How to Know Which Crosses to Carry
As we continue the Good News video course on “How to Turn Your Crosses into Resurrections”, I’d like us to explore a little bit further that Garden of Gethsemane that we are in with Jesus. It’s the Garden of Decision: the question of should I pick up this cross, or should I continue carrying this cross, or should I get rid of it? Should I turn away from it? Am I being called to do this or not? How do we discern which crosses to carry?
Next: Part 3 >>
Video Excerpt:
When we do something that God isn’t calling us to, He’s going to help us with it because we mean to do right, we wanted to do His will, and He honors that. But we’re not going to have the same strength, the same encouragement, the same appreciation from God as those crosses that He does want us to carry. He’s not going to help us very much.
What He’d rather help us do is discern that it’s a cross we need to get rid of and how to get rid of that. So in this session I’d like to cover that discernment process. How can you tell what God’s will is regarding whether or not to carry a cross?
Well, first of all, it does take prayer. It does take time in prayer. And in that prayer time, we need to surrender our agenda of what we think should happen. We need to surrender our ideas of how comfortable our life should be, or in some cases, a cross that we’re carrying can seem more comfortable than letting go of it. We’re so familiar with it, it becomes something that we cling to even when we’re not supposed to. Codependent relationships is an example of that. Staying in an abusive relationship is an example of that. We’ve become so comfortable with it, the world outside of that seems frightening. We don’t know how we can manage on our own. We don’t know how it’s going to affect the children. We don’t know how we’re going to be able to live outside of what we’re used to. But God knows. God has a plan. But to get from here to there, we need a lot of discernment and often a lot of help. This usually cannot be done with discernment all on our own.
More from Good News Ministries
To take the Paracletia course on the same videos but with discussion questions and music videos for meditation, go to gnm.org/paracletia-course-description-C02.
You might also like “Unite your sufferings to Jesus for healing” (a Footsteps to Heaven podcast).
Or read our WordBytes faith-building articles on Healing from Suffering.
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