Presented as a devotional, La Junta First Church of the Nazarene's Lenten service and dinner, March 19, 2010:
Like any woman, I
like to look at jewelry, and the more sparkly it is the better. Sometimes when
we’re at the mall or at Sam’s, the light hits those jewelry counters just right
and something catches my eye so that I change my course of direction and go right
toward the sparkling gems. “Oooooo,” is my first reaction as my husband groans.
I laugh and say, “It’s sparkly,” and then continue walking. He responds,
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I see this as a
little joke. I am not really into buying a lot of jewelry, but it is still fun
to look and it is fun to hear him groan. I do not know why, it just is.
Have you ever
noticed that every jewelry store has crosses for sale? They come in gold, white
gold, silver. Some are plain; some adorned with jewels. Even though the jeweled
ones are pretty, I prefer wearing my plain cross. There is just something funny
to me about adorning something typically used as an instrument of torture.
Beyond the jewelry
store, the emblem of the cross comes in various forms. People buy crosses as
religious objects, decorative pieces for the home, and as artwork. Artists
depict crosses in stained glass, like the one you see above my head in this
sanctuary. There are jeweled crosses, crucifixes, crosses with scrolled edges.
We see them carved into tombstones and erected upon hills. We even see flowered
crosses beside the road from time to time marking the place where a loved one
left this world and entered the next.
In my home, I have
a photograph hanging on my wall of the plain wooden cross that stands across
from the entrance at Point Loma Nazarene University. I walked by that cross
several times a day for the four years that I was working on my bachelor’s
degree. It is in a beautiful spot. It overlooks the Pacific Ocean and there are
flowers and bushes all around it. That cross seems to tell people who enter the
campus that the school stands for more than just academia. We also assume that
people who wear the cross or who have depictions of it in their home do so
because the cross means something to them. However, what does it mean?
Well, I do not
think that I have to tell you, a group of people who attend church regularly
what the cross means. We all know it is where Jesus suffered a horrible death
to become the sacrifice for everyone’s sin, so I thought that I would focus
this devotional on what the cross means to me.
Simply put, it
means the same thing. It means salvation from sin and ultimately escape from
eternal punishment, but there is more to it. Arthur W. Pink, an evangelical writer
from the 20th century said, “The nature of Christ’s salvation is woefully
misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a savior from hell
rather than a savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived,
for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire
to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness.”
A little boy once
prayed, “God if you can’t make me a better boy, that’s OK. I’m having a good
time the way I am.”
Isn’t this how we
are? Changing is hard work, yet, that is to what Christ calls us. I believe
changing, is one of the elements of faith that Christ was talking about when he
said. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me.” Mark 8:34.
A literal example
of this truth was Simon of Cyrene when the Romans forced him to carry Jesus’
cross. One of my commentaries says that whenever the Romans forced someone to
carry another’s cross he had to walk behind the condemned. I’m sure that Christ
used the example of carrying the cross to describe what it was like to follow
him as a word picture because it was familiar to his audience. The Romans
crucified thousands of people. This was a common punishment for those who
rebelled, so I am sure that the Jewish people knew exactly what Christ meant.
Jesus added a new dimension to the word picture, however, because people who
carried crosses were usually forced. God expects us to pick up our cross
voluntarily. However, carrying our own cross is our only option if we are to
follow Christ.
What does carrying
the cross mean? What is our cross?
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who was a German theologian, went to prison for participating in a
scheme to dispose of Adolf Hitler during World War II. From prison, Bonhoeffer
wrote “The Cost of Discipleship.” In this book, he said that the Christian
enters daily an arena of temptation and that he or she must bear the sins of
others and forgive them. A Christian must “abandon the attachments of the
world,” he wrote.
“When Christ calls
a man,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “he bids him come and die.”
St. Paul said, “I
have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me
and gave himself for me,” (Galatians 2:20, NIV).
Therefore, this
verse suggests that the cross we must carry is faith in Christ. According to
Bonhoeffer, we must shun the temptation to sin; we must bear the burdens of
others. In addition to this, as Galatians says that we must also bear our own
weight. In essence, we have to give up our very selves to God and put Christ in
charge of our lives. This is the cross we must bear – to die to ourselves and
allow Christ to live his life through us. In this way, he uses our gifts, our
lives, our personalities to do his will in a way that is unique to us. That is
how Christ lives in us. We allow Christ to do this because we are grateful that
God loved us and gave himself for us.
My generation is
visually stimulated and that’s why movies speak to us so effectively. It
started when I was seven. The late Johnny Cash narrated and sang songs for a
movie called “The Gospel Road.” As a young person, I watched the movie about
Jesus’ life with great interest, and then, when the Roman soldiers pounded the
nails into his hands, the sounds of the blows seemed to fill the sanctuary and
I began to weep. “I did that to him,” I thought over and over, so when my
pastor gave the invitation to go to the altar, I went forward and gave my life
to Christ. That movie, with its blonde Jesus no less, seems a little tame now
when I watch Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” The pain and
rejection and the sickness of man just blows my mind when I watch that movie. I
can’t get over the fact that Jesus, a gentle, faultless lamb, would go through
all of that pain and rejection for us, but he did. I am grateful for the cross.
I am grateful that Jesus suffered so much so that I could have abundant life.
That abundant life
comes through denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following Jesus. It
comes from recognizing and accepting the salvation that only Christ provides.
True joy comes when we follow this pathway in life because we unite with God,
our creator, and we allow him to mold us into what he wants us to be. This
process is very difficult at first because we want to be what we want to be. However,
as we give up our lives bit by bit, the Holy Spirit replaces the turmoil with joy
as we realize that we are becoming who we truly are. True union comes when we
feel joy with God over this fact.
So this is what
the cross ultimately means to me—union with God and everlasting joy in him as I
give my life away. The cross is not a trinket; it is a lifestyle. It is through
the cross that we become reconciled to God and how we live for him.
