WE have the impression that comparatively few believers ever have attained to a full and correct idea of this divine life, as revealed in the word of God. Cross-bearing is quite commonly understood as the taking up of those forms of duty which burden us and give us pain. On the other hand, the entire Christian life is represented in the New Testament as a cross-bearing life—a form of life in which the cross is never laid aside. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Yet this form of life is represented as one in which the bearer is “kept in perfect peace,” and as the only one in which he can be thus kept. Under the pressure of the cross we find not pain, but rest. “Come unto me,” says Christ, “all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke [that is cross] upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke [cross] is easy, and my burden [cross] light.” The cross, we must bear in mind, is really taken up when, and only when, self-denial is complete and perfect; and this is the only state in which “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding,” can by any possibility keep our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. The individual who was to be crucified was required to take up his cross and bear it to the place of execution. In doing so he not only relinquished all the rights and privileges of citizenship, but consented to his own death, painful as it was to be. Hence, cross-bearing was taken by our Saviour, and the sacred writers of the New Testament, and also by all primitive believers, as emblematical of the true Christian life, the form of life of which there is an utter renunciation of all the rights and privileges of self-ownership, and an acceptance of the will of Christ as the absolute law of the entire being and activity, and his service as the form of life and activity which is to command supreme devotion. How impressively is this form of life represented by Paul, as exemplified in his own experience: “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God; who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Hear him once more: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” The same state is beautifully expressed in the following stanza of one of our hymns:—
“Jesus, I my cross have taken,
All to leave and follow thee;
Naked, poor, despised, forsaken,
Thou from hence my all shall be.” Two questions arise for your heart and mine, reader: Are our lives, in the true and scriptural sense, cross-bearing lives? Do we, under the pressure of the cross, find not pain but rest to our souls? Unless we can answer both of these questions in the affirmative, do not let us entertain the thought that we are bearing the cross after Jesus.—Divine Life.