Choosing Your Cross Wisely

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

This is a famous quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the nature of following Christ. It's famous, I believe, because it stands in vast contrast to the contemporary perception of what it means to be a Christ follower. And so while Jesus himself can say very pointedly that, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," many of his followers still think that choice is somehow involved when it comes to living a sacrificial life.

Now don't get me wrong, there is choice involved but the misconception is in where that choice lies. This misconception is not only reserved to Christ followers either. In fact, this misconception is the one of the main reasons many non-Christians don't follow Christ. I would say that people are mistaken into thinking that they can choose whether they will live a sacrificial life or not when the real question is what you will sacrifice for.

This my rather long-winded way of stating that everyone will sacrifice their life for something and your choice, whether you feel like you have that choice or not, is to pick what that will be. To sacrifice your life for something is to devote yourself to one thing to the detriment of all other things - it is the proverbial cross you have chosen to carry. Most of the time all of the "other things" may not necessarily feel neglected. But when those things come into competition with that which you devote yourself to, the other things will loss out.

It may not be immediately apparent what your proverbial cross is but I believe with most assurance that you do have one whether you know it or not. And once we have reframed the argument from whether you will sacrifice to what you will sacrifice to, some really interesting conversations can happen. The fundamental question really centers around whether you are sacrificing your life for the right thing. This is a subjective question and only you have the perogative to answer that (because it was your choice, in the first place, what that thing was).

The second question that can then emerge is whether what you are devoting yourself to is really worthy of such a sacrifice. More often than not, its been my observation that people devote themselves to things that are not really worthy of such a sacrifice - they've either undervalued their own life or overvalued what they are devoting themselves to. And its not just that people have been asking these questions and coming up with the wrong answer; I think they have never even bothered to think about it in the first place. The questions have never been asked at all.

These questions are probably worth our effort and time though. They concern themselves with the ultimate point and goal of our life. And while every worthy devotion will ask for your entire life, not everything that asks for your entire life is worthy. In Christ, we follow a God that thought long and hard about the sacrifice that he made for us. On the night he was betrayed he sat in a garden and asked these very questions. And when he got up to face his accusers we know by that action that he considered that which he was passionate about was worth his life. In Scripture it says that he carried our transgressions and died on a tree for our sins - so that we would separated from God no longer. In the garden, Jesus decided that being with you was worth dying for. The cross is his resounding "YES".

We have a incredible example of sacrifice to follow in Jesus. A valuable question to ask today is not whether we will sacrifice but, rather, is what we're sacrificing for more worthy of our lives than Jesus is. The weight of his life and his sacrifice makes it hard to answer that question in the affirmative but that, of course, is up to each of us to decide.