The Cross
THE CROSS
The Cross in Action
Matthew 25:34-40; Romans 9:1-3; Galatians 4:19
Someone has said that he wanted to build a house with no windows and no doors, save the slits of a cross as the only opening, so that he could look out upon the world through a cross alone. Beautiful. But we must not only look out on life through a cross; we must touch life through a cross. Our very contacts must become vicarious.
We must deliberately take on ourselves what really doesn’t belong to us, save as Christ makes us belong to everybody, and, therefore, everyone’s sorrows belong to us. . . . Our love crimsons into sacrifice as it meets the world’s sin. In a world of this kind, a crossless Christian is a Christless Christian.
Victorious Living
(Week 43, Thursday)
Life Looked at through a Cross
1 Corinthians 2:1, 12; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 1:20
The cross means . . . that God goes with us and lets everything that falls on us fall upon God’s own heart. I can love a God like that. . . .
The truth in pessimism is this: this is a world of pain and sorrow and tragedy. The cross saves us from pessimism by using that pain and sorrow and tragedy for redemptive purposes. Through it all it shows the very love of God seeking, redeeming, healing, saving. The cross is light—the only light.
Victorious Living
(Week 43, Friday)
The Four Who Bore Crosses
1 Peter 2:19-24; 1 Peter 3, 14, 17, 18; Mark 14, 41, 42
The third cross was laid upon the shoulders of Simon, the Cyrenian. They laid on him an undeserved cross: “They put the cross on his back and made him carry it behind Jesus” (Luke 23:26 CEB). Life does that with us: it lays hold on us and puts on our unwilling shoulders a cross. It changed the whole course of life for him and his family, for his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, became well-known Christians. Simon did not bear his cross, he used it. When Life lays its cross on us, we can make that cross throw us in company with Christ, and that contact will forever change us. “It is not suffering that ennobles, it is the way it is borne.” Simon bore it well, and it made him.
Victorious Living
(Week 43, Saturday)
Isaiah 5
A great many people go through life in bondage to success. They are in mortal dread of failure. Why should they be? Jesus cared little about success or failure. The story of Jesus is a story of apparent failure; rejected by his nation and crucified by the Romans, he ended on a cross. A faith that has a cross at its center cannot be a faith that worships success. I do not have to succeed; I have only to be true to the highest I know; success and failure are in the hands of God. On my way to India, I once said in England, “The romance of missions has gone for me. I know what I’m up against. If you should say to me that I go back to India to see nothing but frustration and failure and that I would see no more fruit whatever, I would reply, “That is an incident. I have the call of God to India, and to be true to that call is my one business; success and failure are not my business, to be true is.” I made that statement one day in a meeting, and a minister came up and said: “All my life I’ve been in bondage to success; I’ve looked at everything from the success standpoint. You have released within me the greatest tension of my life. I have only to be true, thank God.”
Abundant Living
(Week 12, Thursday)
One Greater Than the Church
Ephesians 4:11-16
One greater than the cross is here. We sometimes say we are saved by the cross. Rather, we are saved by the Christ who died for us upon the cross. The cross can become a matter of contention instead of conversion if detached from Christ. On the cross he took into his own heart all we have done and been and made it his own. If therefore I identify myself by surrender to and faith in Christ; identify myself, not with my past life and its sins, but with Christ, who thus died for me on the cross, I am saved. But I am saved by him, not by the cross. One greater than the cross is here.
The Way
(Week 8, Saturday)
Another Road with a Dead End—Criticism
Matthew 7:1-5
But the center of the Christian faith is not a judgment seat but a cross, a cross where people are not merely criticized but died for. The center is not a sideline criticism but an identification with humanity, which makes human sin its own, and in the process cries, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Redemption is by suffering with and for and instead of, rather than by a sideline pointing out of sin by criticism. People are not converted by criticism. They are converted by a cross.
The Way
(Week 19, Sunday)
Matthew 25:34-40
We have been taught that Christ died once and for all. He was “once offered.” It was a finished fact in a certain point in history. We agree. Something did happen there at the cross that doesn’t have to be done over again. But if the cross were suddenly imposed on history at a given point, something extraneous, then it would lack a cosmic validity. But if the cross is the scarlet thread that runs through the whole garment of existence, then it would have inescapable meanings. “The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8 KJV) points to the cross as inherent.
The cross is the ground plan of the universe. If so, we would expect to see intimations of that ground plan everywhere. We do—some of them crude, all of them are unmistakably pointing to the cross. . . . The seed dies that the plant may live. The mountains are barren that the valleys may be rich. The white corpuscles circulate through the bloodstream watching for infection. When they find it, they absorb it if possible; but when they cannot, they fling themselves upon the intruder and die that the rest may live. The cross is in our blood.
The Way
(Week 28, Thursday)
Using Cyclones
Isaiah 51:7-8, 12; 54:17
“Well, what is God doing?” God is doing what God has always done: helping us to rescue a good out of a bad, to make a new world out of an old one. God did that at the cross. Jesus took the worst thing that could happen to him—his death—and made it into the best thing that could happen to the world—its redemption. God is doing that now, helping us to us make the worst serve the best.
The Way
(Week 35, Sunday)
The Making of a Christian Church
Acts 4:32-37; 1 Thessalonians 3:3-4
The marks of the cross were upon the founding of the church. The cross was in it; hence, the lift of the resurrection was in and through it. If our faith costs nothing, it contributes nothing.
The Way
(Week 45, Monday)
The Way Is the Way of Reconciliation
Ephesians 2:14-22
The one verse that sums up the Christian gospel better than any other, I believe, is this, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, . . . and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:19 RSV). God was reconciling people when they didn’t want to be reconciled, and the price God paid to get to people in spite of their sins was the cross. And what God does we must do; we must reconcile people, even though it costs a cross.
The Way
(Week 46, Monday)
The Word Become Vicarious
Revelation 1:5; Acts 20:28
So the cross is not an afterthought of God; it is the scarlet thread running through the whole garment of creation.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 9, Wednesday)
In Everything God Works for Good
2 Corinthians 6:3-10
This verse tells us: “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom 8:28). Note, the thing itself may not be good; its source and its content may be evil, but God works in that evil to turn it for good. The very genius of the cross is that. The cross is evil, and yet God works in that evil and makes it redemptive. The cross is sin turned saving. With that at the heart of our gospel, we will expect to be saved, not from trouble and evil, but through them.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 23, Monday)
The Central Revolt
Luke 15:13-14
God gives us the awful power to ruin ourselves. On what condition? The condition is that God gets into the whole transaction, suffers in Godself the consequences of our wrong choices, makes them God’s own and redeems us through that identification. The cross is the acute point of that identification where the continuous fact comes to light in history.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 17, Monday)
I Got in Too
1 John 1:5-3
A pastor of a fashionable church was called one night by a little girl appearing at his door and saying, “My mother sent me to ask you to come and get her in.” Wondering what she meant, he followed her into a slum section, up a flight of rickety stairs, into what was the room of a harlot dying of consumption. He sat alongside her bed and told her of Jesus, the great teacher, but she shook her head and said sadly, “That’s not for the likes of me.” Then tried Jesus as a doer of good, but again she shook her head and repeated the same words. He was at end of his tether when he reached back into the past and pulled out something he had discarded; he talked to her about Jesus dying on the cross to save sinners. She began to nod her head, “Yes, that’s it. That’s for the likes of me.” Telling of it afterward, he said, “And we got her in,” and then added slowly, “And I got in too.” The cross met the need of both!
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 18, Friday)
Badly Placed for Wintering In
1 John 2:16-17
Many religious cults are fair-weather cults. It was said of the harbor named Fair Havens, on the island of Crete, that it was “badly placed for wintering in” (Acts 27:12 Moffatt). A good many are taking shelter in harbors named “Fair Havens,” but they are “badly placed for wintering in”; they give no protection when the winter winds of sorrow, sickness, of death blow. . . .
But there is one place of complete security in the universe: “Thus there is no doom now for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1 Moffatt). . . .
There is no doom in your inherent being. You will hold together whatever happens. “In him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). . . .
The saddest sight on our planet is a graveyard without a cross in it, and I see them every day in Japan. But the gladdest sight on our planet is a graveyard with a cross—and hence a resurrection! “There is no doom” to our relationships!
O Christ, You are my surety and my security. You guarantee against the decay and shock of death. It’s all there, forevermore. I thank you. Amen.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 52, Monday)
The Cross Breaks Us
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
The cross conquers the self without violating it. It frees the self from itself and then attaches that self-love to the One who hung on the cross. Deliverance has come.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 3, Friday)
Winning a Positive out of Every Negative
2 Corinthians 4:15-18
Find the positive in every negative situation. . . .
Jesus did that. The Pharisees criticized him, complaining that he ate with publicans and sinners, implying that he was thereby like them in character. That was negative, very negative. Did Jesus meet a negative with a negative? No, instead he gave the three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son—a positive presentation of the seeking love of God. He came out on the positive side of the negative situation.
He always did that. At the cross, Jesus won a positive out of a negative. The cross was sin, and he turned it into the redemption from sin; the cross was hate, and he turned it into a revelation of love; the cross was humanity at our worst, and Jesus through it showed God at God’s redemptive best. This made Jesus the great Affirmation. “The divine ‘yes’ has at last sounded in him” (2 Cor 1:19 Moffatt).
Growing Spiritually
(Week 17, Monday)
Jesus, the Perfect but Unfolding Revelation
Matthew 5:17; Romans 10:3-4; Galatians 6:14
The deepest place of the revelation [of God in Jesus] is the cross. There God let us see the divine heart through the broken heart of Jesus. There was illustrated on a cosmic scale what takes place in a home where pure love meets sin in the loved one. At the junction of that love and that sin a cross of pain is set up. For it is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sin and sorrow of the loved one and make them its own. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one. The cross is the meeting place where the pure love of God meets sin in the loved ones, in us. And there that pure love bore in its own body our sins on a tree. God being what God is and we being what we are, the cross was inevitable. It was inherent.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 51, Tuesday)
Love Bears and Shares
Romans 5:6-11
The cross is the place where God deals with this awful fact of sin. The cross is the price that God pays to get to us in spite of our sin. God being what God is and humanity being what it is, the cross became inevitable.
For wherever pure love meets sin in the loved one, at the junction of that love and that sin a cross of pain is set up. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sorrows and sins of the loved one and make them its own. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one—inevitably so. If God is love, then when that love comes into contact with sin in the loved ones, a cross of pain will be set up at the junction of that love and that sin. But how would I know there is a cross upon the heart of God—God is a Spirit, and I am bounded by my flesh—how could I know there is the unseen cross on the heart of God? How would I know except God show me—show me by lifting up a cross in human history so that I can see through the outer cross the inner cross upon the heart of God? That has happened.
The cross lights up the nature of God as vicarious, suffering Love.
The outstretched arms of the cross are the arms of God stretched out to gather to God’s heart all the sin and sorrow of the world to make it God’s own. . . .
The cross is God saying . . . : “I love you enough to bear your sins in my own body and make them my own.” The cross is Love caring and sharing and bearing.
Mastery
(Week 2, Monday)
Hebrews 12:1-2
The preaching of Jesus created a revolution—turned the world upside down.
The cross was the revelation of the heart of God. That was new and almost unthinkable to that ancient world. Cicero said: “The very mention of the cross should be far removed not only from a Roman citizen’s body but from his mind and his eyes and his ears” (as quoted in Phil Moore, Straight to the Heart of Galatians to Colossians [Oxford, UK: Monarch Books, 2014], 233; a footnote cites Cicero’s legal defense of Gaius Rabirius in 63 BCE as the source for the quotation). Even to think about the cross would defile the proud Roman. But Jesus accepted the cross as his very own and through it showed the love of God. The cross was hate, and through it Jesus showed love. The cross was sin, and through it Jesus accomplished the healing of sin. The cross was humanity at its worst, and through it Jesus showed God at his redemptive best. To atone for sin through the action of sin is new. To show the best through the worst, that was new and revolutionary. The thought and the outlook of antiquity were reversed.
Mastery
(Week 26, Friday)
To Sit with Me on My Throne
Our God rules from a Cross. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). When he was weakest, he was strongest; when he was most helpless on a cross, he was most powerful—the magnet that draws all people to himself. The universe has at its head One who obeys his own laws, and especially the deepest—finding life by losing it.
In Christ
(Week 15, Tuesday)
Hope . . . in the Lord Jesus
Christians never know when we are beaten. We begin with defeat, the defeat of the cross. You cannot defeat defeat. It starts with defeat and turns that defeat into victory, the cross into an Easter morning. Christians are incorrigibly hopeful. When Christians cannot sing of what is, we sings of that which is to be. When that which is to be looks hopeless, we still sing on general principles! In spite of!
In Christ
(Week 36, Monday)
The Cross—Touchstone of Being in Christ
A steadying passage: “Therefore, my brethren, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved” (Phil 4:1). Paul, after having talked of the upward call of God in Christ, here talked about holding steady, “stand firm thus in the Lord.” He points to the cross as the place to hold steady: “For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil 3:18). Evidently there were those who claimed to be in Christ, but in Christ without the cross. Stand fast at the place of the cross, Paul pleads, even with tears.
Was Paul right? Is the cross the touchstone of being in Christ? Yes. Just as self-surrender is the touchstone on our part of being in Christ—no being in Christ without it—so the divine self-surrender in the cross is the touchstone of the real gospel from the side of God. God cannot save without a cross. The cross is the price God must pay to get to us in spite of our sin.
In Christ
(Week 37, Tuesday)
The Son Who Is Effulgence of God’s Splendor
Hebrews 12:2-3
And Jesus “is the effulgence of God’s splendor” (Heb 1:3 NEB). God’s glory point is the Incarnation, where God took it all on. And the center of that glory point is the cross, where God felt the acutest pain of all—the pain of our sin. At the transfiguration, Jesus burst into light when he talked about “his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). But this was the word of the cross become word. But at the actual cross it was the Word become flesh. It actually happened. Therefore the actual cross is “the effulgence of God’s splendor.” God’s bitterest shame was turned into the greatest glory. The God of the Scars has become the God of the Stars—all worlds.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 49, Wednesday)