Matt 16:24-25

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 for whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.
NIV

Matt 16:27
27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done.
NIV

Both of these paragraphs are scriptures that come from The Bible in the New Testament and they were BOTH spoken by Jesus. So that should answer a number of questions, but here’s one more: What do they mean? Good question, let’s look at them very closely.

In the first one Jesus says that if anyone comes after Him (wants to be a believer), they must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Him, because if anyone wants to save his life then they will lose it but if anyone wants to lose his life for His sake, they will find it.

Now what do the “deny themselves” and “take up your cross” and “lose his life for my sake” parts mean? When we believe or have faith in Jesus, His life becomes ours. There is no longer a “me” there is only a Jesus. Jesus knew way ahead of time that His earthly life would end on the cross, so He was telling His disciples (knowing ahead of time that what He was doing was correct) that if anyone was going to follow Him, they were going to have to believe and act or do correct things before they worried about anything else.

Then in the second one Jesus tells his disciples about His return to the earth and how He will reward people according to what they have done.

So that is pretty clear isn’t it? Basically, if you did or didn’t do the first thing, He will show you in your reward.

So (if you feel that I am correct, and I know that I am because it’s in the Bible) we’d better make sure that we are living these scriptures because the end result that we are given will be the result of what we’ve done in our lives.

So now I come to the main reason that I wrote this, do you realize that 96% of the handicapped community don’t have a Church that wants them? These are people that God created and have His image and they’re being grossly neglected by Christ followers. You can give excuses or say whatever you want, but to me, there’s a lot to be done before we’re really living these scriptures.

And being a handicapped man now with a handicapped wife and 3 handicapped sons, this means a lot to me. But let’s say that you’re not like me. This should still matter to you because your rewards in Heaven will depend on it. So yeah, it’s important.