Drawing a Cross
“That I may know Him and the fellowship of His sufferings,”” — Puut. iii. 10.
In the later days of the war, when America had only just come into the conflict, there were grave difficulties of transport. Only a limited number of American troops could cross the Atlantic. There was a certain company from which a draft was to be taken. Every man in the company was keen to go, but only a few could be taken. Who should the few be? They decided to cast lots. A number of papers were put into a hat, just as many as there were men, and crosses were put on some of the papers, and every man who drew a cross was to go to France. One boy wrote to his father, and this line was in the letter, ‘‘ If ever I prayed in my life I prayed to-day that I might draw a cross.”
The spirit of this American boy, and the symbolism in which the passion was enshrined, seems to me to express the spiritual ambition of the Apostle Paul. He was always eager to draw a cross. He had a passion to fill up that which was behind of the afflictions of Christ. Even when he prayed for the enlargement and enrichment of his spiritual resources his prayer was always linked with the further ambition of sharing the sufferings of the Lord. Watch him on this great roadway of spiritual aspiration, “That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection!” But he does not end there. To stop there would be to seek to fill his own treasury without any desire to flow over into the deep, craving necessities of others. It would be greediness for gain, and the shutting out of pain. His gain would be not only unearned increment, for our spiritual gain is always that, but uninvested increment. And so the Apostle relates his intense desire to know Christ with the further eagerness to enter into practical fellowship with His Cross. ‘ That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings.” It is there he draws a cross. He wants to use his spiritual resources to explore the deeper secrets of redemption, and this in an experimental life which shares the passion of the cross.
It is even so with Simon Peter. His letters glow with eagerness to share the glory of divine communion. But he wishes not only to know the secrets of the light, but the mysteries of the night. He would ever draw a cross. In his letters the word ‘“partaker” occurs at least three times, and the varieties of its usage are very significant, ‘ Partakers of the glory!” The first and last would be maimed without the second.
The second is a kind of roadway between the first and third. Through the sufferings to vital glory! Let anyone read the first letter of Peter, and he will see and feel the Apostle’s burning eagerness to draw a cross. He did not wish to reach his end by any short cut through By-path Meadow. He wanted the way of the cross.
Many of us are more intensely concerned to draw the lucky-bags of life than to draw its crosses. We would dearly like to sit with Christ on His right hand or His left hand in His kingdom, but we shrink from the cup that He drank of, and the baptism wherewith He was baptized. And yet the real joy is in drawing the cross and following the Saviour. In one of the riots in China, Griffith John received a blow on his head. He put his hand up to the wound, then looked at it, and there was blood. He says that when he saw the blood, the first blood he ever shed for Jesus Christ, he was filled with an extraordinary exultation in the spirit. He knew the joy of the Lord. In the cross
he found his crown.