17 years ago, living in West Palm Beach, I was still too full of vinegar and a sense of my own possibilities and the methodologies of a corporate manager. The Lord looked at me and saw a spiritual father when there was not the slightest shred of evidence that that identity was latent within me.
To get me to it, he had to first kill my understanding of who I was, undress me – taking off the blue business suit – so that I could try on the strange-looking garments of a priest. He did it by stripping me of two years of effort in one quick meeting where I was handed my head on a platter.
This killing process is the most painful thing you’ll ever endure and looks like anything but the act of grace that it is. What does it mean to “pick up your cross and follow Jesus?” I suppose it’s like saying, “strap a gas chamber on your back” – the cross is an instrument of death.
It wasn’t the Romans who caused Jesus to be nailed to the cross. God is sovereign; that means it was His plan, His hammer, and His nails. Even the devil is God’s devil!
God is still nailing people to the cross every day – forming Christ in us. Of course we wriggle and want to get off, when what we need to do is go ahead and die so that He can resurrect us to our real identity.
If you’re on some painful cross today, consider the possibility that God put you there so that He can reveal His glory by showing the world you really are. Get the dying over with – Easter is around the corner!
(foto courtesy of
Jonathan Clark
)
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Seth,
Thanks for another great entry! “Get the dying over with.” Yes indeed. The Lord gave me a powerful revelation once between the difference of choosing to die willingly on our cross, or God having to send men to come and hasten our death. From John 19:
“Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that HE WAS ALREADY DEAD…”
Jesus chose to die, and as His disciples we should take our cue from the Master, otherwise God may permit the cruel hands of men to come to break our legs to hasten a death we should choose willingly. As you stated, LIFE follows death.
Mark
Maybe this is why I like the movie Die Hard. Great post.
Happy Easter
James
http://www.advancing.blogs.com