Taking up your cross doesn’t have anything to do with financial worries, medical conditions, familial obligations, and other ordinary everyday stresses of life. These things are common to unbelievers and believers alike. The requirement to daily take up the cross is for those who would follow Jesus.

To follow Jesus, to be a believer, is to be in Jesus. In Jesus, the second Adam, we lived in His life, suffered in His death, rose in and with Him, and sit in and with Him in the heavenly place. In Him, we have our being. Therefore, the statement by Jesus to take up your cross means the cross that we’re to bear is the cross that He took up. It’s the only cross that matters.

To take up your cross, then, is about suffering, self-denial, and a willingness to die for a higher purpose. It’s about being slandered and persecuted for the sake of the gospel; for the welfare of others.

Everything that we do or say as we carry that cross is for the glory of God, even as scorn and ridicule are hurled our way.

Know too that taking up your cross is about sometimes falling under its weight. But it’s also about God’s grace to enable us to stand again and complete the mission.

Finally, to take up your cross, is to step into faith; the belief that all is worth enduring for the salvation of our own soul, and the souls of others.