GOSPELS 16 TAKE UP YOUR CROSS

GOSPELS 16 TAKE UP YOUR CROSS 

In the three Gospels of Matthew and Mark and Luke, (Matthew 16:21 Mark 8:31; Luke 9:21), after Jesus declares that he is the rock upon which he would build his church, he straightaway tells his disciples not to talk to anyone about that fact that he is the Christ, and he then says, ‘I must suffer many things at the hands of the Jewish leaders and be rejected by them and be killed, and after three days I will rise again’ (Mark 8:31). 
Peter immediately takes Jesus aside and scolds him for saying a thing like that. Peter has just previously had a revelation that Jesus is the Christ and was probably feeling a little heady with all the authority that Jesus said was coming his way, along with the promise about being given keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. So Peter decides to weigh in on this plan of Jesus, which was far too negative for his liking.  

To Peter’s surprise Jesus did not seem grateful for Peter’s kind-hearted advice. Jesus turned and faced all the disciples and said very sternly to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are not mindful (phrone?? - a focussed conscious awareness) of the things of God but of the things of man’
From that moment on Peter began to painfully learn time after time that what he often thought were good ideas were not God ideas. Peter was to learn what it meant to be ‘mindful’, consciously aware, of what God was saying through Jesus and not what his opinion was of what he thought God should be saying – a very common error that he shares with a few billion more of us.
That is why Jesus made that peculiar remark at the beginning of this reading when he told the disciples not to mention that he was the Christ, because Jesus did not want his disciples and followers giving their random human opinions about him as God, to people, and he also didn’t need or want notoriety. His whole aim was for his followers to know him personally as God. It is only then that their words would have life. There was coming the day when Jesus would have risen from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit to the earth and his followers would be living in and speaking from the Kingdom of Heaven that was within them. It is from that inner Kingdom place in us today that we can speak words of life that come from him, and not just our learned opinions about him. 

Then Jesus called his disciples and the crowds to come over and listen to him and he said, ‘If any man wants to come after me let him deny himself (there’s the me self and the together with God self) and take up his cross and follow (akolouthe?? - accompany) Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it. But whoever would lose his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? – These are weighty words. They could have a primary place in what could be called a ‘Christian Manifesto’

Jesus was instantiating a new way to live a new kind of life (that word instantiating means not only to model something but to be the first person to ever model it). It means for us that some kind of life within us would have to die so that a greater life within us could live. This had never even been thought of before – people had always just had to try harder to get better at living the one life that they had. Jesus described how he would bring this new process of life out of death into being for humanity by his own death and resurrection, and he said in another place ‘unless a seed falls into the ground and dies it abides alone but if it dies it bears much fruit. (John 12:24). 
I will now quote that Scripture from the Living Bible ‘I must fall and die like a grain of wheat that falls into the furrows of the earth. Unless I die I will stay alone, as a single seed. But my death will produce many new wheat grains—a plentiful harvest of new lives’.
A seed contains the energy within it that can release a new kind of life that looks totally different to the original life form of the seed. The outer shell or husk must experience being hidden within the dark moist and nutritious substrate of good soil that awakens a new form of a hidden inner life to be invigorated. This new life breaks forth upwards out of the soil and into the light and air into its true life form, and its destined growth and purpose and reproduction. 

Jesus was a unique seed that went into the ground and died. That seed had both human life and divine life from Heaven within it and that seed not only rose again with a new resurrected life power for himself, but he released a harvest of this new resurrected life power for all of humanity to receive through the power of the Holy Spirit that was sent to all mankind at Pentecost. That new life form had never been seen before – God and humanity joined together. That is our new life and that was the work of the cross!

If you thought that taking up your cross and denying yourself meant self-discipline and mindfulness you would be correct. That is why Jesus had to rebuke Peter when he gave Jesus his kind-hearted advice about him not having to suffer and take up his cross. He told Peter that he was not being mindful (phrone?? - living in conscious awareness) of the things that God was saying and doing but only of the things that man could say and do. 
When Jesus tells us to deny our ‘human self-serving self’ which wants to have everything its own way, he is telling us that we are choosing to take up our cross by dying to that self-centred bias in us so that we can release the new ‘spiritual self’ life of Christ that is now planted within us. That choice requires a conscious awareness of faith that a new life is always springing up out of the death of the old life. This conscious awareness of faith is the Bible’s hallmark cause and effect activity that consistently yields the fruit of  a true Christian life. 

So, does that mean that taking up our cross means living a killjoy miserable life – all work and no play, and trying to look more virtuous than everyone else? 
No – it means being self-disciplined and mindful of the true person that you now are in Christ through the revealed truth from God into your spirit. That means just the opposite to living a killjoy miserable life because it allows our soul to come out of the chaotic disorder of this worlds thinking and into the peace and order and joy and harmony of a Kingdom ordered mind. Our limited human nature with its bias towards self-serving and self-advantage weakens the resolve of our struggling soul to express the full potential of our true spiritual nature. 

That is what Jesus means when next he says ‘if you save your (demanding old self centred) life you lose it (your new fulfilled Spiritual Kingdom life) and when you lose your life you save it’. And he goes on to say ‘For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Jesus then gets serious with his disciples and all who were listening (including us) and says ‘And anyone who is ashamed of me and my message in these days of unbelief and sin, I, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when I return in the glory of my Father, with the holy angels.’
That is God sadly saying to us whom he lovingly cares for ‘If you put me at the back of the line by not being grateful to me for doing all that I am doing for you - then you are actually putting yourself at the back of the line for getting my approval and all that goes with it when I come in my glory to settle things up’.
And Jesus concludes with the following very timely thought – ‘Truly I say unto you, that there are some of you standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power’.

That statement tells us that there would have been many people there at that time that were still living when Jesus rose from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit. They would have received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and lived in the power of the ‘Kingdom of God’ just as we can now today if we believe and do what Jesus has just been saying. Unfortunately, Judas was not one of them. He decided to end his life in deep despair and regret instead of waiting for Jesus his friend who loved him, to die instead of him and to heal his soul and give it new life. And I don’t presume to know his soul’s end, and we don’t know about the souls of any others back then or here and now. But we can be eternally grateful that we know that the words that Jesus said to all those disciples have that same deep significance for us. 

We can live an astounding Kingdom life that we enter into through the grace of God and our faith in Jesus, and by being mindful, having a mindset of conscious awareness that he is supernaturally working on our behalf at any given moment of time. Capture the now because that's when it is working - sit with it and be grateful and get to the front of the line – that’s our God. And even if we feel we're not faithful the Bible says he remains faithful and he will pull us back in - our human capacity to stay faithful is so limited with all of the moods and circumstances and disappointments and ‘what's it all about anyway’. God comes in and says ‘I'm still here I'm drawing you back in, it's now it's the start of the new life every moment just step into it’. Be mindful now of the new life that you have - the cause and effect holds true - life out of death. You might think how much repenting do I have to do to do this cross thing? 

I believe our repentance is simply out of unbelief into belief – repentance unto life. We don't say if only the past hadn't happened – it did. God is saying I'm giving you the gift of ‘now’.  When we say to the Lord I choose to believe that you are my new ‘together with you’ life, that faith sweeps away the old self-centred life. It does it for you – it overpowers the old life - it's called grace. So we don't beat ourself up in guilt, and don’t hide ourself in shame. We declare ourselves a child of God – redeemed. 

That faith lifts us above everything in the past. It is the exchange of one life for the other. The new life just drowns the old one. If we lose our life - we save it. Jesus knew how to use shorthand. He didn't use a lot of words but the words he said were packed with meaning.  We don't go around regretting our old life, we swap it – the exchanged life and our soul rejoices, it is saved and healed - it's the start of the new life every moment. Let us just step into it in Jesus’s name. Amen.