Taking Up the Cross

Wuen the Lord told His disciples that they must take up the Cross and follow Him, they could have little understanding of His meaning. He wished to — rouse them to earnest thought, and so prepare them for the time when they should see Him carrying His. Cross. From the Jordan, where He had presented Himself to be baptized and reckoned among sinners, onward, He carried the Cross always in His heart. That is to say, He was always conscious that the sentence of death, because of sin, rested on Him, and that He must bear it to the uttermost. As the disciples thought on this, and wondered what He meant by it, one thing only helped them — it was the thought of a man who was sentenced to death, and carries his cross to the appointed place.

Christ had said at the same time: ‘‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’? He taught them that they must hate their own life. Their nature was so sinful that nothing less than death could meet their need; it deserved nothing less than death. So the conviction gradually dawned upon them that the taking up of the Cross meant: ‘‘I am to feel that my life is under sentence of death, and that under the consciousness of this sentence I must constantly surrender my flesh, my sinful nature, to death.’’ So they were slowly prepared to see later on that the Cross which Christ had carried was the one power to deliver truly from sin, and that they must first receive from

Him the true Cross-spirit. They must learn from Him what self-humiliation in their weakness and unworthiness was to mean; what the obedience was which crucified their own will in all things, in the greatest as well as in the least; what the self-denial was which did not seek to please the flesh or the world. ‘‘Take thy cross and follow Me’’ — that was the word with which Jesus prepared His disciples for the great thought that His mind and disposition might become theirs, that His Cross might in very deed become their own. ee Oe