The Cross is Not the End Game

Hebrews 12:2, “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who FOR THE JOY SET BEFORE HIM ENDURED THE CROSS, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

We call so many things painful. Our worries and fears are painful. Someone else’s unmet need seems painful to us. Rejection, ridicule conjure up images of emotional hurt. Financial insecurity seems as painful as the hunger it can lead to. But is this really pain when compared to the physical pain of being scourged, and left to suffocate on a cross having been nailed there through His hand and feet… is any of the other really pain?

In our selfish little existence it is pain. Our pains are not having insurance, or money for a cable bill or being able to get along with our spouse or co-worker because we are too hell bent on being right v. being at peace with one another. And yet these pains are real to the beholder. They are so many times the nails being driven into our spiritual hands. The PAIN is so many times the sharing of the cross of Christ because that cross represents a place of passing from world to spirit. It represents a place of rejecting everything man made for everything God made. It is part of being transferred into the kingdom of God’s Son as Paul wrote, but the cross is NOT the end.

I, like all of you, can be tormented by uncomfortable circumstances. And yet, as my friend Aaron told me, somehow God’s glory is at the hour and pain of the cross. This is very different from the pain and consequence of sin. The pain of the cross is when you are “trying” with all your heart to live for God, and things “still don’t go right.” When in fact they are going perfectly, stripping you of the “junk” your soul has accumulated to that point in life.  But again I reiterate this pain, this cross, this lot in life is not the end, it is not the point. It is a place that like Christ we endure even though we despise it. And we endure because in faith we learn it is also the hour of glory. It is the hour of intimacy with the Father as we are invited to His throne.

Jesus did not come to teach us to suffer. Jesus came to give us life, to see deep into the kingdom in spite of the suffering.

I think T. Austin Sparks was experiencing this when he wrote, “…it represents a good deal of breaking and smashing up of our previous ideas.  It does represent a terrific stripping off of a system in which we have grown up, in which we have been trained; but when the Lord has done it thoroughly, it is marvelous.  You look back and can only say: ‘There was a time when that, and that, and that was everything to me; it was my system, my program, my line of things, my very life, the presentation of myself to the world.  I did not see anything beyond that.’  But the Lord has done that great emancipating thing, and you laugh at your utter folly that ever such things should have been of any account at all.”

What a great word TAS chose… emancipating. This is the cross… the emancipating pain of obedience to God in a lost and dying world. Oh to be emancipated from the world by the cross, because to be free of the world is to be joined with God.

God set the joy Christ had before us all. Give us His vision, His understanding, His character in Jesus name.