primarily an act of saving sacrifice for sin but not only that, the cross was also the ultimate demonstration of how we are to live for Him in response.

Going to the cross was Christ’s obedience to the will of the Father at greatest personal cost to Himself, we in taking up our cross are called to be obedient to the will of the Father – to the teachings of God’s word at whatever personal cost to ourselves and our reputations. For all of us that means getting to know His word more so that we understand better what His will for our lives is. Christ in going to the cross was demonstrating love for others, even His enemies who put Him there: we as disciples are called to show love for others even for those who would hate us – maybe for us that is something as simple as praying for those who would ridicule us for our faith. Christ, in going to the cross was sacrificing Himself for the sake of others: we as disciples are called to sacrifice ourselves, to count as dead our own lives for His sake and for the sake of the Gospel – maybe for us that could start with giving our time and energies for the help of others in our church and for the work of the Gospel in our area.

So that is the way we are all called to live – to take up your cross is to die to selfishness. The call to take up your cross is not a call to put up with bunions or to tolerate a difficult person at work – we cannot ever just reduce it to that level. The call to take up your cross, is a call to set aside your own aspirations and agenda, to do away with what is important to me and pleasing to self in order to live in accordance with what is important to Christ. But ultimately and simply, the call to take up your cross, is a call to come and die – maybe literally but certainly metaphorically. I wonder if you would die for Him? Let me assure you that if you are not prepared to live for Him today, then you can be sure you won’t be prepared to die for Him tomorrow! Many Christians are still dying for the sake of the gospel. There are places as we have been considering this morning where Christians are literally dying for His sake and for the sake of Gospel – places like Pakistan, places like Somalia where a Christian is reported to live only a matter of weeks after conversion.  This is the kind of commitment that Jesus demands and calls us to.

Luke in his Gospel adds that we are to take up our crosses daily (Ch 9 v 23) – that is to say it is a constant and deliberate, ongoing act of death to our own selfish life. Jesus is calling me to put to death the old nature of Stephen Gamble and whatever his aspirations may have been and He is calling you to do the same. To put aside your priorities and to replace them with His priorities. The Principal Lecturer of a Theological College in North Carolina, every year asks each batch of his fresh new students in his opening speech – have you come to this seminary to die? That is to say have you come here to continue to the death march you began the day you trusted Jesus as your Saviour and Lord? I’m not sure what the first day dropout rate at the college is but that is the call and challenge of the real Jesus.

It’s not exactly a great sales pitch is it for Christianity is it!? But our salvation has not been accomplished lightly and should not be responded to lightly – there is a cost to count, Jesus asks us, ‘What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? There is a cost to count, a price to pay, a weighing up on the balance sheet to be done. There is much to say about that but time doesn’t allow, suffice to say that Jesus is not calling for fair weather disciples, He is calling for those who would give up everything for Him in light of what He has done for us.

The Freedom of Living Under the Cross (How is it Done?)

These are difficult and sobering matters we have been considering this morning, they are hard challenges to live up to but that is the standard nonetheless – a complete surrender to Christ and denial of self. But i want to finish on a note of encouragement too and it is simply this……..that when we surrender all to Christ, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We were reminded last week at Andy LW’s farewell service that there is nothing that we can invest our lives in which cannot be taken away by the next crisis this world will throw at us. But Jesus calls us to die to all of that, to be free from all of that and to follow Him. It was Jim Elliott who said – ‘He is no fool, who gives that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.’ And that is profoundly true for the Christian life – Romans 6 tells us that we have been crucified with Him… crucifixion is a slow drawn out and yet inevitable death – it goes on to tells us that…anyone who has died has been set free from sin. I think there is a freedom and encouragement in those words to help us live for Christ. If you are a Christian, you have already died to all of that and are free from the burdens of selfishness that this world would have us pursue.

It’s like the analogy of the soldier who has already accepted that he is going to die – he is a dead man and he knows it and so he fights with a freedom because he has nothing to lose – you can’t kill a man twice – that is the kind of freedom Jesus offers! And Jesus tells us that….’if the Son sets you free, then you will be free indeed’! Are you fighting the Christian battle with that freedom? The real Jesus is calling for cross bearers and I pray that you would bear your cross for Him today. Amen.