The Crucified Life

01If it isn’t impossible, you’re opting out

God heals physical bodies. He breaks off mental illness. He changes patterns that feel irreversible — behavior, insecurity, relationships. And if our expectation is that he’ll probably do a little something here and there, that’s often what walking with him feels like: I’ll just do my best to hang in there, because he’s pretty good.

But Jesus taught us to pray on earth as it is in heaven. Nothing is unresolved in heaven. Think about what that will be like — how close to God you’ll feel, how healthy you’ll be, how good your relationships will be, how few insecurities you’ll have. Nothing wrong. And Jesus says: pray for that to happen now.

If you’re not thinking about the impossible when you think about God, you’re not wrong — you’re just opting out of what his presence is here to do.

Because if it isn’t impossible, it’s something we could do ourselves — and then God is just humanism with better branding, a concept that helps us feel better while nothing actually happens. But God moves. He still raises the dead. He still speaks destiny to people. He still pulls people back from the edge. Read the Bible and it doesn’t stop being full of impossible things. Jesus supernaturally heals someone about as often as he explains something; there is no story of Jesus without the miracles. Thinking this way is scary, because it means feeling helpless. But that is exactly where we have to step into the Lord — letting him be the power, the truth, and the comforter in every situation.

02Take up your cross

The short version: if you’ll surrender to God and become dependent on him, he’ll be able to love you as much as you want him to. Every one of us is desperate to make sense of the things that don’t make sense. Even philosophy’s consensus is that life is suffering — that there will be lack, a void inside. God wants to meet us right there.

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

Luke 9:23–24

Look at where Jesus says that. Peter has just declared him the Messiah — the anointed one who’s going to restore everything. Everyone’s excited about how good things will be. Then Jesus says, right, so I’m going to die and rise, and Peter says no way — we need you alive for this to work. Jesus rebukes him, turns to everyone, and says: you want all the good stuff, but this is how it’s accomplished — through the cross. If you want to save your life, pick up the thing that kills you.

This is not suicide, and our cross doesn’t save anyone. We aren’t the ones actively trying to die. Picking up the cross means picking up dependency — being willing to follow him through whatever it takes, and considering yourself as good as dead so that he decides what needs to happen in your life. It gets concrete fast. In the middle of an argument you want to win, have you ever put your preferences aside and given that person all your love? Very few of us have. In the moment it’s you’re my problem and you’re making me mad. Emptying yourself there — considering what the Lord wants first, not yourself — is the death.

It hurts. And yet: Jesus died unable to raise himself. The Father raised him. That is helplessness. That is dependence — this won’t work if God doesn’t do it. Same for us. Whoever you want to be, and whoever you ought to be, comes through Lord, you can have all of it. It’s an exchange: we hand over the little speck of who we are, and he gives us the fullness of the kingdom. When Jesus says “abide in me,” the vine we abide in is a crucified vine — and it takes a daily cross to keep abiding.

03For the joy set before him

Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before him. He didn’t savor the pain — he did it unto something good. The cross itself was scornful and shameful, and he conquered it because of what was on the other side. We take up our cross daily because every day he has new goodness for us, and every day we can dream about the impossible — in our own hearts, in a marriage, on a campus, in a workplace, across a city.

God wants to break off the callousness of disappointment and let us dream something fresh. So don’t go to your default settings. Is there a relationship you’ve gone indifferent to? A part of your heart you’ve written off as just the way it is? Ask him to speak fresh there.

Hope is anxiety in its proper place.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for — so if you want more faith, you need an imagination that looks at what isn’t good and pictures it good. Have you ever pictured yourself with the same peace as Jesus? The same joy? Anxiety assumes it’s going to go badly and dreams about how badly. Hope says ooh — I wonder how this is going to be the best thing that ever happened. It sounds foolish. That’s hope. Then faith is the substance, and the action that comes with it. Hope is something we have to feed all the time.

The order matters. We don’t get the kingdom the way Peter wanted it, skipping straight to the good part. Pick up the cross, and then step into abundant, fruitful, joyful, peaceful, patient, good, faithful, kind, gentle, self-controlled life. The Father has already done the hard work through the Son. We just yield.

04The response

Come to him like a helpless two-year-old — unable to do much, trying to help along, but sure of the Father’s affection. Let your spirit cry Abba, good Dad. Ask him to disrupt your expectations and confuse what you’ve decided is normal. Open your hands and hand over the disappointments that make you afraid to hope again; he doesn’t erase them, he heals them. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted — he meets us in the sorrow, and turns mourning into joy. And if it helps, kneel. It’s a yield position: we choose dependence, we choose surrender.

God is breaking into Chattanooga to continue the harvest Jesus started — healing every family, every insecurity, every fear, every body; bringing joy and peace into classrooms full of students who are depressed and addicted; saturating workplaces in goodness until the whole industry asks how it’s done.

An echo of Sunday’s prayer

And if God as Father is hard for you — if there’s baggage there, and barriers to him being gentle and kind and full of identity for you — he wants to heal that specifically. Ask Dan, Maggie, or Michael to pray with you. It’s not too late.