Many are drawn to Jesus for comfort, healing, and forgiveness. yet it as "Christ crucified" we find him disturbing, disrupting our expectations and dreams about God. All is well until we understand where he is going. Then “following Jesus" becomes our greatest dilemma.

As the cross moves us to contemplate the death of a “self" and what it might mean to us personally, the cross becomes just as much a horror to us as it was to the twelve disciples. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die". Only faith, the very thing the cross will give those who are willing to be willing, only faith can see the true joy of abiding in Him who hung on a cross precisely because He willed himself to abide with us. Such love is more rare and yet more satisfying than we imagine.

Following Jesus teaches us that getting close to our enemies out of love for them is as dangerous to us as it was to him. We too will face humiliation, rejection, and suffering. We come to him for the forgiveness of sins, for him to bear them in himself. Then, being forgiven, we are startled to learn that we too must bear the sins of others. We have both in Christ, the death of self and a new creation where the many become one in spirit through Him.

For myself, I was doing okay until the message started to sink in. The gospel is good news to the suffering and bad news to those who despise the suffering rather than the sin. That has been and remains my own experience, my own battle with self and need for the faith that only Christ can inspire in me. I run from suffering. Yet, I need the very thing I fear the most, to abide with him at Calvary.

For some time Galatians 2.20 has fascinated me, challenged me, troubled me, and been my hope.

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."

Is this really the experience I want everyday? Is this the Jesus I want to be with and want to be like, He who is crucified to the world and the world to him? (Gal. 6.14)

Who do we know who can say with the apostle Paul, “From now on let no one trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."? (Gal. 6.17). Yet this was not meant to be the way of a few. He taught that all discipleship was bearing the burdens of others (Gal. 6.3), “so fulfilling the law of Christ". In doing so we are compelled to identify with their sinful state as wounded healers.

And along this same line is a profound paradox to contemplate, again only resolved by faith, not by logic:

“We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you." II Cor. 4.7-12