The Faithful Christian a blog of The Lighthouse Ministries

Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. Luke 9:23 Many people interpret “cross” as some burden they must carry in their lives: a strained relationship, a thankless job, a physical illness. With self-pitying pride, they say, “That’s my cross I have to carry.” Such an interpretation is not what Jesus meant when He said, “Take up your cross and follow Me.” When Jesus carried His cross up Golgotha to be crucified, no one was thinking of the cross as symbolic of a burden to carry. To a person in the first-century, the cross meant one thing and one thing only: death by the most painful and humiliating means human beings could develop. Two thousand years later, Christians view the cross as a cherished symbol of atonement, forgiveness, grace, and love. But in Jesus’ day, the cross represented nothing but torturous death. Because the Romans forced convicted criminals to carry their own cross

Comedian Ken Davis tells of the time he gave a speech in his college class. The title of his talk was, “The Law of the Pendulum.” For 20 minutes he carefully explained the principle that governs a swinging pendulum. The law of the pendulum is: A pendulum can never return to a point higher than the point from which it was released. Because of friction and gravity, when the pendulum returns it will fall short of its original release point. Each time it swings it makes less and less of an arc until finally, it is at rest. This point of rest is called the state of equilibrium where all forces acting on the pendulum are equal. As part of his presentation, Davis attached a 3-foot string to a child’s toy top and secured it to the top of the blackboard. He then pulled the top to one side and made a mark on the blackboard where he let it go. Each time it swung back he made a new mark. It took less than a minute for the top to complete its swinging and come to rest. When he finished the d