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Serious Discipleship

If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life.  We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering.  The psalmist was lamenting that he was despised and rejected…and that is an essential quality of the suffering of the cross.  But this notion has ceased to be intelligible to a Christianity which can no longer see any difference between an ordinary human life and a life committed to Christ.  The cross means sharing the suffering of Christ to the last and to the fullest.  Only those thus totally committed in discipleship can experience the meaning of the cross.