July 3

Taking Up The Cross Of Christ

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.

Mark 8:34-38

A life centered around religion can be a frustrating one for a young person, especially if it involves lengthy daily rituals that become boring and meaningless. That was the attitude of A. Stephen as he grew up in a devout Hindu home in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu State, India. Religious faith was everything to his family—so much so that his father built his own temple in the village where they lived.

But young Stephen began to have doubts. “My parents taught me how to do ‘pujas’ and offer sacrifices to the idol gods,” he later recalled. “We made many pilgrimages and performed many good works, but still my life was empty.”

At fifteen, Stephen rebelled. He stole money from the temple and ran away from home. For three months he visited temples and talked with gurus, but still he had no peace. Finally he returned home and there attempted suicide, convinced that there were no answers and that life was not worth living. As he “sat in his room with a rope tied around his neck,” he began to call out for God. “Just then,” he writes, “I heard a voice saying, ‘My son, there is a peace for you . . . my son, there is a peace for you.’

“I went out and started walking along the street. A happy-looking young man came out of the night. He stopped and asked me why I was so sad. He said, “I want to help you.” In the minutes that followed, Stephen heard the gospel for the first time and professed faith in Christ.

The news of his conversion was upsetting to his family. “His brothers rejected him. His sister was so overwhelmed by shame at his new faith that she killed herself. And his father finally disavowed him and sent him away.” For the next years Stephen wandered without a home with the Bible as his only real friend. He had taken up his cross to follow Christ and willingly suffered the consequences.

But as he wandered, he began sharing his faith, and in 1971, at the age of twenty, he founded Cornerstone World Challenge. In the years that followed he established more than fifteen churches, and recruited other workers to join with him in an itinerant ministry of distributing tracts and showing Christian films. Through it all he shares his own testimony of how through losing his life he saved it. ³