7/22/26- Carrying Your Cross

Hey, there! How has your week been? I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to take a little bit of time today to write about the idea of believers carrying their own crosses. It comes from Matthew 16:24 and the verses following it: “Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. 25 “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. 26 “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” Now, I understand that the phrase doesn’t always need to literally mean “take up your cross,” but it very much can, has, and does carry that meaning for someone every day. I have a soft spot in my heart for Christians in Nigeria; do you know how many of them have been murdered in the last twenty years? The numbers are uncertain, but estimates tend to sit comfortably in the tens of thousands. Now, I understand that tens of thousands of lives are not a large number in the grand scheme of things- the U.S. alone contains roughly 330 million of the world's population of about 8 billion- but numbers don’t matter: people do. Our brothers and sisters do. Whether you believe attacks are intentionally targeted at Christians or are simply a haphazard by-product of terrorism is irrelevant; there are many Christians who live from day to day uncertain if some extremists will roll in, kill husbands, violate wives, and brutalize children. It is sickening. (By the way, if you want to find more information about how you can help, check out:https://equippingthepersecuted.org/) These people, our family across the sea, are required daily to deny themselves, take up their (possibly literal) cross, and follow Jesus. I have heard horrific stories of orphanages being attacked and of children being gunned down in the street for promoting and standing by the gospel of Christ.

What about us?

If you know me, you know that I wear a cross around my neck; a chunky, unpolished, little wooden cross. I made it myself (though that isn’t a marvelous accomplishment) from the root of a tree. I attached it to some paracord via a repurposed paperclip and it has hardly left my neck for the last year. I wear it to remind me of my calling. I wear it to remind myself of how dearly God loves me. I wear it so that, even though it seems like everyone has a cross on them where I live, mine may, through my words and deeds, help to remind somebody else of how much God loves them. I wear it to remind myself to stay faithful. To almost anybody else, they might see it, barely register it’s there, and keep moving. To me, though, that little cross has weight. Not literal weight- it’s at most a couple of ounces- but emotional weight. I’ve worn a cross on and off for a lot of my life, but I used to wear them with a calloused attitude; I didn’t attribute the proper weight to it, what it represents. I probably still don’t. To be clear, I’m not proposing some sort of idolatrous cross worship; think for a second about what a cross is. Yes, it is the symbol understood by much of the world to represent Christianity, but what was it originally? A torture device. An instrument of humiliation and death- excruciating, painful, death. (Fun fact: the word excruciating comes from the Latin excruciatus, literally, “out of the cross.” Yep, a word used to describe the depths of human suffering derives its root from the most famous Roman execution device.) The cross could and would regularly take days to kill its victims. Do you know how it killed them? Well, it varied; some died from shock, some died from blood loss (depending on how thoroughly they were tortured prior to being mounted to the cross), some had their heart give out, and some died of asphyxiation. The asphyxiation in particular is gruesome because of the way that our lungs work; due to the angles and strain that would be placed on a man hanging on a cross, it would cause the lungs to forcibly expand if the body was hanging slack. Usually, lung expansion is good, but the problem is that this position didn’t allow the lungs to decompress; to do so, the strain had to be alleviated. How was that done? By forcing yourself up, leveraging yourself- in Jesus’ case- off of the large nails jammed through your legs and hands. As you can imagine, this would have been quite painful, and could only be endured for so long; this was one of the crueler aspects of the cross: victims would have to fight to breath the whole time they hung, till exhaustion or something else killed them.

It was a horrific way to go.

I share all of this to make a point; a lot of us don’t carry any sort of cross. I’m not saying we all have to be martyred or that we all have to suffer unimaginable agony, but a lot of us aren’t even willing to suffer a little bit of reproach or discomfort for the name of Christ. Throughout the New Testament (Acts, Philippians, James, and 1 Peter come to mind), we are told to be joyful when we suffer for the name of Christ, when we are allowed to partake in His suffering. The man who wrote the majority of the New Testament scriptures, Paul, spent much of his life in and out of jail, beaten, hunted, and was even stoned. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Hebrews 12:4, and it goes like this: “You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin…” It was written to an audience who was in grave danger of turning their backs on Christ for security and comfort in the old way of doing things, and the exhortation still rings true almost 2,000 years later.

 A lot of us are unwilling to represent Him when things are going well, let alone when we are faced with trouble for His sake. Or, if we are willing to represent Him, it tends to be more academic; we may be willing to verbalize what we believe, but fail to practice it consistently. 

To be clear, I don’t mean perfectly, just consistently. Everyone has struggles- the Lord knows I do- but I am referring to the practice of ongoingly making decisions that are contrary to the clear teaching of scripture. Our words don’t mean much if we are unwilling to follow through with them. What cross do you pick up every day; if you weren’t a believer, would you look any different than you do now? By how much? It is easy for us to say that we love God and love Jesus, but what are we actually doing with that love? Real love demands movement. If love doesn’t do anything, then on a practical level that love isn’t anything.

I mentioned the Christians in Nigeria earlier, and I want to step back to that for a second. Their love for the Lord, although tragically displayed, is evident in their faithfulness to Him, even until death. This world doesn’t deserve them, and one day their voices will call out to God, pleading with Him to judge those who hated and killed them for His sake. (Revelation 6:9-11) But if you and I aren’t in Nigeria, if we aren’t a missionary or street preacher or anything like that, how is our love made evident? 

Through our willingness to die to ourselves, whether or not anyone else is trying to kill us. That’s part of the point of the Matthew 16 passage I quoted at the beginning of this post; nothing can have more worth to us than Christ, whether it is something in our life or life itself. He demonstrated for us the lengths to which we all must be willing to go by enduring the agony of the cross–some of which I described earlier–and we must continually look to Him and strive to emulate that resolve in our own lives. 

You might ask: “What does that look like, specifically?”

I would answer your question with a few other questions: What do you ultimately fixate on? What do you talk about? Is the word of God far from your heart and lips? Do you demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,  goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? Paul teaches us about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:25–all rooted in love–and tells us all about what love is in 1 Corinthians 13. Additionally,  Jesus summarizes what love does in Matthew 22:37-40; how are you and I lining up with that? We have a great big book that tells us how we ought to live our lives before a holy and righteous God; what are we doing with it? If we won’t pursue the Kingdom of God and His righteousness when it is easy, what makes us think we will when things get hard?

I won’t presume to tell you that everything you and I are doing is wrong, or that efforts made in pursuit of faithfulness don’t count. I just want to push for more integrity in my own walk and those around me. Our lives all have an invisible expiration date on them, a finite shelf life, and then we’ll be gone. Eternity is a very, very long time, and while I want to hear “well done, good and faithful servant; come, enter into your Master’s joy,” myself, I also want very badly to help others hear it as well. My heart breaks whenever I hear another story of the sacrifices made by our brothers and sisters around the world, and it makes me ask myself; could I do the same? Am I raising a family that would, if it came down to it? Or are we too attached to comfort and safety to give, even a little, for the cause of Christ if it means putting us out of our way? These are questions that frequently cross my mind. My little necklace isn’t much in itself, but it’s a daily reminder to me that–while I am frequently inadequate–I have a responsibility to uphold. 

I hope that this has been at least a little bit thought provoking to you; it’s not a super organized sort of post, just something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. If it has struck you at all, take some time to think about it and ask yourself: how am I carrying my cross? Look into the scriptures and see what it looks like, or remind yourself of what it means- I don’t think we can be too diligent in our study of God's word. Whenever you happen to be reading this, I hope you’re having a great day, and I look forward to seeing you again soon!