Matthew 16:24 Part II: Take Up Your Cross
Matthew 16:24 - “Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wants to follow after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.’”
In this passage, Jesus calls His people to do 3 things if they want to be true followers of Christ:
Deny yourself
Take up your cross
Follow Jesus
Over the next few weeks, the blog will focus on each of these and how to practically live them out as believers.
In the first post of the series, I discussed what it means to “deny yourself”. You can find that post by clicking this link. The post below breaks down what Jesus meant when He calls us to “take up your cross”.
Jesus tells His disciples that the second prerequisite for following Him - after denying themselves - is to take up their cross. In the context of Matthew 16:24, the cross did not signify faith in Jesus since He had not yet been crucified. So the disciples would not have associated the cross with the resurrection or eternal life as believers do today.
They would, however, consider the cross a symbol of death by crucifixion. During those times in ancient Rome, crucifixion on a cross was a common, cruel punishment for offenders convicted of the worst crimes. Jesus’ followers would have considered a cross-bearer a dead man walking toward his own crucifixion. So why would Jesus tell them to take up their cross if it would seem to the outside world that they were criminals by doing so?
Of course, Jesus didn’t mean that His disciples would have to take up a cross in the literal sense. To the outside world, it may look like they are giving up their lives, but Jesus was not calling them to death as felons but to eternal life in Him. They were not being forced to take up their crosses as convicted offenders but were rather invited to willingly bear their cross for the sake of Christ just as He would soon do for the sake of the world (John 19:17).
They were to put to death any plans that they had made for themselves and give their lives completely over to Him - crucifying their worldly sins and idols and revealing their faithfulness to Him alone. A call to bear one’s cross as part of following Jesus was a call to be as submitted to Christ as the condemned criminal was to his death, no matter what this act looked like to the rest of the world.
For believers today, we are called to the same thing: to disregard the world’s perception of us as Christians and obey Jesus’ command to take up our cross. Here, it is important to consider that one cannot effectively bear their cross without first denying oneself - the two go hand-in-hand. When we deny ourselves, we claim that our earthly life as we know it is futile, and we are no longer fixated on controlling it. Beyond that, when we take up our cross, we reveal that we are completely and utterly submitted to a life of faithfulness to the One who saves. Nothing in the world - not even our own lives - should matter to us more than obedience to Jesus.
There are many examples throughout the New Testament of what it looks like to bear your cross. The book of James is one of the more practical books about living a cross-bearing life. The following are just a few examples of how Christians can show the world that they are submitting to a godly lifestyle instead of following the world’s ways:
Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger when someone calls out sin in your life (James 1:19,20)
Be doers of the Word and not hearers only (James 1:22)
Control your tongue (James 1:26, 3:8)
Keep yourself unstained by the world (James 1:27b)
Reveal the faith you have in Jesus Christ by your works (James 2:26)
Do not harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your heart (James 3:14-16)
Submit to God and resist the Devil (James 4:7-10)
Be patient (James 5:8)
Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another (James 5:16)
Turn a sinner from the error of his way (James 5:19-20)
Many people assume that the life of a Christian should be extremely easy and comfortable. Still, as we have seen in our study of Matthew 16:24 so far, the life of a true believer is one of the most difficult to live. Just as the rest of the world around us is tempted to give in to sin on a moment-by-moment basis, we are too. But we should remember the calling of Jesus to deny ourselves and take up our cross in those instances. It shouldn’t be so simple for the Christian to give in to the sin that lures us every second of every day. We should fight against the sins of our flesh.
“And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
This is the cross we are called to bear: To deny the world of its hold on us and crucify our flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24). It is not a simple or easy task; it is a burden. That cross weighs us down as we walk toward Calvary following our Savior Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God, that we are not relying on our own strength to bear this cross. We are given the strength of Christ (Philippians 4:13).
If bearing the cross is so hard and painful and makes us look foolish to the outside world, why should we willingly submit to bearing it? Because the cross precedes the crown. Just as Jesus had to bear His cross to take His crown, we are called to the same. The apostle Paul tells us that the “sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). None of the persecution we face in life will be remembered when we enter the presence of God the Father and God the Son in glory.
Taking up your cross is a high but matchless calling. Nothing in this world is worth passing up eternal life. Christ is claiming authority when He calls for our self-denial and cross-bearing. When we do these two things, we give allegiance to Him instead of ourselves, setting us up for an easier path of following Him toward eternal life.
