Take your cross, how do evangelicals do this in practice - Matthew 10:38 What does picking up your cross look like practically speaking for evangelicals? What does picking up your cross mean in every day life?

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I’ve read the related questions to this verse


  “And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”
  ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭10:38‬ ‭


But the responses are obscure and ambiguous and if applied practically I wouldn’t know what exactly to do. The answers are still relegated to the realm of abstract and conceptual theory. 

What is a working definition, or a practical definition, or a practical application for take (up) your cross in the evangelical circles. 

Please keep this a serious discussion, don’t include answers like getting married, the spouse being the cross, or being terminally ill, no one willingly takes on terminal illness, especially excruciatingly painful kinds. It needs to make sense to the text. 

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Or in the same vein, if it won’t be misconstrued as a separate question, crucify the flesh. They both seem to be saying the same thing. 


  Gal 5:24  And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires
The Lord Jesus Christ's teaching about taking up our cross is found in Matt 10:38; 16:24; Mark 8:34 and Luke 9:23. It is my belief that our Lord was addressing the subject of conversion, not discipleship. Meaning, that Jesus was teaching what was necessary to be saved, not what was required of us after conversion.

Jesus was not saying that we had to be merely willing to make the ultimate sacrifice or even to be a literal martyr upon a literal cross. He was teaching that in order to be saved we must be crucified with Him. Hence, Gal 5:24 does answer how to apply the truth of our conversion to our daily lives. 

Paul the apostle does provide us with the understanding. He said in Gal 2:20 'I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.' Paul lived in the powerful truth of having been crucified with Christ and his answer for not fulfilling the desires of the flesh [Gal 5:16] was to 'hear with faith' [Gal. 3:1-5] what had happened to him in his conversion. 

Notice Gal 6:14, where Paul says, 'But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.' Paul does not have his own cross that he can boast in, but rather, he only has the cross of Christ. Only the cross of Christ was Paul's answer for how to be an overcomer in this world. 

Understanding Jesus' teaching as the application by faith in the all sufficient work of Christ, so that we can say that we have taken up our cross, by being crucified with Him is the only thing that will enable us to follow Him. We need a cross in which we die to sin [Rom 6] and to the Law [Rom 7], by which we are circumcised with a circumcision made without hands [Col. 2:11-15]. No cross of our own will accomplish this. What Jesus taught, Paul the apostle opened up for us.

In like manner, when Jesus says in Matt 10:37, "He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me" - it is about our conversion. Certainly, we are not to literally hate our parents, just as we are not to literally take up a cross, in order to be saved. It is an expression by our Lord that speaks of our need to undergo a fundamental change in our very person. Only our conversion in Christ accomplishes this. 

Read my book:'Take Up Your Cross: Our Only Power to Live and Walk by the Spirit'. Visit my site Take Up Your Cross for information.