Those who belong to Christ Jesus have
crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:24
AN
EARNEST CHRISTIAN WOMAN sought help from Henry Suso concerning her spiritual
life. She had been imposing rigid austerities upon herself in an effort to feel
the sufferings that Christ had felt on the cross. Things weren’t going so well
with her and Suso knew why.
The old
saint wrote his spiritual daughter and reminded her that our Lord had not:
said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up my
cross, and follow me.” He had said, “Let him . . · take up his cross.” There is
a difference of only one small pronoun; but that difference is vast and
important .
Crosses
are all alike, but no two are identical. Never before nor since has there been
a cross-experience just like that endured by the Savior. The whole dreadful
work of dying which Christ suffered was something unique in the experience of
mankind. It had to be so if the cross was to mean life for the world. The
sin-bearing, the darkness, the rejection by the Father were agonies peculiar to
the person of the holy sacrifice. To claim any experience remotely like that of
Christ would be more than an error; it would be sacrilege.
Every
cross was and is an instrument of death, but no man could die on the cross of
another; each man died on his own cross; hence Jesus said, “Let him take up his
cross, and follow me.”
Now there
is a real sense in which the cross of Christ embraces all crosses and the death
of Christ encompasses all deaths: “We are convinced that one died for all, and
therefore all died” (2 Corinthians 5:14); “I have been crucified with Christ”
(Galatians 2:20); “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world
has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (6:14). This is in the judicial
working of God in redemption. The Christian as a member of the body of Christ
is crucified along with his divine Head. Before God every true believer is
reckoned to have died when Christ died. All subsequent experience of personal
crucifixion is based upon this identification with Christ on the cross.
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