23rd February 2024

Take up your cross

…‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’  Mark 8:34 (NIVUK) 

What does Jesus mean when he says his disciples must take up their cross? He provides us with three things as an explanation. 

First, it means a new identity. ‘…whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.’ (v.35). The Greek word for life here is the word psyche, from which we get our word psychology. It means your identity and personality: what makes you distinct. Jesus is saying, don’t build your identity on gaining things in the world (vv. 36-37). Our identity is not to be based on our career, money, or status. In other words, it is not performance or achievement based. Neither is our identity to be based on becoming a moral, decent person who goes to church, studies their Bible, and says their prayers. Our identity isn’t to exchange one performance and achievement based approach for another. Jesus wants us to lose the old self, lose the old identity, in order to base our identity on him (v.35). This is such a radical approach, it’s like the Christian going to the cross: the old approach to ‘identity’ must die. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.… our real selves are all waiting for us in Him.” ¹

Secondly, it means a new agenda. When Peter hears that Jesus is going to Jerusalem, and it entails suffering, not just for Jesus but almost certainly for him too, he’s furious (v.32). Peter had his own agenda for Jesus, and it didn’t include suffering and crosses. He wanted the Roman occupation overthrown and national independence given to Israel, and he saw Jesus helping him achieve his agenda. We can’t have Jesus in our lives simply as the means, and our agenda as the end; we can’t use Jesus. Taking up our cross means dying to the control of our own lives, dying to our own agendas and to using Jesus. Our attitude is to be that of Jesus who in the garden of Gethsemane said, ‘…not what I will, but what you will.’ (Mark 14:36).

Thirdly, it means new hope. Jesus is heading to the cross where he is going to experience an excruciatingly painful death, but he is going to come ‘in his Father’s glory with the holy angels’ (Mark 8:38). Jesus was resurrected on the third day and will return in glory. In Jesus, life has triumphed over death, and this is true for the followers of Jesus. As we lose our lives for Jesus, we have the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. New life begins in this life, as the old person dies and we become a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), and it continues into eternity as we are resurrected into glory.

Let me conclude with the words of C.S. Lewis: ‘Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes, every day, and death of your whole body in the end. Submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find, in the long run, only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.’ ²

Prayer
Loving Father, what a challenge we have. We have to lose to find. We have to die to live. We have to go to the cross to be resurrected. Enable us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to believe so we can begin to experience the identity-transforming love of your Son Jesus, to follow his agenda, and to live in the hope of his resurrected life. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Study by Barry Robinson

¹ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p 225.
² Ibid, p 226-227.

About the writer:
Barry Robinson is a minister in Grace Communion International and Regional Pastor for Southern England, the Midlands, and Wales

Local congregation:
Grace Communion West Hampstead
Sidings Community Centre
150 Brassey Road
West Hampstead
London
NW6 2BA

Meeting time:
Sunday 12.30 pm

Local congregational contact:
Gordon Brown
gordon.brown@gracecom.church

Word of Life contact:
wordoflife@gracecom.church