the message of the cross…is the power of God. -I Corinthians 1:18, also Mark   15:22-39; Romans 5:6-10

The Cross is the power of God.  The NT says there is power in Jesus’ death!  Let me repeat that.  Maybe I need to say it a third time.  But no matter how many times it is repeated, there is dissonance, an incongruity. 

It is not that the words Death/power don’t belong together.  Death has power.  It is pervasive, it is inevitable, it is unavoidable.  In fact I think Saul Bellow was right when he expressed the philosophy of this generation by saying, “Death is God.  This generation thinks—and this is its thought of thoughts—that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power.  Death waits for these things as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb.”¹

The New Testament denies that.  It is says that God took the enemy’s biggest weapon, his most powerful and most destructive act and not only experienced it but used it to accomplish his own purpose.  It is through death that      Jesus entered Satan’s stronghold.  Jesus’ dying, the event, the act, has power to effect you, me, all of creation, then, now and for all time.

We are inclined to minimize the cross, the death in order to magnify, the resurrection, Easter.  In the gospels, in contrast, the “spotlight is on the passion”.  The New Testament exalts the cross as the central act of our salvation.  Malcome Muggeridge called the cross the intersection of time and eternity.  Paul, the apostle makes explicit what all the New Testament breathes: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (I Cor 2:2).

The good news is that Jesus died for you.  His death has power and it becomes effective when we, by faith, surrender our lives to Jesus.  John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, struggling with faith and life found that true one night. He described what happened:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

            “I did trust in Christ” is the telling fact.  That is how you can experience the power of the cross.  For help click here or contact me.         

¹Christianity Today, 9/18/87, 20).

Filed under: belief, Cross, Easter, How to start, Jesus, The Journey |