One of the great things about being a teacher is that you are not required to come up with any new ideas. Unlike an inventor who must break the mold of conventional thought, a teacher appropriates wisdom for where it can be found and shares it with their audience in a way that hopefully speaks to them where they live. Most of what I write here is not original to me. It’s lessons I’ve learned from others, reformatted to hopefully share the same truth in a different light.
I write all this as a disclaimer because what I’m about to share is the result of listening to someone else. In a recent sermon the pastor of our young adults ministry shared that if you want to learn about Christ, look to the Cross. The Cross is a practical example of every aspect of Christ’s character; His love, His justice, His mercy, and His grace are all on display at the Cross. The pureness of His holiness and its complete incompatibility with our sin is conclusively related on the Cross. Our equality before God as sinners is shown in the fact that one payment was made for all. God’s receptivity to prayer, His completeness forgiveness for those that call Him Lord and Savior, and His abolition of the legal requirements for salvation are all shown through His sacrificial death on the Cross.
And so when we say that our job as Christians is to “take up the Cross” maybe we shouldn’t think of it as just an obligation to bear the burdens of persecution and the perceived inconvenience of living to God’s standards and not our own. Maybe we should see it as a call to display all these attributes of Christ, wherever we go.
