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THE CROSS
HOW BOUT DEM ASTROZZZ!!!!! Since I talked a lot about sports last week, that’s all I’m going to say about the future MLB CHAMPIONS. On another note, with the presidential election coming up, I wanted to remind and encourage everyone to “VOTE”. I won’t tell you who to vote for, but I ask that you make your decision through prayer. This is who is going to be leading our country through the next four years.
I was going through some of my old writings the other night and I came across an article I wrote for a newsletter a few years ago about the cross. And as I was trying to write the column for this week, my mind kept going back to that article, so I decided to share it with you. I hope it blesses you as much as it did me at the time.
THE CROSS
The cross is one of the most underappreciated and overlooked things in Christianity today. Why do I say that? Without the cross, our salvation is in vain, and yet the body of Christ tends to not see the cross in the same way God views the cross.
A few months ago, I decided that I was going to put together a collage of pictures of the cross, so I gathered up a bunch of my old magazines. I’m an advent reader of various Christian based magazines, so I thought my task of putting together a collage of various pictures of the cross would be quite easy and inexpensive, since I have thousands of magazines to choose from. Of course, I thought, any Christian magazine would have pictures of the cross scattered throughout its pages, but to my surprise, I found very few. I couldn’t even fill one poster board, much less half a poster board, with pictures of the most sacred things in our beliefs as Christians.
Is it a shame? I don’t know. I’m not saying that we have to have a picture of the cross on every page of every magazine, but it seems that the cross has become less and less important in the lives of Christians. You ask many people what the cross is today and they would say, “It’s a piece of jewelry.”
I heard an evangelist the other day talk about the cross. He went into how the cross is the most devastating form of execution created by man. It’s the most agonizing and humiliating, yet it’s the only form of execution that people wear around their neck. You don’t see people wearing execution chairs or guillotines around their necks.
Why do I choose to emphasize the cross? Well, for one thing, it is the definition of our faith as followers of Christ. Without the cross, our lives boil down to just sinners lost in a world with no chance of ever being reconciled for our sins. Without the cross, we’re stuck going back to the Old Testament days and offering up unblemished lambs as atonement for our sins.
Why did Jesus die on a cross? Yes, for our sins, and yes for our redemption, but why did He choose a cross to die upon? I think if you examine the cross, there is so much more there than people hardly ever recognize. In doing my collage, I decided that I was going to find the cross in everyday life, in situations where one would never notice. It took me by surprise that everywhere I went and everywhere I looked, there I saw the cross. Think about it. Driving down the highway I caught a glimpse of telephone poles spread out for miles connecting the world. I saw the cross there. I was at a gas station and I looked at one of the signs and I saw that it was formed in the way of a cross. From the lowercase “t” that I just wrote to the way a couple of my pens happen to sit on my desk, I saw the cross everywhere I looked.
When one really seeks for Christ, one will see Him wherever they go. I noticed that. I believe Jesus chose the cross for that very reason. He wanted something that was perfect and used in daily life so that people would always remember what He did for them that day on Calvary. I don’t think anything Jesus did here on earth was coincidence. Everything was well-planned out by God Himself. That is why there is no question in my mind that the cross has deeper meaning than we can even think about.
Imagine Jesus on the cross. What a perfect image. It was a horrific scene, yet God chose this path for Jesus to follow. Here is Jesus with arms outstretched offering His life as a sacrifice for our sins. Here is Jesus at a point in His life where there was no turning back.
The cross is two parallel lines coming together in perfect symmetry in the middle and pointing upwards towards Heaven. Tell me this is a coincidence. The cross points to Heaven where Jesus now is. I think God chose for Jesus to die on the cross for the purpose of keeping it a daily reminder for us. So, the next time you go about your daily life, look for Jesus in the everyday things. The cross is in more places than you would expect.
Hebrews 12:2 says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
w/muchluv,
geno
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