And if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:27)

Read: Joshua 3:1 – 4:24, Luke 14:7-35, Psalm 80:1-19, Proverbs 12:27-28

Relate: As young girl of twenty, Amy was already involved in a successful ministry in Belfast teaching poor female mill workers. She was given an opportunity to attend the Keswick Convention where she heard Hudson Taylor preach, and her life was changed forever. A short time later, she applied to work with China Inland Mission, but was denied because of her poor health. You see, Amy had neuralgia. This made her consistently weak and would cause such pain that she would often be bedridden for weeks on end. Amy believed God had called her to the mission field and when turned down by CIM, she instead applied with the Church Missionary Society.

With them Amy set out for Japan, but a little over a year later, her bad health forced her home. Before she was fully recovered, Amy was on another boat, this time for Sri Lanka. Soon, her illness was leaving her incapacitated again but rather than head home, she headed to mainland India, Bangalore, on a health retreat. She never returned. For fifty-five years, Amy worked on in sickness and health. Fourteen years after first hearing the call of God, Amy founded Dohnavur Fellowship which was an orphanage for girls rescued from Hindu temple prostitution. Nine years after it was founded, another young lady in England was considering becoming a missionary and wrote a letter to Amy wondering what missionary life was like. Amy simply wrote back, “Missionary life is simply a chance to die.”

React: Amy wrote a poem that is among my favorites and has consistently been a challenge to me:

Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land;
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned.
Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And piercèd are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who hast no wound or scar?

If I call myself a Christian, where is my cross? If I claim to be following Him, then why are my feet not wounded? If I am living a life of comfort and luxury and ease, is it truly a Christian life?

Respond: 

God, I want to follow You. I want to go where You go. I want to bleed with Your heart. Help me to understand the cost of truly following. Help me to understand and embrace sacrifice and surrender. Let me die to myself so that You can live and love through me. Whatever it takes, whatever the cost, I am running after You.