Reading: Matthew 16:21-28
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on August 28th 2005
Jesus told His disciples, "If
any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save
their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."
Hear it again. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."
And again. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."
I’ve just come off vacation. It
would be a whole lot easier for me this morning if the scripture passage were a message about taking up golf, or taking up
fishing, or taking up a new hobby, or taking up the power of positive thinking, or taking up a message of health, wealth and
prosperity. I'd probably find easy taker-uppers for those things.
But it’s not. It
is "Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Lose
your life in order to find it." This is a hard message. This is something we may not want to hear Jesus asking of us. This
is something we may want to qualify or spiritualize or put in other terms.
Be clear here what Jesus is asking of us. Sometimes people use the expression, "Oh, we all have our little crosses to bear." Sometimes people wear little crosses as a form of fashion symbol. Sometimes people look to the cross for
reassurance that they are greatly loved by God.
Jesus is not asking us to look to the cross, but to take up the cross.
Jesus is not asking us to wear a cross, but to bear the cross. Jesus does not identify a cross with our daily lot in life, however hard that may be, but is talking of
completely something else; willingly taking up, in the midst of everything else, the weight and the force of the cross He
was crucified upon.
We sang a few moments ago, "Were you there when they crucified my
Lord?" Part of the emotion generated by that hymn is that, if we allow
it to, the words and music take us to Calvary. We visualize Christ
crucified. We feel as though we could have been there. We sing of nails hammered through flesh and bone, a place of agony and bloodshed and torture and
darkness.
That's the cross that Jesus was talking about when He said, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross." Not our daily problems. Not any little silver cross on a chain
that serves as a reminder that God loves us. That’s the sort of cross Peter
tried to talk Jesus out of taking up.
Reading from Matthew 16:21, "Jesus began to show His disciples
that He must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and
scribes, and be killed...,... Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying,
"God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you."
Peter, the disciple, rebuked Jesus, His teacher. He took the Son of God on one side, like a mother with a naughty child, and scolded Him, ‘God forbid,
Jesus, you shouldn't talk that way... I'm warning you, no good will come of this’. Jesus
responds, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting
your mind not on divine things but on human things."
We are talking, then, of the cross as a divine thing, not as
a human thing. As a human thing the cross is an example of man’s total
failure. As a divine thing it is a sign of God’s glory. As a human thing it is foolishness. As a divine thing it is
the place of salvation. As a human thing it offers darkest despair. As a divine thing it symbolizes victorious hope.
Bearing in mind that Jesus is calling Peter to look upon the Cross
from a Divine rather than a human perspective, what might it mean for us to ‘Take up our Cross’?
There’s a song in Disney’s Lion King movie where Simba
sings, “I just can’t wait to be King.” That’s part of
the problem. Peter couldn’t wait to be king. So Jesus puts him in his place. ‘Get behind me, get in line, you are not the boss here, that is a
devilish design, you are not the one to tell me what is and what isn’t God’s will’.
What are the desires of our hearts?
What do we want out of life? What are we planning for ourselves? For our homes, our families, our children? Remember
the lion in the Wizard of Oz? “If I were the King of the Forest!” What would the forest look like if you were King?
Now here is the hardest thing. To
take up our cross means, forget about it. Let it go. To take up our Cross means all that we want out of life, has to be erased. To
take up the Cross requires emptying ourselves of all ambition and desire. Losing our life in order to find it.
Picture it this way. On
that torturous road that led up to Calvary, once the Cross was placed upon Christ’s shoulders, nothing
else mattered. It was too late. There
was no turning back. Everything else in life was jeopardized. He stumbled along that road for one purpose. A Divine purpose.
All human scheming and planning and hope was at an end.
From the Divine Perspective
the Cross is the place of surrender. The Cross is the place where “What
we want” and “What God requires of us” collide. The Cross is
the place that calls us to deep commitment. The Cross is the place where we are
challenged to set our minds on the divine purpose of life rather than evaluating life from a purely human perspective.
If we are not prepared to let go of ‘What we want!’ then it is not God's will that is being done in our lives, but our will. "Not my will,
but thine be done" was the whole thrust of Jesus agonized prayer in Gethsemane. Jesus did not want to suffer the agony of the Cross. He pleaded
that there may be another way. He said "Let
this cup of suffering pass from me."
But a god-forsaken world could only be saved by one who knew what it
was to be god-forsaken. A world of darkness and pain and suffering could only
be redeemed by one who was prepared to travel through the hurt and break on through, in victorious reliance on God's power,
to the resurrection side.
So here is the challenge that ‘Taking up our Cross’ offers
to our religious life. Are we just looking for a religious experience that offers
a warm fuzzy spiritual message and sends us on our way thinking that because we feel all right that somehow the world is going
to be all right? Or do we want our lives to have a redemptive impact upon our
world?
Churches lose their way and fall apart, not because of a lack of resources,
or people-power, or financial support, or enthusiasm, or abundance of meetings, but because in our materialistic 'I need it
now' self-centered, throwaway culture, there is no room for the cross. The message
that comes to us, all the way from the corridors of the Whitehouse to the guy on welfare buying a Lottery ticket at Comac
says "Indulge yourself" not "Deny yourself."
There are many who will seek out a church because of what they can
get out of it, who walk with Christ as long as doing so seems to parallel their personal ambitions or lifestyle choices. But how do we react to the Cross of Jesus Christ? In
the same manner as Peter? ‘Now come on Jesus, You can’t be serious.
Take up a Cross. Get Real!’
Here’s the bottom line. Taking
up our Cross equates with complete trust that God's will is better than our will. It
takes a willingness to go wherever, be whatever, do whatever God asks of us without the qualification of asking either, “What’s
in it for us?” or "How much will this cost?" The qualification for discipleship
has always been the same - a prayerful placing of our lives into the hands of a loving God, and a complete surrender of our
wills to the will of Jesus Christ.
“What does it cost?”
All that we are and all that we have.
Whatever we keep to ourselves is lost.
"For
those who want to save their lives will lose it."
“What’s in it for us?”
If we are prepared, by the grace of God, to say "Yes, I will take up
my cross, whatever that cross may personally mean for me" - if we seek to live every day praying, "Not my will, but thine
be done" - then we will be living our lives from a divine perspective rather than an earthly one.
And I honestly don’t know exactly where that will lead you or
how such a commitment will express itself in your life. What I know for sure
is that Jesus calls us to take up our Cross and follow, and that any objection to such a notion is not rooted in the Spirit
of God, but in the spirit of this world, a spirit Jesus rebuked by saying to one if his closest and most loyal friends, “Get
behind me, Satan.”
I trust also that, when Jesus talks of losing our lives in order to
find true life, He knew exactly what He was asking of us. For although as He
walked Calvary’s Road, it was a moment of complete abandonment.
It led to new life and resurrection.
What sort of life do you want? One
that takes you on a journey from the womb to the tomb? That’s life from
an earthly perspective. But from a Divine perspective we are talking about life
that is lived from before the womb to far beyond the tomb.
The place where that Divine life became
a reality was the place of the Cross.
So I invite you today to come to the Cross of Jesus Christ, not just
in hope of salvation but as a place of surrender.
I invite you to come to the Cross of Jesus Christ, not simply that
you may be saved (although there is no other place in all creation where you may find such a wonderful salvation), but because
you want your life to have a redemptive impact on the life of this hurting and needy world.
I invite you to come to the Cross of Jesus Christ, because through
the Cross you shall no longer be part of the problem, but a part of the solution.
I invite you to come to the Cross, because Jesus tells all would-be
disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me".
By the grace of God
May there be a surrendering of our
lives to God,
So that God can do God's work,
In God's way,
In the lives of God's people.
AMEN
Rev.
Adrian J Pratt
