daily java

Daily Java: Then he said to them all: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.’- Luke 9:23-24.

There is the picture you have of Jesus carrying the cross. And you have one of us as we carry our cross around through life, being obedient and sharing the sufferings of Jesus.

The only problem is that no one carries a cross around. At least not for long.

You are nailed to a cross. You are nailed to it and you die. Your career of carrying around a cross was extremely short.

When we take up our cross, we do not carry it around. We die. We give up our lives for Jesus and we die. We have given all we have to him and we are not, as far as the world is concerned, dead.

Now it is up to Jesus. He raises us to walk in a new life. Without him we are just dead. We have traded one set of circumstances for another.

But with him, we live. When we give our lives to him, we live.

Sometimes we work so hard trying to find our purpose or our design in life. We look so hard, but we find nothing that will fill that void.

That is because that void can be filled only by the One who made us. It is, what one called, a God shaped vacuum and only God will fill it. Everything else just gets sucked in with no purpose.

It was he who said, Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 10:39). When we give him our lives, he gives them back to us. Then we find them.

There really is no loss, since his life is forever. In order to get that, we give up pain, and sorrow, and futility, and purposelessness. We gain meaning in our lives and we gain a higher purpose than anything we could ever have without him.

And we gain God.