The Cross a Burden or a Glory.

I. There is the constant ordinary discipline of human life.—Life when it is earnest contains more or less of suffering. There is a battle of good and evil, and these special miseries are the bruises of the blows that fill the air, sometimes seeming to fall at random and perplexing our reason, because we cannot rise to such height of vision as to take in the whole field at once.

II. There is the wretchedness of feeling self-condemned.—Law alone is a cross. Man needs another cross—not Simon’s, but Paul’s. He took it up, and it grew light in his hands. He welcomed it, and it glowed with lustre, as if it were framed of the sunbeams of heaven.

III. The same spiritual contrast, the same principle of difference between compulsory and voluntary service, opens to us two interpretations of the suffering of the Saviour Himself.—Neither the cross of Simon nor the cross of Paul was both literally and actually the cross of Christ. Its charm was that it was chosen. Its power was that it was free. The cross becomes glorious when the Son of God takes it up; there is goodness enough in Him to exalt it. It was the symbol of that sacrifice where self was for ever crucified for love.—F. D. Huntington.

The Cross—

  1. The sinner’s refuge.
  2. The sinner’s remedy.
  3. The sinner’s life.

The Glory of the Cross.

  1. The cross was the emblem of death.
  2. Christ was not only a dead Saviour, but a condemned Saviour.
  3. A disgraced Saviour, because the cross was a disgraceful kind of punishment.
  4. Paul gloried in the cross because it is an exhibition of the righteousness of God.
  5. Because it proclaims His love.
  6. The contemplation of Christ’s cross helps us to conquer the world.—Newman Hall.

Glorying in the Cross.

I. The subjects in which the apostle gloried.—1. He might have gloried in his distinguished ancestry. 2. In his polished education. 3. In the morality of his former life. 4. In his extraordinary call to the apostleship. 5. In his high ecclesiastical position. 6. He did not glory in the literal cross. 7. Nor in the metaphorical cross. 8. But in the metonymical cross (1 Cor. i. 17; Col. i. 20).