What is the way back? We need to return to the message of the Cross.
by: Erin James Sain
What is the way back? We need to return to the message of the Cross. The message of the Cross will spearhead the great reformation that is coming. It was the message of the Cross which started the Church, and the same message restores the Church whenever it wanders. We like to say that “God is doing a new thing,” but the foundation of what God does in these last days will be used on an old thing, the Cross of Jesus Christ. When the Cross is preached today, it is typically used to emphasize the crucifixion of Jesus, I think this is wonderful but we also need a revelation of how the cross applies to us.
When Jesus preached about the Cross, He always referred to it as “our cross,” not His Cross. In the King James Version of the Bible, Jesus uses the word “cross” six times in the four gospels. One hundred percent of the time, when Jesus used the word cross, He was telling His people to take up “their cross.” He was not talking about how the cross applied to Him, but how it would apply to us. Here’s what He said:
And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. -Matthew 10:38
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. -Matthew 16:24
The Cross was a place of death for Jesus, but it is also to be a place of death for us. The Cross was a place for radical humility for Jesus, but also for us. We are to taste the humiliation, hardship, dying to self, and surrender to God’s will that Christ experienced. When we preach a message off the Cross but don’t consider it applicable to our own lives, we miss its power. First Corinthians 1:18 says, “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
Powerless Christianity is the result of Cross-less Christianity. At the Cross we are transformed by the Spirit of God. At the Cross, we find freedom, victory, and newness of life. At the cross, we find Christ.
