Thought for 22 April

 Luke 9:23-26

Then Jesus said to the crowd, ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross daily and follow me.

  If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it, but if you give up your life for me, you will find true life.  And how do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose or forfeit your own soul in the process.  If a person is ashamed of me and my message, I, the Son of Man, will be ashamed of that person when I return in my glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels’.

The reading selected for today is a wee bit longer than the usual but should be familiar to most who read these articles.  Like so many passages of the bible, we will have heard it many times before and lots of us will be able to recite it from memory because we have heard it so often.

The bible differs greatly from other books.  With most, they are read and then set aside because once read, there is little need to go back to them, at least, not for a while.  With the bible, it can and should be returned to on a frequent, if not daily basis.  Every important character within its pages like Noah,  like David, like Samson, like Moses have serious weaknesses but God still used them to achieve his purpose with only Jesus being without sin.  Even though the Old Testament and New Testament are vastly different from each other, the message of the New Testament can be found in the Old and the message of the Old Testament is fully revealed in the New, as the prophecies about Jesus and the Law of Moses are fulfilled.

Unless Jesus is central in our lives, any aspiration we have in terms of status, career, social standing or anything else along those lines is futile and we should never be reluctant to acknowledge to ourselves and others that this is the case.

Jesus tells us ‘we are to shoulder our cross daily’.  In many of these articles, we have read that following Jesus is not necessarily the easy option.  We all face challenges as to how we should react to certain situations or how we should behave and the correct response to these challenges is not always the automatic choice.  It is not enough to see ourselves as Christian for that hour or so on a Sunday morning when we attend our place of worship or tune in to a service of worship online or on tv, ‘we are to shoulder our cross daily’ in all that we say and do, every single day, morning ‘til night.

The need to refer to scripture often reminded me of the old hymn, ‘tell me the old, old story’ which contains meaningful lines like ‘tell me the story simply, as to a little child, for I am weak and weary, and helpless and defiled’ like ‘tell me the story often, for I forget so soon, the early dew of morning, has passed away at noon’ like ‘tell me the old, old story, of Jesus and his love’.

Prayer - Loving Heavenly Father, more and more we want to surrender our lives to you, to take up our  cross daily as a willing sacrifice and to cry out, "Thy will not mine be done."  We pray that our old lives without your presence will remain firmly nailed to the Cross. May we submit to your leading, your teaching and your guiding in all that we say and do. In your gracious name we pray, Amen