Phil. 3:4-16, Take Up Your Cross (2)

·       The “cross” we take up in following Christ is the altar for our living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1-2).  The writer of Hebrews says that we have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat (Heb. 13:10).  What was he talking about?  He was talking about the cross of Christ, the place where Jesus suffered outside the gate (13:12).  Jewish people (and it is true of Gentile people as well) have no right to eat the sacrificial meal from the “altar” of Christ.  If we come to Christ in faith we eat of His flesh and His blood (John 6:51-53).  The cross is His altar, and we are called to go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach (13:13).  When Paul pleads with us to offer our bodies a living sacrifice, that sacrifice is offered on the cross that we have taken up. 

·       Our cross is the prerequisite to our resurrection.  Obviously, there can be no resurrection without a death.  Jesus’ resurrection is such a marvelous thing, for Him and for us since He is the firstfruits of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:23).  Jesus did not just tell the disciples He was going to Jerusalem to be killed.  He also said, and after three days rise again.  The life that we live as born again children of God is “resurrection life.”  But that life is of no use for us if we have not first died, if we do not carry our cross.  If we live as a Christian, mixing the “things of man” with the “things of God,” we will be miserable and ineffective (2 Peter 1:8-9).  The reason we know this is because the aim of our lives, from the moment we put our faith in Christ, is to become like Christ inside and out.  We are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:28).  We have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him (Col. 3:10).  And Christ Jesus was never a mixture of the things of man and the things of God.  He was all about the things of God!  And He came to produce His abundant life, His resurrection life, in us (Jn. 10:10).

Consider this in Philippians 3.  Paul denied himself (he considered all he was in his own strength as “loss,” 3:4-7).  Paul took up his cross (his desire, his will, was to be conformed to His death, 3:10).  Why did he do this?  So that by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead (3:11).  The NKJV has an alternate reading for “attain,” that it literally means to arrive at.  What is Paul talking about?  Aren’t we all going to be resurrected in the last days, given a body for eternity?  Yes, but that’s not what he is saying.  He is talking about arriving at the resurrection in this life.  Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4).  We who were dead in trespasses have been made alive together with Christ (Eph. 2:5).  Paul desired to arrive at the power of His resurrection in this life so he could walk in newness of life, and to do that he had to know the fellowship of His sufferings so as to be conformed to His death.  There is not resurrection life without death on the cross.