“And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:27 KJV)”
Have you ever lacked the strength to follow where Christ leads? As we grow we begin to understand the necessity of letting things go and following Jesus knowing that offering our lives as a testimony of His goodness and grace is a much greater thing. We learn to trust that God will bring things together to enable His plan to be fulfilled, and one of the most comforting passages of scripture to me is Luke 23:26. “And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus. (Luke 23:26 KJV)” Wow! What a delima. Christ has resisted the temptations that He must resist. He has trained the disciples that He was sent to train. He is the unblemished lamb that is in the process of being offered for our sins, and He has been beaten so that He cannot continue to carry the cross that has been laid upon His shoulders. He has the delima of completing this task. How does He even get to the place where the fulfillment of God’s plan must take place? We see in the midst of this tragedy how God places the assistance that is needed right on Jesus’s path. What if the soldiers had just killed Jesus right there and cut the whole event short? What if Simon had not been willing to participate in the killing of an innocent man despite the likely abuse he would have suffered for such a decision? Simply knowing that Jesus also had to trust His Father to provide in a situation where His strength was completely tapped out is an enormous encouragement to me to also trust in Jesus when I find that I simply cannot follow where He really is leading.
“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:” (1 Peter 5:6 KJV)