Deny Yourself and Take Up Your Cross

This week we think about giving expensively with our open hands by studying the ways that Jesus calls us to die to ourselves as we follow Him.” 

STUDY THE SCRIPTURE

Click here to access the reading from Luke 9:21-27

For more help use this Bible Study method

REFLECTION

Secret Ambition

by Mary McGinnis

Jesus was the ONLY perfect human who ever walked the face of this earth.

When He did miracles, like feeding over 5,000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, He did it to care for the people around Him freely, generously, and extravagantly. He REFUSED to use His power, care, and generosity as a tool to advance His own agenda.  In fact, the very things that could have brought Him fame and influence, He told His followers to TELL NO ONE! 

And when He chose to love those around Him, it often cost Him dearly!

Doesn’t that seem counter intuitive? Didn’t He want people to follow Him? Instead, He seems to warn them with demotivating, hard words like the one in our reading today.

“If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself daily, take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

What? Who wants to sign up for that? Why did Jesus do and say such things?

He had a bigger picture in mind. “Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it!”

Jesus knew that the only way to live out His divine calling placed before Him by His Father was to go the way of the cross. 

Listen to this song about Jesus’ secret ambition  .

It would be a brutal, painful time of suffering that would ultimately lead to His death.  But He walked obediently to His Father because of His extravagant love for US!

He looked down through the ages and said, “I know that ________________(add name) needs my love and my forgiveness.”

Hebrews 12:2 says we are to keep: “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

You see, you don’t lose a seed when you plant it, though it seems dead and buried. When you plant it, it is set free to be what it was always intended to be.

PRAYER PRACTICE - Take a prayer walk today and consider the call to take up your cross and follow Jesus. Where is Jesus leading you? What cross is he calling you personally, to carry? How are you or will you give expensively in obedience to Jesus?