Has some occasion caught the reader in a net of suspicion, slander, and humiliation?  Shrink not.  "Expose yourself to the circumstances of His choice." All things are subject to Christ, and all things work together for good to those who love God.  Take up this circumstance, therefore, as your cross; shoulder it and go forth to lose your life.  The "world" knows only how to "take it on the chin." But we take it up, embrace it as our cross, stretch out our hands upon it, and lay down our lives.  We thus "put on the livery of humiliation worn by Christ."

You may be handicapped in health.  It is the one thing you cannot get over.  Now welcome your weakness, and take it up as the instrument of a new death to old ambition and pride. Paul embraced the "thorn" even though it was a "messenger of Satan" to buffet him.  He learned: "When I am weak, then am I strong."

Have you been utterly misrepresented and your good evil spoken of?  The Saviour says: "Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy." But, before you can rejoice, you must first stretch forth your hands, and be nailed, as it were to that very falsehood.  A man of God had embraced the pathway of reproach for Christ, had left a modernistic church, and had gone "without the camp, bearing his reproach." He was maligned and falsely accused as being a "holier-than-thou" kind of Christian.  As he turned away, answering them never a word, the Spirit of glory illuminated this truth: "If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye." He was happy beyond words.

Thus it is that we learn to die daily, "always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body" (II Cor. 4:10).  Our lives must be poured again and again into the mold of the cross--"made conformable unto his death." Madame Guyon, the mystic, cried: "O life, which cannot be lost without so many deaths! 0 death, which can only be attained by the loss of so many lives!"

In his book, The Cross of Christ, F. J. Huegel quotes from the Sunday School Times as follows:

Dr. J. G. Fleming tells how, in the days of the Boxer uprising in China, Boxers captured a mission school, blocked all gates but one, placed a cross be-fore it, and sent in word that anyone who trampled on that cross would go free, but that anyone who stepped around it would be killed.  The first seven, we are told, trampled on the cross, and were allowed to go free.  The eighth, a girl, knelt before the cross, and was shot.  All the rest in a line of a hundred students followed her example.

In order to avoid pain, humiliation, disgrace, and death, we can trample on our cross and go forth to a false freedom; or, we can kneel in "worshipful acceptance," and carry it to our Calvary "in thankful submission," there to find the liberty wherewith Christ sets us free, the life that is hid with Christ in God, the joy that is unspeakable and full of glory.