Board index ‹ Specific Bible verses, texts, and passages ‹ Luke

[Mel B]

What does it mean in Luke 9:23 to pick up one's cross? I'm familiar with the story from the other Gospels, but I just realized I never dissected what it meant. Does it just mean to deny your flesh?

[jimwalton]

“Pick up your cross” technically means that if you choose to follow Christ, you sign up for the very real possibility of suffering and even death for Him. It’s at least a commitment to self-denial (no longer what I want, but what Jesus wants). To pick up your cross means to do exactly and everything that God wants until the day we die. That may involve rejection from others, scorn, verbal abuse, not getting the raise or the promotion, losing a job (financial abuse), incarceration, physical abuse, or even death. In some cultures, being a Christian is a high-stakes commitment. The stakes are rising in America. (If you want to listen to a 5-minute YouTube I just made on this subject: https://youtu.be/LHYHKWoAsrY)

John Yoder writes that picking up your cross is “the price of social nonconformity. It is not sickness or catastrophe, or inexplicable unpredictable suffering. It is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not inward wrestling with self and sin. It is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the new order to come.”