Embracing the Cross

Intro

Bible Passage: Matthew 16:22–23

Greeting and introduce yourself

Pre-sermon prayer

One of my friends has been having a hard time with the youth at his Church lately. The other day they had a wedding and one little boy leaned over to his friend and asked, “I wonder how many wives men are allowed to have?” And then the other little boy leaned over to him and said “16.” The first little boy asked, “Well what makes you think that?” The second little boy said, “Well didn’t you hear the preacher? He just said it: FOUR better, FOUR worse FOUR richer, FOUR poorer.

Even though that was just a joke, many people are going through difficult things in their lives right now. You could be having issues within your family, with your extended family, with your job, with your friends, or even within yourself. You could be a young person that feels like you are so far behind your friends because you aren’t as far ahead in life as they seemingly are. You could be a Father who on the outside presents a strong image but on the inside is in turmoil because of issues with your marriage or feeling like you have failed your children in one way or another. You could be someone who is struggling with the sickness or pain that comes with disease or some kind of sickness. No matter who you are or what you do, the point is is there is most likely some kind of struggle that you are going through. Even if you are rich, healthy, and good looking you will eventually run into some kind of problem in your life.

When we go through times such as this particularly if we are Christians, it can be a confusing and hurtful situation. We might feel like God has abandoned us. We might not understand why a God that is supposed to be loving would let us go through so much turmoil and pain in our lives. We could feel like we are being punished by Him for something we have done wrong, or we could feel like maybe He has given up on us and is just sitting up in Heaven looking away from us and our struggle.

You know, there was a man in the Bible that had the same questions as we do sometimes in our life, and he was one of the closest friends of Jesus. His name was Peter.

Let’s go to the scripture for today and i’ll show you what I mean. The scripture is Matthew 16:22–23 “Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” In the verses just before this, Jesus had told his disciples the things that He was to suffer. He told them per the Scripture that He must go into Jerusalem, suffer many things from teh elders, chief preists and scribes, that He as to be killed and raised again the third day. Peter would in the next verse respond with what we just read. Essentially, once Jesus had told the disciples what was going to happen to Him, that is when Peter took him aside and essentially tried to “get on Him” if you will, it says he rebuked Jesus saying that “This shall never happen to you!” Now, i’ve struggled with how Jesus responds here when I was a baby Christian. I would think that as his friend Jesus would appreciate the concern from Peter regarding the suffering He said He was going to take. However, Jesus responds with “Get behind me, Satan!” Telling Peter essentially that he was being a stumbling block in that moment and that he only had human concerns in mind rather than the concerns of God.

But why did Jesus respond this way? It was because Peter was only understanding half of what the gospel of Jesus Christ is.

You see, Jesus was about halfway through His ministry when this conversation with Peter happened. Up until this point Peter had seen Jesus heal the lame and the sick, He had seen Jesus walk on water, he had seen Jesus do many wonderful things and was one of Jesus’s closet friends. Peter was in fact the first to confess that Jesus was the Messiah, saying in Matthew 16:16, just before the conversation we referenced earlier, that “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But see, Peter in that moment only loved the first half of the Gospel. He loved the Jesus that was his friend and the Jesus that fed the five thousand with a couple of fish and a few loaves. He loved the Jesus that calmed the raging sea and that had came in Glory to claim His role as the Messiah, but Peter did not love the Jesus that said He was to suffer the awful events of the Cross. He wanted the food, he wanted the comfort, he wanted the safety and the security, but he didn’t want to acknowledge the suffering and the pain that was to come.

Jesus would show Peter that Peter only had a limited view of the Gospel when He would go on to say in verse 24 of the same chapter, Matthew 16:24–25 “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. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

You see, Jesus let Peter know that not only would He have to carry His literal Cross to go face His death in that day that was to come, but that Peter and any other person who claimed to be His disciple would have to carry their own cross and follow Him. Well what does that mean? Does that mean that Jesus is commanding us to carry a literal wooden cross and go find a hill somewhere and hang ourselves on it? NO! What Jesus is telling us here is that if we are going to be a true follower of Christ, that we are going to have to face our own suffering as well. You see, we’re just like Peter. We only want the Gospel of Jesus Christ for what good it brings. We only want the salvation, to see Heaven one day, we only want the help that God can give to us on Earth to help us through difficult times, we only want the food, we only want more money, we think of God as a butler that we can call through prayer to help us out when we need it or to just run and get us whatever we want and sit up on His cloud and wait to hear from us again when we need something else. We are just like Peter was then, we are Christ-centered but not Cross-centered. We hold the “good” in such high regard and priority that we ignore the “bad” and the difficult that we must go through in our journey to Salvation. We only want to follow God for the possible good He can bring, and a lot of people who claim to be Christians are only following for the good. They don’t want to follow Him to seek His will in their life, they only want to go to Church once or twice a week and check a box thinking that that will keep them out of hell. I’ve got news for you and Jesus has news for you, if you want to be a true follower of Christ, if you truly want to seek His will for your life and to spend eternity in Glory with Him, just as Jesus said, you must take up your cross and follow Him. You have to take up that cross every day, you have to die to what you want, you have to die to the sinful desires of your heart, you have to die to your sinful thoughts, you have to die for all the things that you make your god in your life, whether it be food, drugs, money, gambling, drinking, smoking, or things done in the dark that other people can’t see you do but that God sees you do. To be a Christian isn’t to come up to the front of the Church and shake the Pastors hand and say that you’re saved and never think about it again. To be a Christian is to make that commitment through the strength of the Holy Spirit that lives inside of you to take up that cross and die daily to the things that have held you prisoner so far in your life.

This is something everybody must do and suffer to be a true follower of Christ. When Jesus saved the adulteress from being stoned in John chapter 8 when Jesus told the crowd that anyone who was without sin could cast the first stone, then asked the woman if anyone has condemned her and she responds that no one has. Well what did Jesus say? Most want to focus on the part where He says “Neither do I condemn you” but nobody wants to focus on the second part where He says “go and sin no more”. We only want the easy life, we don’t want the suffering of the cross or dying to ourselves every day.

It’s this lack of concern for Godly things and the emphasis we put on humanly things like Peter was in our Scripture for today that keeps us from seeing that God uses that dying to ourselves, that God is using that suffering to make us more like His Son Jesus. Each struggle in our lives where we seek God’s will to help us set aside some sin that we’re struggling with in our lives is just another step we are taking to prepare ourselves for a Holy eternity. Peter in our Scripture today was so caught up in the fact that Jesus was to die, that he almost ignored the fact that Jesus said He was going to rise again three days later! How often do we miss the good because we can’t see past the bad? I’m the world’s worst for being so caught up in self pity for something difficult happening in my life that I completely miss how God is about to use it for my good. I’m telling you people, this message is just as much for me as it is you. We are so caught up with poor little us that we completely miss the brilliant work that God is about to accomplish in our lives through difficult situations.

Zechariah 13:9 says, Zechariah 13:9 “And I will bring the third part through the fire, And will refine them as silver is refined, And will try them as gold is tried: They shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: And they shall say, The Lord is my God.”

Here the Scripture says that your life in Christ isn’t always going to be a walk in the park. It says here that He will bring you through the fire to refine you. Silver and gold is refined through fire to remove impurities. God uses the same process in us. He sends us through the fire. He sends us a difficult situation in our life. He is using those things and situations in our life to remove our impurities, to make us more like Him, to make us increasingly holy (lowercase “h”) on Earth to prepare us for a (capital “H”) Holy eternity in Heaven with Him!

You know God uses fire to signify His presence in the Old Testament. He came to Moses in the form of a burning bush for example. Fire signifies His presence. So since He says that we must be refined by fire to remove our impurities, that means that through our tribulations in life that He is right there with us. Yes we are purified just like gold or silver is with fire, but Hallelujah we can take comfort in knowing that wherever there is a fire in our lives that we can know that God is near. We can rejoice that through the trouble in our lives He will either bring us out or away from it but if He doesn’t then He will help us through it. He will never make us go through our lives alone. Take comfort that even though as Christians we must do a little suffering that He will never leave our side, that He is using it for a purpose, that He is using it to remove those impurities that are like poison in us. 1 Peter 5:10 says, “But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.”

So just know that accepting the full Gospel of Jesus Christ holds much more benefit than only accepting the first half. If you are at a point in your life that you are only finding joy in the loaves and fishes that He gives you, but not in the cross that He calls you to take up as well, then you are missing the point of what it means to follow Him. To follow Christ on this Earth means that you will not have it easy but that you will do some suffering, but I hope after this message that you will see that God is not punishing you, He isn’t turning away from you, but that this suffering is His plan for you, that He is allowing difficulty in your life because He loves you, wants you to grow further in your relationship with Him than where you are now, wants you to depend on Him, and wants to make you more like Him, to prepare you for an eternity in His beautiful Glory, where there is no darkness but only light all the time because of His presence there, where we will see our loved ones who have gone on, and where Revelation 21:4 says He will wipe away the tears from our eyes and death, sorrow and crying will be no more, because the unholy and humanly things of this Earth will have passed away. I pray that as we leave here today we could all learn to embrace both sides of the Gospel, and to pray for Him to give us the strength to accept and live that truth. Let’s pray.

Prayer