Day 16: Pick Up Your Cross and Follow

Come Before Him in Worship: We step into today with the assurance that we have a High Priest who has gone before us. Whatever the day brings, our King has faced it first. His commandments are not burdensome, for He Himself carried the burden we could not. It is His example that sets the context for us to imitate. It is His Spirit that empowers us to do so. Thank Him for the treasure it is to simply know Him. Pause, even before you read on, to allow your heart to be moved by His greatness and His beauty. He is the treasure in the field that makes all else worth turning aside from. Don’t move into more content before giving your heart a chance to be captivated afresh.

“Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16:24-25

Devotion: Jesus was our example of what it meant to deny “self.” Jesus and the Father are one and Jesus left heaven to come to earth to make us one with each other and with Him and the Father, through the sacrifice of His life, the ultimate denial of “self” (John 17:21,23). This divine union was the glorious purpose in the heart of God for His people from the foundation of the world! It is for the purpose of bringing His people into the personal and actual experience of this oneness that our Lord calls us so earnestly and repeatedly to abandon ourselves to Him.

Maybe you have given up much to follow Jesus. You have believed in Him, and worked for Him and loved Him! But maybe there are still two wills, two interests, two lives warring within you: His and yours (your “self.”). Jesus offers us a life lived in His power and strength and love, a life of abundance and freedom, but it’s only into an empty heart that His streams of living water can flow. He can’t come and fill us if we are full of ourselves.

We live in a world that trains us to focus on and live for ourselves (our goals, our happiness, our time, our sexual ethic, our money, our glory, etc.). Can we not see that this has led us to a place of confusion, depression and darkness? Jesus said “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). He holds out that life to us here. Will you say “yes, Lord,” trust that He will enable you to put down your “self,” and then pick up your cross to follow Him?

Respond in Prayer: Jesus, what an incredible leader You are! Thank You for modeling for me the life I’m to live. Thank You for showing me how to do it before calling me to do it. Who is like You, my Lord and God, that You would lay aside glory to instruct me in my weakness?

How can I pick up my cross today? What are you calling me to lay down, that my hands would be open? How can I walk just as You walked? When my soul wants to say “No,” but I hear You say, “Yes,” teach me how to take the first step into obedience. May my will and dreams be absorbed into the delight of following You. Your kingdom come, my King. Your will be done, my Lord. And when this leads me into unexpected spaces, bend me to believe. For you are worth it all.