The Pain of the Cross

A man came back from a weekend retreat experience and when a friend asked him how it was, he said, "I died!" The friends asked him what he meant. "You see," the man answered, "I went to this thing not knowing what to expect. But in the process of that long weekend, I discovered that I had spent my whole life hiding behind a lot of masks. I realized that I had never even let my wife see me as I really was. I'd been playing games with her, and playing games with my children, and playing games with others--never letting anybody know who I really am. The worst of it was to discover than even I didn't know myself. And, as all of this was being exposed over the weekend, I died over and over again." It is a painful thing for a middle-aged man to discover that he is not even in touch with his own honest feeling about himself. "I am convinced," he said, "that I had to go through this death experience in order to become the new person that I hope to be now." Unless a grain of wheat falls to earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears rich fruit (John 12:24). When Christ died, we who believe in Him, died with him. We died to sin, to self, and the world. While this may sound like something you might want to avoid, dying is the only way to live.