The cross is what gives us life, but before life can be given, we must first be broken by it. Looking to Christ for life and salvation cannot be complete without first allowing Jesus to break our core and then restore us back in Him.
Matthew 16:24 tells us, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."
Before there is to be a season of following Christ, we are first allowed to experience two things: to be denied and to be crucified. This might not sound pleasant but nothing could bring more freedom than these two things.
God allows a season of breaking through the cross by calling us to deny ourselves. The world wants us to believe that we can put our confidence in ourselves. That our abilities, our strengths, our connections and our knowledge are sufficient to bring us all we desire. And while, yes, we must experience the affirmation of Christ and be thankful for our gifts and strengths, there will also always be our weaknesses. That is why on our own we will never be enough.
And that is a tough pill to swallow - to admit that we are insufficient and that we cannot be our own saviours. We need to deny our confidence in ourselves and deny our pride of self-sufficiency and allow Jesus to complete us.
God calls us next into a season of breaking through the taking up of our own cross. That refers to our purpose - our God-given purposes. Many people come into a relationship with Christ already with set ambitions and dreams for their own, but no matter how we try to do so, we can never determine our own purposes. Because God is our creator, He alone knows what purpose we are to serve.
The wonderful news is that God wants to make that purpose know to us, but the revelation of our purpose in Him calls us to lay our own desires, ambitions, fears, considerations down at the cross of Jesus Christ. To follow Christ calls us to surrender, which is another painful thing for people to accept.
The work of Christ is a redemptive one and the good news, well, is good news, but behind that good news is some bad news that makes the good news sound even sweeter; the bad news of our insufficiency, of our sinfulness, of our stubbornness and of our brokenness. But that bad news is accompanied by the sweetest of revelations we can ever receive - the revelation of the glory of Christ upon our lives that becomes the strength for our weakness, our redemption for our sinfulness and our healing for our brokenness.
