Oh to truly allow the cross to take hold and literally ravish, destroy, and kill! For centuries the cross has stood as the iconic emblem and symbol of our faith. It is the epicenter of history unfolded and continues to stand as the single most important point through which the entirety of history revolves. It is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power of God for salvation to those who believe. Do I believe? Have allowed the cross to utterly annihilate who I am? Have I truly grasped the importance of what occurred upon its rugged and splintered structure? The cross is bloody, horrendous, and detestable. Somehow, beyond comprehension, Jesus chose this to be the setting on which he would take my place and pay the penalty for my sin so that I can be purchased or redeemed and declared righteous before my God, in whose image I am made, whose standard is nothing less than holiness. Jesus Christ has lived the life I couldn’t live, and died the death I should have died—both physical and spiritual. This is the Gospel. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” This is of FIRST importance. The Gospel should remain at the forefront of not only what we believe, but it is also who we are. The moment we remove our eyes from the cross of Christ is the moment we replace it with something else. This is also known as idolatry! We must keep Jesus at the center of our entire essence and being. The Gospel is what should define our lives! Can we ever truly move beyond this? The moment we move beyond the Gospel is the moment we turn back to religion. Religion is doing anything apart from the completed work of Christ and yields nothing less than moralism and works-based self-righteous pride. There is nothing good in us. We are wicked to the core of our being. Jesus is the only thing that can be deemed good in us. The cross must become the sole milieu by which we live our life if we are to truly embrace the Gospel as First importance. I find it interesting that later in the same chapter Paul says, “I protest, brothers, by my pride which I have in Christ Jesus, I die every day!” The cross is a place that represents death! In Galatians Paul says that “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Like Paul, we must work out the implications of the Gospel in our own life before we can even begin to proclaim it to others. Am I at the point to where I can say, “I die every day!” There must be a death before there can be a resurrection. So what does the cross mean to you? Paul says the following in Galatians 6:14: “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” What is it that you boast in? The cross must remain the center of who we are. We must die every day to ourselves so that we can be resurrected by the power of the Spirit to fulfill our calling as ambassadors for King Jesus! Has the cross wrecked, dare I say destroyed your life? The Gospel paints a clear path to call all men to repentance. It calls the religious to repent of their pride, moralism, and works-based self-righteousness. And it also calls for the irreligious to repent of their sin and wickedness. I hope and pray that you continue to work out exactly what the Gospel is and means to you in life. Is is just a message or is it truly “Good News”. Think about the word “news”. News is something that is in the past and already completed. The truth is that Christ has already paid our debt by His death on the cross and we should never forget the price He paid, but more importantly the love He gave. The tomb is empty, but the cross still stands as a constant reminder of salvation to all who are willing to humble themselves and take the march to the foot of its bloody soil and die so we can truly live!
I will close with a quote from A.W. Tozer which says the following:
“The old cross is a symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt violent end of a human being. The man in Roman times who took up His cross and started down the road had already said good-bye to his friends. He was not coming back. He was going out to have it ended. The cross made no compromise, modified nothing, spared nothing; it slew all of the man completely and for good. It did not try to keep on good terms with its victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its work, the man was no more…So the cross not only brings Christ’s life to an end; it ends also the first life, the old life, of every one of his true followers. It destroys the old pattern, the Adam pattern, in the believer’s life, and brings it to an end. Then the God who raised Christ from the dead raises the believer and a new life begins”
Taken from The Radical Cross: Living the Passion of Christ by A.W. Tozer
