Crucified Messenger

“Crucified Messenger”

This is the phrase I heard while in prayer; face down, trembling, crying out for God to strip me of myself. Pleading for Him to leave nothing of me, only what is of Him. In the last five years, I’ve had a handful of these moments; encounters where the presence of God is so heavy, it feels almost impossible to breathe, yet in those moments, I am more alive than ever.

After I heard those words I realized something. Don’t you know, that the primary cause of death during a crucifixion is suffocation. When we take up the cross and follow Christ Jesus we are not only dying to self, we are suffocating our own nature that the nature of God would be preeminent in our life. For me, in that moment I was realizing, in greater depth, the call to follow Him. We, as disciples of Christ, are called to take up our cross and follow Him. When a person was sentenced to death by crucifixion they would be forced to carry a cross beam(patibulum) through the Via Dolorosa(The way of suffering) til they would be either tied to the beam or nailed(they nailed those who they considered a deity). When onlookers saw a person carrying that beam, they knew that person was sentenced to death. To take up our cross is to allow the presence of God and the word of God to crush us, to suffocate our own selfish and sinful nature so that the divine nature of God can reign through our mortal bodies. My friends, do onlookers know we are carrying that beam? Do they know we are not living for self? Do they know who we are living for? Carrying the cross sent a message. God is calling us to be a crucified messenger, what message are we sending?