To Take Up Your Cross!

The cross of Christ is not a trial or tribulation that we must endure, but a neccessity and a gift. The simple call to "Take up our cross and follow Jesus" is as important as teh call to "take up My yoke, for My burden is light." We are to both, take up our crosses, which mean suffering and rejection by the world, and to take up His yoke which means freedom from our burdens.

How is this possible? To carry his yoke which is light and carry the cross which was too heavy for Christ to even bare up the mountain to its resting place. Is it possible there is some hidden connection between the two?

I think it is commonly mistaken that you can have His yoke without the cost of the cross. And perhaps there are those who boast in their own afflictions and severe rigidity to the law who take up His cross pharisitically and without his yoke, thus doing it in their own mere humanistic endeavor.

But truly, you can not have the one without the other. To take up the cross we must take up the suffering and rejection of Christ, without the weight and power of the world. We cannot take up His cross any other way. We must believe and know that there is nothing but Christ in this. You must understand the henous nature we acted and still act against God and realize the suffering and rejection it took to spare you. Then we may begin to see the complex connection between the cross and the yoke. Understanding the wickedness of the human heart and the liberty God offers "through" his Son causes a man to both want to bare the cross he deserved and rejoice in the salvation he didn't.