Taking up Our Cross
Scripture Reading — Luke 9:23-27
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
—Luke 9:23
Our friendship with God in Jesus is the greatest relationship on earth. And yet it is often separated by our refusal to submit to God’s authority in our lives. We’d rather exercise our will instead of doing God’s will. The spirit of self-will says, “I want to do it my way, and I will!”
Jesus provides a remedy for this disease when he calls us to take up our cross daily.
The cross is where we give up all that we are clinging to in this world. The cross is where our self-life is immobilized. This may seem restricting and be painful to our selfish ambitions, but as we obey the commands of Jesus in faith and in the power of his Spirit, we discover the greatest freedom and joy imaginable.
As we take up our cross daily, we enter into God’s way of doing things and are freed of our self-will. This is not an achievement but a process that we enter into daily, with God’s help and in his strength, because we have a way of reverting to our old nature.
Are you willing to surrender yourself completely into God’s hands?
If you answer “Yes,” you are uniting with the Spirit of our Lord Jesus, whom God the Father sent to be the one Redeemer of the world.
Father, the safest place to be is in your hands. We humbly come before you and lay our self-will at the cross. Take charge and lead us on, we pray. Amen.
About the author — John Kuperus
Since he was young, John Kuperus has had a passion that everyone would know Jesus. Spreading the good news that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15) is very important to him. To be better equipped for missions, John attended Reformed Bible College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He applied these skills with marketplace evangelism in a business he started in Sussex, New Jersey. This calling continued to follow him, so John attended seminary and became a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, serving a church in Ontario for eight years. Currently he serves as a missionary for Youth with a Mission (YWAM). He witnesses Jesus changing lives as people walk out of the darkness into the light. John is married to Helen, and they have seven children.
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