THE FACTS OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE indicate that most believers wander for some time in the wilderness of Romans 7, in the land of a mixed and divided affection, before they enter into the life of victory in Christ.  The great apostle himself reveals the tragic breakdown of his own inner life subsequent to his conversion, when he cries out in an agony of despair, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Rom. 7:24.) He then learned what he later wrote in Romans 6:11 -- "Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." He came to see that God's deliverance from the thralldom of a loathsome self-life is not through resolution, but through reckoning on co-crucifixion with Jesus Christ.

Sooner or later most of us as believers awaken to a sense of our sinful selfhood.  We, too, would live for Christ.  We hunger and thirst after righteousness, but, alas, how tragically self-will thwarts the flow of the living waters.  The stream of our life is mixed and muddy.  We fight and pray and struggle.  We redouble our resolutions.  We see that we must experience an inner crucifixion; that the Cross must be at the heart of our Christian lives.  We try to crucify ourselves, but all to no avail.  Self cannot, will not, crucify self.  In utter self-despair we sign our own death sentence, sinking into our death-union with the Crucified.  We let go and let God, yielding ourselves in total self-surrender.  Once and for all we take by faith the position God gives us of death and resurrection with Christ.

Such is the beginning of a life of Christian victory--but it is only a beginning.  This death-position once taken must then be learned.  The life of the Crucified must be received moment by moment.  There is the Cross once and for all, and there is the "cross daily." It is a lifelong process.  "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me" (Luke 9:23).  The early disciples must often have seen the long procession of murderers and criminals on their way to crucifixion, carrying their crosses.

This matter of the Cross once-for-all and the "cross daily" is what Bishop Moule calls an "inexhaustible paradox; on one side, a true and total self-denial, on the other, a daily need of self-crucifixion." We are followers of the Crucified.  We must surrender to Him once-for-all.  There is also what has been called the "spread-out-surrender, a surrender which covers our whole sphere of action and lasts all our days." The Cross-life is not an attainment, but a lifelong attitude.  It Is not a goal, but a road.  There is no ready-made holiness that we can put on like a suit of clothes.  God does not show us everything at once.  Those who have entered into the life of Christian victory will all their lives be making deeper discoveries of the depths of self.  The scriptural attitude, then, must ever be: "Not as though I had already attained."

In remarking upon the "cross daily" Bishop Moule insists that it is "without intermission, without holiday; now, today, this hour; and then, tomorrow!  And the daily 'cross'; a something which is to be the instrument of disgrace and execution. . . . And what will that something be? just whatever gives occasion of ever deeper test to our self-surrender . . . just what-ever exposes to shame and death the old aims, and purposes, and plans, the old spirit of self and its life."
New occasions, fresh tests, difficult circumstances-all bring us up against the question of the will of God, or the will of self.  If we are hungry to go on with the Lord; if we have an appetite whetted for reality at any cost, then we will set our faces like a flint Cross-ward.  Each of us will find "his cross" in his daily pathway-waiting at his feet.  Providential circumstances bring us up against choices which cross self.  These will become the instruments of death to our own wills.

The Bishop of Durham sums up the daily cross as: "Some small trifle of daily routine; a crossing of personal preference in very little things; accumulation of duties, unexpected interruption, unwelcome distraction.  Yesterday these things merely fretted you and, internally at least, 'upset' you.  Today, on the contrary, you take them up, and stretch your hands out upon them, and let them be the occasion of new disgrace and deeper death for that old self-spirit.  You take them up in loving, worshiping acceptance.  You carry them to their Calvary in thankful submission.  And tomorrow you will do the same."

  Many times you have cried, "Anything but that, Lord." You have feared it might come upon you.  And there it