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 "Come, I will make life easy for you." He did not say, "Come, let us indulge ourselves to heart's content." He said, "If any man will come after me, let him leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his cross daily, and let him come after me."

Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be saying, "God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?" Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service which await us elsewhere than here.

We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find one of these