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DAY <strong>18</strong>: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
DAY <strong>18</strong>: THE CROSS: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that<br />
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John<br />
3:16)<br />
Sometimes I hear people say, “We need to move beyond Jesus dying<br />
on the cross to `deeper’ things.” Like what? What is “deeper” than the<br />
God of the Universe becoming a man and showing his incredible love<br />
by dying to rescue you and me from eternal damnation? The cross of<br />
Christ is not only the source of our salvation, it is our highest motivation,<br />
our clearest example of obedience, and it draws us to rich intimacy<br />
with one who loves us that much. I believe we never “get beyond”<br />
the cross. We only go deeper into our grasp of what it means in every<br />
relationship, every desire, every goal, and every decision.<br />
Jesus is a king whose reign had one purpose: to demonstrate his love<br />
for us by sacrificing himself in our place. We deserve death; he took<br />
our place. But we often yawn at the gospel. We see Bible verses spraypainted<br />
on highway overpasses, and we drive by without a thought.<br />
We see “John 3:16” signs waved at sports events, and we wonder<br />
why somebody would be willing to look so silly in public. We wear<br />
silver crosses as jewelry, but we’ve forgotten about the real blood on<br />
the real wood of Jesus’ cross. Not long ago, I even saw a guy selling<br />
crosses that you activate by twisting them so they glow in the dark.<br />
The cross seems to have become trivial and irrelevant.<br />
A few years ago, our family went to Paris, and we went to the Louvre,<br />
the second largest museum in the world. My brother Benjamin went<br />
with us. The Louvre has some of the greatest pieces of art and artifacts<br />
of history in the world-and lots of them. It would take years to see it all!<br />
I was really excited about seeing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. We weaved<br />
our way through room after room of incredible paintings. Benjamin<br />
was right there wit ;us, jammin’ to music on his Walkman. By the time<br />
we got to the room where the Mona Lisa hangs, I turned around to say<br />
something to Ben. He was gone! Somehow we lost Ben in the labyrinth<br />
of rooms in the Louvre! I looked everywhere for him, but nobody<br />
spoke my language. I went to room after room, past thousands of<br />
people. I looked everywhere, then I remembered that a while back<br />
we had passed a huge painting of Jesus on the cross. I ran back to<br />
that painting. There was Benjamin. He had pulled up a chair in front<br />
of the painting of Jesus hanging on the cross, and he was weeping.<br />
Benjy didn’t care about the Mona Lisa or the French Impressionists or<br />
Picasso. All that mattered to him was the cross of Jesus Christ.<br />
A lot of us think, “I’ve done that. I became a Christian when I was<br />
five ... or fifteen ... or fifty five. I’m looking for more now.” If that’s your<br />
attitude, you have no idea what the cross is about. we need to think<br />
about the cross of Jesus every day of our lives.<br />
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DAY <strong>18</strong>: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
We never get any deeper than the cross. Everything we say and do<br />
needs to be filtered through the sacrifice Christ made on the cross.<br />
At every crossroad in life, the question is not necessarily, what would<br />
Jesus do?”, but more accurately, “What has he already done on the<br />
cross?” and “Will my decision honor the cross?”When you read Paul’s<br />
letters, how often do you see the cross described as the foundation for<br />
the broad scope of what he writes about? All the time! It defines our<br />
identity as children of God; it explains how we can be disconnected<br />
from sin; it gives us hope that we have a future resurrection; it gives us<br />
the example of how much to obey the Father; it shows us how much<br />
we are forgiven and how much we can forgive those who hurt us;<br />
and it measures the depth of God’s great love for us. (There’s more,<br />
but that’s enough to make the point.) Do we choose not to sin only<br />
because we don’t want to get caught? Hopefully there’s a higher,<br />
more compelling motivation: to please the one who laid down his life<br />
for us.<br />
The great English pastor, Charles Spurgeon, said, “If you sin boldly<br />
every time you sin, you are saying that sin is worth more to you than<br />
the cross of Jesus Christ.” Spurgeon was certainly not advocating<br />
sin, but he recognized that those who are very aware of their sin can<br />
become very aware of God’s great forgiveness. If we sin boldly, we<br />
will be slapped in the face with the absurdity of what we are choosing<br />
in light of what Christ did on the cross. Some of us need to be slapped<br />
in the face.<br />
The movie, Saving Private Ryan, was a graphic display of World War<br />
II soldiers’ courage in the face of death. These men obeyed orders<br />
to move forward under heavy fire. Friends were blown apart next<br />
to them, but they kept moving forward. Thousands of these brave<br />
men shed their blood for our freedom, yours and mine. Many people<br />
consider this movie, probably more than any other movie out there,<br />
a realistic portrayal of how much we owe these men for what they<br />
did for us as American citizens. Their sacrifice was great. Freedom and<br />
courage weren’t theories to them. They were blood and guts and raw<br />
obedience when everything in them said, “Hide! Go back!” They went<br />
on. They paid a high price to preserve our freedom.<br />
The sacrifice these soldiers made for our physical freedom made me<br />
think of the price Jesus paid for our spiritual freedom. Everything in<br />
him wanted to hide and run away because he knew exactly what<br />
he faced. Yet he went on. The whip tore chunks of skin and left his<br />
flesh exposed and bleeding. The nails ripped through real muscle and<br />
tendons and bone. It wasn’t antiseptically clean. It was dirty, and it<br />
took hours, all to “demonstrate his love for us” beyond a shadow of a<br />
doubt. He paid a price, and we owe him everything.<br />
One of the errors people have made about Jesus over the years<br />
is to say that his death on the cross is primarily a man’s “wonderful<br />
example” to us. Well, yes, it is a wonderful example of his obedience,<br />
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DAY <strong>18</strong>: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
but he is not just a man. He is the pre-existent immutable, holy God.<br />
He is the Creator, who chose to stoop to become a man to do what<br />
no one, not even the greatest example could do for us: pay for our<br />
sins.<br />
We get a better concept of Christ when we think of him as both Savior<br />
and Creator. All that we see, and all that exists far; beyond what we<br />
can see, didn’t “just happen.” The vast scope and the incredible<br />
complexity of the Universe required a purposeful Creator. The scope of<br />
creation is illustrated by a few facts:<br />
-there are 2.5 million galaxies,<br />
-there are 25 sextillion stars, -the nearest galaxy is 750,000 light-years<br />
away, -our Sun is only 93 million miles, and -the Sun is 3.5 million times<br />
bigger than the earth.<br />
The complexity is illustrated in creation’s incredible precision:<br />
-if our Sun were 10% closer to the Earth, we’d fry.<br />
-if it were 10% farther away, we’d freeze.<br />
-the Earth travels around the Sun at 70,000 mph, 19 miles a second. If it<br />
traveled more slowlywly or more quickly, the seasons wouldn’t provide<br />
change for life as we know it to exist.<br />
-our air contains 22% oxygen, just the right amount for life to exist.<br />
”But,” some people complain, “Christians are so arrogant.<br />
they say Jesus is the only way.” No, it’s not arrogant for God to<br />
“ humble himself to become a man and die a horrible death to pay<br />
for the sins of everyone who ever lived and then to say, “My<br />
forgiveness is yours if you want it.” If there was another way, then God<br />
was cruel to have his Son die. If that’s true, then he died for nothing.<br />
Muslims say Jesus was a prophet and a man of truth, but Jesus said “I<br />
am THE way,” not just “a way” (John 14:6).<br />
Don’t take the cross of Jesus for granted. Don’t trivialize it by wearing<br />
it as a token without feeling intense gratitude for what it means. Don’t<br />
reduce Jesus’ death to only an example to follow. It is more. Much<br />
more. Our entire lives and all of our eternity will be spent trying to grasp<br />
the power and the depth of what the cross of Jesus means. There is<br />
nothing deeper.<br />
-Be still. Listen to what God is saying to you.<br />
1. Read Luke 7:36-50. Describe the woman. What did she do? Why did<br />
she do it? Describe Simon the Pharisee. What was his response to the<br />
woman? Why? Paraphrase the parable Jesus told Simon:<br />
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DAY <strong>18</strong>: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
What does this passage say about gratitude and indifference?<br />
Which are you more like, the woman or Simon? Explain:<br />
2. How can the cross shape:<br />
-your identity?<br />
-your motivations?<br />
-your goals and desires?<br />
-how you relate to other people, especially those who have hurt you?<br />
3. Is it healthy to dwell on the gore of the cross? Why or why not?<br />
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DAY <strong>18</strong>: ARE YOU BEYOND IT?<br />
4. Should a Christian wear cross jewelry or t-shirts? Why or<br />
why not?<br />
5. Read John 3:1-21. Think about each paragraph, then use it as a<br />
guide as you pray.<br />
Memorize: Write Psalm 115:1, 17-<strong>18</strong> three times.<br />
Lord, today you are calling me to die to selfish desires by:<br />
You are calling me to obey in these areas:<br />
You are calling me to intimacy with you by:<br />
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