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The only persons in the ancient world who carried a cross were condemned criminals going out to execution; each, like our Lord himself, was made to carry the cross on which he was to be crucified. So, what Christ means is that you must accept for yourself the position of such a person, in the sense that you renounce all future expectations from society and learn to take it as a matter of course if the people around you give you the cold shoulder and view you with contempt and disgust, as an alien sort of being. You may often find yourself treated in this fashion if you are loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ.
–J. I. Packer

Are you willing to renounce all future expectations and gladly endure the contempt of others to gain favor with Him?

It was because Jesus was made to be sin, and bear God’s judgment on sin, that he trembled in the garden, and because he was actually bearing that judgment that he declared himself forsaken of God on the cross.
–J. I. Packer

Perhaps you have wondered about Jesus’ anguish in the garden before going to the cross, and you thought (like I once did) that it was all about the physical pain that He was about to endure. I have heard it preached that way in the past, and have even said it myself from the pulpit. But then we encounter various Christian martyrs who did not seem to flinch at the prospect of enduring pain and/or cruel, torturous deaths for their belief in Jesus. So were they more courageous than Jesus? No, of course not.

So it must have been something else that Jesus was in anguish over… such as the fact that for the first time in all of eternity, His unity with the Father would be severed for a time while He was made to be sin and bear God’s judgment on that sin… my sin.

My sin should have separated me from God. Instead, Jesus chose my punishment. And it was that punishment of being separated from God that caused him to tremble in the garden and declare Himself forsaken of God on the cross.

Thank you Jesus for loving me so much that you would endure that cruel, torturous separation from the Father in my place.

So how do we determine who Jesus is? Fortunately, we do not have to “check our brains at the door,” as Josh McDowell said. Instead, we can use our logic to make a pretty simple determination.

Jesus was either:
(1) God, if His claim about Himself was true, or
(2) a bad man, if what He said was not true, for good men do not claim to be God.

This is the essential Christian argument.
–Peter Kreeft

We sometimes use the term “savior complex” to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over curing others’ problems. The true Savior, however, seemed remarkably free of such a complex.
–Philip Yancey

Jesus was so confident of who He was. He didn’t need to “put on airs” or run around healing everyone just so people would think well of Him.

I wish that I was so confident of who I am in Christ. He lives in me. All that is His is now mine as well. And yet I am still running around trying to “do things” to get the attention of others so that I can somehow feel better about myself. Instead, if I would just embrace the truth that I am a child of the King… that would be enough to satisfy me completely for all of my life.

Father God, help me to rest in the truth that I am yours… a child of the King!

We often think that the “routine” means dull and mundane, but Chesterton asks us to think about it in a different way:

Routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.
    …Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
    But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making daisies. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
    The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
–G. K. Chesterton

What a beautiful thought… that God delights in what He has made so much, that He continues to say “I will do it again!” Remember today that He has made you, and He delights in what He has made!