The Gospel & Cross-bearing
By Travis Scott, October 1, 2021.
Over the past decade or so I’ve noticed a greater resistance among Christians to teaching on the general call of Jesus to take up our cross and follow him. On one level this is understandable since the call to cross-bearing is a daunting one that confronts us in the starkest of ways. It’s a call that cuts across the ease and comfort middle-to-upper class evangelicalism has become accustomed to in the West. However, of particular curiosity to me is how many people have resisted the call to cross-bearing because they claim it’s a call to duty, and therefore legalistic and anti-gospel.
Certainly it is possible, possibly even very easy, for us to preach cross-bearing in a legalistic manner. Any teaching that God’s acceptance and love for us is in any way dependent on our ability to obey is indeed anti-gospel. The biblical call to take up your cross and follow Christ is only ever a response to the Gospel. We are saved completely by grace and our salvation isn't ultimately based on the perfection of our obedience, but on Christ's. While it is certainly true that the call to "cross-bearing" should be a part of our counting the cost of being a Christ follower - that cost of following is always only our response to God's grace to us in Christ. This is still a daunting thing to be sure, so much so that Tim Keller calls it the "Threat of Grace."
Besides the gut-reactions to fundamentalist and legalistic approaches to this topic, I think the concept of cross-bearing seems at odds with the gospel because Western evangelicalism, particularly U.S. evangelicalism, has a largely truncated view of the gospel. Even in many Reformed circles we like the language of being "gospel-centered" but we haven't always been consistent in our application of what that means.
The word "gospel" in the 1st Century was a word primarily talking about the good news, or announcement, of a victorious king. It was the heralding of the ascension of a new victorious ruler to the throne. When the Gospels of the New Testament use this word, they borrow from this understanding and most often use it in reference to the Kingdom of God. The gospel is the good news of God's kingdom. It's God's free grace to us through Christ’s victory. It’s by his cross, that he secures victory over sin and death and purchases our citizenship in his kingdom. Now, as our king, Jesus is calling us as citizens of this kingdom to act like citizens and live out the values of this kingdom. That means following him in being willing to intentionally suffer for the sake of loyalty to God and to willingly bear loss, shame, scorn, difficulty for the sake of sacrificially loving others for Christ's sake. This means a gospel-centered life is a cross-shaped life.
The call to take up our cross and follow Jesus is one part of the repeated call of the Bible to practically experience our union with Christ by imitating him. This language of imitation is all over the the New Testament: John 15:12-17; Acts 14:22; Romans 6:1-14, 8:16-17; 1 Corinthians 11:1; 2 Corinthians 5:14-15; Galatians 2:20, 5:22-26; Philippians 2:1-18; Colossians 3:12-15; 2 Timothy 1:13; 1 John 3:16-24. In all of this God is calling us to not merely be observers and theorizers of the gospel, but those who follow the gospel by following Christ's example. And that example includes dying to self, giving up our rights in loving care of others, suffering for others, and suffering simply for bearing the name of Christ.
While the general principle of cross-bearing is true for any who would follow Jesus it's important to note that what it will look like in practice will vary from person to person. Our cross-bearing as Americans will look different than our North Korean, Iranian, or Afghani brothers and sisters. If you're a stay-at-home mom the practice of this principle will look different for you than it does a single man. If you're a high school student it will look different from someone working full-time. Your age and stage in life combined with the various other circumstances of life (past and present) will necessitate different ways of following this calling.
Another important point is that the calling to cross-bearing is not a call to hate God's good gifts or to have a predominantly negative view of the blessings God has given us. John Calvin writes that, "our constant efforts to lower our estimate of the present world should not lead us to hate life, or to be ungrateful towards God. For this life... deserves to be reckoned among the divine blessings which should not be despised. Therefore, if we discover nothing of God's goodness in it, we are already guilty of no small ingratitude toward him." While the call to cross-bearing is countercultural to the American idols of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - it is not a call to deny the goodness of those things in their proper place. Comforts, recreations, hobbies, vacations and the like don't need to be rejected outright - though we should ask if they are supplanting the place of pursuing Christ in our life. We can enjoy these good gifts rightly; but because we derive life from Christ, and not them, we can also forgo them at times for the service of others.
We should also remember that any self-denial Christ calls us to (as opposed to the self-denial false religion calls us to) will only ever lead us through death to life. His Cross makes any cross we have to bear lighter, and his resurrection is the assurance that any loss we suffer in following him is ultimately gain. Any death to self in Christ will only ever result in a blossoming of his life in me. His cross ensures that resurrection is our hope. Cross-bearing doesn’t earn us anything before God, but in conforming us more to the image of Christ it does serve to grow us in the grace of the gospel.
That the call of cross-bearing is a central and normal part of living out the gospel is an important thing to remember and preach in this cultural moment. As the moral and spiritual sands shift beneath our feet we should not be surprised when fiery trials come our way. In fact, we shouldn’t be surprised those sands are shifting in the first place. This has always been the way of Christ. And the Gospel of Christ has often flourished where believing it actually required picking up a cross and following him.
