This morning I want to take us on a journey to the cross. And I don’t know how long this journey will take for each of us to get there. As far as my leading us along the path through preaching only God knows. The travelogue will take a couple of weeks anyway you look at it. But your actual journey could take only days or weeks. It could take you months or years or even an entire lifetime to receive the truth of your journey to the cross with Christ. However the sad reality is that some of you will never receive the truth of your journey to the cross because you won’t believe it or you can’t receive it. Nonetheless, that’s a risk I’m willing to take – to lead you on a journey to the cross.
You see, Jesus calls us to come after Him, to come to Him and deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. Furthermore, He challenges us with the idea that if we “wish to save our life we will lose it” because in His journey outlined in Philippians 2:6, even though he existed in the form of God, He did not regard equality with God something to be “grasped,” held on to. He didn’t attempt to “save” His life. That’s Jesus challenge to you and me – that if we try to save our life we’ll lose it, but if we’ll lose our life for His we’ll find real life. According to the context of this passage Jesus both warned and instructed us with these words on our journey to the cross.
Folks, we’re on a daily journey to the cross and our journey will mirror the journey of Jesus as He went to the cross. Our cross will correlate with His cross. What I mean by this is that we need to come to an experiential awareness of the cross – our death, our burial, our resurrection, our ascension, & our seating with God in Christ. Some people have never heard the message of the cross, the whole message. I think if you’re honest, you’ll remember that in almost every message you’ve ever heard about what happened at the cross, you’ve only heard about Christ’s death. You haven’t heard about your death. At least if you have, it’s not been a very meaningful message that you’ve heard. So I think it’s fair to say that many Christians have never heard the message that they were crucified with Christ. Well, how do we get started on “Our Journey to the Cross?”
I. How We Get Started On the Journey
Jesus said we must come after him, we must deny ourselves. Well, I would say the journey of a 1,000 miles begins with one step. One step of faith. In the very beginning you must come to realize that in your sinfulness you need God’s forgiveness. That’s why Christ died. He died to forgive you of your sins. And God’s Word says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. There is none that is righteous in the sight of God, no not one. However, Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that he was buried and rose again the third day. He died that our sins might be covered forever.
And the one step of faith you must take is to come to Him and believe that he died for your sins and that admit that you need his forgiveness. You must deny yourself by totally surrendering your sin to Him. By faith, by believing, by trusting that what he says He will do. And by receiving Christ Jesus as your Savior and Lord, you are forgiven of your sins. That’s the beginning of the journey. Because at that moment He forgives you of your sins AND He gives you His life – a great exchange takes place – your life for His life. And you are on the Journey to the Cross with Jesus.
Now let’s talk about:
II. How We Continue On the Journey
We continue on the journey according to Jesus by taking up our cross daily. We continue in the same way we entered in, by faith. As Colossians 2:6 says, “As you have received. . .“ To start with you received Him as Savior and Lord, you had to totally surrender your sin to Him by faith for forgiveness &andHe gave you His life. There was a great exchange then and there if you were sincere. Then you have to go on walking or journeying or living the Christian life and there are two ways to continue: by faith allowing Christ to be your life, following Him, obeying Him and letting Him life out His life through you, by walking in the Spirit – OR – The other option is walking after the Flesh, that is, to try to live the Christian life in your own self-sufficiency. Flesh is living out of your own resources with or without God’s help to do so. That’s why we have to continue on “Our Journey to the Cross.” We must be brought again and again to total surrender or brokenness until every aspect of our self-sufficiency, is crucified and surrendered.
A high school football player illustrates how the facade of the flesh keeps us from allowing Christ to be our life. The big game was coming up and the cheerleaders decided to have a pep rally to fire up the guys. You know how football players are when they get on the helmet and pads and after all that weight lifting. They see themselves as sort of invincible. They seem like mighty men of valor who can’t be conquered. Well, they set up the pep rally and decided to have a contest which involved eating a carmel covered apple. Whoever ate this apple in the shortest amount of time with the fewest bites would win. So the players lined up. On your mark, get set, go! These guys took a mighty chomp – they thought, “In two bites max!” Within seconds they were all spitting it out! Why? Because it was a carmel covered onion. Now that analogy is good because many of us are carmel covered onion. We’ve covered and clothed our fleshliness with a facade of spirituality.
Of course the truth is we’ve already been crucified with Christ according to Galatians 2:20. . . If we would allow the Lord to live out His life from our spirit, because we’re one spirit with the Lord according to 1 Corinthians 6:17. You see, we’re not experiencing the life of the Lord because we don’t understand we’ve been crucified with Christ. For example, if I put one million dollars in the bank because I took pity on you in that you were starving and it was in your name, but you never heard about it, you could be a homeless pauper and starve to death even though you were a millionaire simply because you had never heard. Well, that’s similar to what happens to believers. Some have heard this message, but they don’t believe it. If I put that million dollars in the bank and I told you about it, but you didn’t believe me, what good would it do? You could still starve to death as a millionaire. In a similar way, many Christians, even though they say they believe that the Word of God is true, that it’s true in every aspect from Genesis to Revelation, they say they believe it, but still don’t believe that it’s they who have died. That it’s no longer they who live, but it’s Christ who lives in them (Galatians 2:20). And why wouldn’t you want to believe this?
One reason is that you may not be feeling or experiencing Christ as your functional source of life and you may know you’re functioning in their own self-sufficiency, your own strength, your own power. Another reason is, there’s a sense that we have to live a perfectly sinless life if Christ is our life. In other words people don’t see that “actions” or “behavior” is dictated by the soul and that the life is in the spirit. So, when they see that they’re still misbehaving they may be thinking, “Well Christ can’t be my life, I must still be experiencing only my own self-sufficiency. So feelings and behavior may lead some people to believe that – their feelings and behavior, rather than the Word of God.
Now, it’s important to understand that the life of Christ that’s in our spirit as 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, “He that is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.” This life that is in our spirit doesn’t control the soul, even though many people say that Christ controls you. That word control is misleading because what it really means is, Christ’s life influences us, empowers us, and constrains us. The word control shouldn’t be used even though the NIV uses this word rather frequently.
The third reason people don’t experience Christ as life I think is found in terms of explanation in Luke 9.23-25. . . “let him deny himself” doesn’t mean we suppress our feelings or we pretend that what we want is not what we want or that we don’t exist in some magical way. When the Bible talks about denying ourselves it probably means deny ourselves the right to reign, the right to be in control or in charge. In other words, be willing to subject ourselves or submit ourselves to the life that is in Christ, the life in our spirit, to life in the Spirit. Then Jesus goes on to say, “For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he will save it.” That sounds a little bit like double talk doesn’t it? But it’s a profound statement. The Bible teaches that we must lose our life if we want to find what we’re really looking for. If we want to find real life, if we want to save life we have to lose ours. Now, what does that mean? Well, it’s important that we understand the extreme sacrifice, the extreme loss, that the losing of our life can entail. You see, everything we think life is, is not necessarily life.
Christ is our life and in order to continue our journey to the cross we’ll have to come to understand more fully what this loss of life is and our need to experience the brokenness of our self sufficiency. This we’ll look more deeply into next Sunday.
The question is are you on the journey? Have you begun by accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior from your sins? Are you willing to continue on the journey? Will you accept the truth that Christ is your life and allow him to do whatever is necessary to save you from your Self, your self-sufficiency by taking you to the cross with Him?
(Much of the content of this sermon series came from a study of "The Grace Life Conference" Audio Tape 5 by Lee LeFebre, Exchanged Life Ministries Aurora, CO.)
