Suppose in the afternoon you are made unhappy in some way by your wife or husband. At bedtime you need to apply the cross to your feeling of unhappiness. If you do this, the feeling of unhappiness will disappear.

This indicates that our way is the cross, not asceticism or any severe treatment of the self. Realizing that we have already died in Christ, we should go to bed at night with a consciousness of the cross. If we practice going to bed through the cross, lying down with the realization that we have died in Christ, the next morning we shall wake up in resurrection as a new person.

I can testify that it is a healthy spiritual practice to pass through the cross every night when we go to bed. By applying the cross at the end of each day, I rest very well during the night. At bedtime we need to apply the cross to every problem and to every negative, natural, or sinful thing.

We may pray, “Lord, I want all these things to pass through the cross. I do not want to go to sleep with any natural, sinful, negative, or worldly element that has not been dealt with. When I go to bed, Lord, I want to be a person who has been crossed out.” What we need to do is simply lie down through the cross at night, have a restful sleep, and then rise up in the morning in resurrection.

Praise the Lord that the experience of Christ's death is versus asceticism!