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Back To The Cross
by Chip Brogden
www.watchman.net/articles/back.html
"For I
determined to not know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him
crucified (I Corinthians 2:2)."
Though Paul had
quite a bit of knowledge and many things to say and teach the
Corinthians, he determined to become a man of one subject: Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified.
We must become
foolish in order to be wise.
We must give up
everything in order to get back everything.
We must become
weak in order to be strong.
We must die in
order to live.
We can quote these
teachings of Jesus, seek to imitate Him as our Example, strive to
walk the narrow Way, and even accomplish many good deeds in His Name.
But apart from the Cross these activities are wood, hay and stubble.
The moment we are challenged or confronted by the opposition we will
fall away. Perhaps we can appear to be patient, but a day comes when
we lose our patience. Perhaps we can appear to be gentle, but a day
comes when our roughness is revealed. Perhaps we can appear to be
humble, but a day comes when pride is discovered in us and we fall.
Perhaps we can obey the letter of the law and appear outwardly to
others as being righteous, but when alone and faced with the secrets
of our heart and mind we discover that the inside of the cup is full
of uncleanness.
In calling us to
come back to the Cross, God is asking us lay down our lives and
embrace the Wisdom of death, burial, resurrection, and ascension in
order to live as sons and daughters within the Kingdom of God. Apart
from the Cross we can neither enter the Kingdom nor live in the
Spirit, no matter how great the desire. For apart from the Cross, we
do not know what it is to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile,
to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us. Apart from
the Cross, we do not know what it is to submit to the will of God,
accept suffering, and cast ourselves upon Him.
Apart from the
Cross, we do not know what Resurrection is.
Religion seeks to
reform a man; the Cross seeks to crucify him. Religion may fail to
bring about the desired result, but the Cross never fails to achieve
its end. Mankind will pursue morality, virtue, spirituality, even
perform religious works and good deeds, in order to avoid death on a
Cross. But there are no wounds, no scars, no evidence of having ever
died and been made alive unto God. Either a man has never died, or he
has died and been raised again. You cannot fake a resurrection.
The Cross is the
means by which God reduces us to Christ, that we may be raised to new
Life. What cannot be accomplished in a lifetime of self-effort is
easily accomplished in God through the Cross. We may take many
shortcuts along the way and attempt to escape the inevitable, but the
day we cease striving and meekly accept the Cross we find everything
is done for us. In fact, death by crucifixion cannot be accomplished
by suicide. We cannot crucify ourselves. The instrument of our death
is chosen for us, as well as the manner in which it is carried out,
the timing and the duration of the execution - all is controlled by
Another. There is nothing to be done, for we must submit to the
Unseen Hand and cast ourselves completely upon Him.
If we will follow
Jesus, we must take up the cross daily, deny ourselves, and follow
Him (Luke 9:23).
The Cross Is
Wisdom Through Foolishness
"For the
preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness (I
Cor.1:18a)." There is a wisdom which comes from above. This
wisdom is counter to the wisdom which is earthly. Our thoughts,
reasonings, arguments, rationales, and opinions are worthless in
God's sight. We are commanded to have the mind of Christ and seek the
Wisdom which comes from God.
Humanly speaking,
the Cross makes no sense. If we approach God with our minds only, we
will never know Him. If we study the Cross in order to gain a new
teaching or doctrine it will make no impression on us. Indeed, we may
memorize the appropriate verses of Scripture, even teach others what
we have learned, and never experience the reality of it. How easily
and freely we may talk about dying to self, taking up the cross, and
living the crucified life. But knowledge without experience is
nothing. Indeed, knowledge without experience only deceives us into
thinking we are living something just because we are able to rehearse
a few facts mentally. This counts for nothing in spiritual matters.
We must ask God to
empty us of our preconceived ideas and notions and fill us instead
with His Mind. We must relinquish our wisdom and receive His Wisdom.
His Wisdom is how He sees things. How we see things is irrelevant,
and will mislead us. His Ways and His Mind are higher than our ways
and our mind. The Cross is the means by which God seeks to destroy
the earthly wisdom and the carnal mind. The Cross, then, is wisdom
through foolishness.
The Cross Is
Gaining Through Losing
In order to
accumulate more, we usually think that we must add to that which we
have already. The Wisdom of God teaches us that in order to gain, you
must first lose. Think of a child who refuses to let go of his old,
broken toy in order to receive new ones from his father. To his mind
he is losing something. But by letting go, by giving up, he gains.
Like the child, we
stubbornly refuse to relinquish our grip on our spiritual
possessions. We tenaciously cling to things as a child would cling to
a collection of broken toys. We collect teachings, experiences, and
good deeds, pointing to these as proof that we are spiritually
endowed. Until we are willing to part with our "riches" we
will not be able to receive the true Riches of Christ in us. The
Cross demonstrates that we do not gain by trying to get, but by
losing in order to gain. We cannot really receive from God until we
have learned to give up unto God. It is the spirit which cries,
"Not my will, but Thine be done" and "Father, into
Thine Hand I commit my spirit."
These words are
easily uttered, but we cannot appreciate them or really experience
them until we have been through our Gethsemene experiences and our
Golgotha experiences. Until that time we are merely reciting some
words, but we do not truly know what it means to give ourselves up to
God, to be completely consecrated and submitted to Him. The Cross
prepares us to receive by first forcing us to give up. Therefore, the
Cross is gaining through losing.
The Cross Is
Power Through Weakness
"God hath
chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are
mighty (I Cor. 1:27b)." To the natural way of thinking, power
and weakness are opposites. That is, in order to have power, we must
eliminate weakness. The Wisdom of God teaches us differently. This
Wisdom tells us that the weak things are chosen to overcome the
mighty things, and power works concurrently with weakness.
The Cross is meant
to inflict pain, weaken, and slowly kill. It is the ultimate
expression of weakness. The victim is stripped naked and nailed to
the wood through their hands and feet. Their weight is supported by
their legs until they are too tired to stand. When their legs give
way their entire weight is supported by their outstretched arms (to
speed this process along the legs are sometimes broken). The chest
cavity is eventually pulled apart from this stress and the helpless
victim slowly dies of suffocation as the lungs collapse.
The crucified one
can hardly move, much less struggle. Once the nails are in place
there is no way to remove them. You carry nothing with you, and have
nothing remaining. You can neither speed up nor slow down your death.
The shame of your nakedness is open for all to see. Besides the
physical suffering, the soul is stripped of its dignity and pride.
There is no escape.
God desires to
give you power, but that power only comes through weakness. Any power
not obtained through weakness is illegitimate, no matter how
spiritual it appears. The only legitimate power is granted to those
who have been made weak. Power is birthed in weakness. Many exude a
certain "power", but there is not the corresponding
weakness. Hence, the power only gives them an occasion for boasting.
To remedy this, God has ordained that all who would have His power
must first be weakened and made empty - we refer to this as being
"broken". The purpose of weakness and suffering is to open
the way for His Power. The instrument God uses to weaken us is the
Cross. Therefore, the Cross is power through weakness.
The Cross Is
Life Through Death
"I am
crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me (Gal.2:20a)." There can be no Resurrection Life
without a Crucified Death. Naturally we expect that in order to live
we must avoid death at all costs. Yet, the Wisdom of God teaches us
that Life is found by embracing Death - that is, as we die to
ourselves we are made alive unto Christ.
There is a
principle of death that works in us. When we are born, we begin to
age and die. For the one in Christ, physical death is not the end,
but the beginning. Likewise, a God-ordained death on the Cross is not
the end, but the beginning. The Cross works death in us that the
Spirit may work life in us. The Cross kills that which needs to be
killed in us, whereas the Spirit gives Life to that which has been
killed. The Cross beats and tears down, while the Spirit rebuilds
that which has been destroyed. Only those who have experienced Death
can truly minister Life and speak to dead men.
Now if we have not
learned what it is to die daily, we will not experience the life of
God daily. In a word, I am dead, yet I am living. I am crucified, yet
I am alive. On the one hand I am weakened to the point of death and
powerless; on the other hand, I live by the power of God and am
strengthened with all might by His Spirit which indwells me. The
moment I cease to experience death, however, at that precise moment I
cease to experience life, for the cross is life through death.
The Aim of
God's Dealings
"Verily,
verily I say unto thee, when thou wast young, thou girdest thyself
and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou
shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry
thee whither thou wouldest not (John 21:18)." Though our heart
attutude should be childlike, God desires us to be men and women of
maturity. He desires us to grow spiritually. In order to accomplish
this He allows us to meet with many disagreeable circumstances and trials.
When we are young
in the Lord we do as we please. We find much pleasure in serving the
Lord according to our own thought, and everything is light and gay.
We live a life of feeling and sensation. We are easily moved by how
we feel. If we are happy we gladly deny ourselves and pour ourselves
out in service. But when we are sad or troubled by our circumstances
we feel as though we have been deserted. The Lord must then reach
forth and draw the little sheep back to Himself again, whereupon our
feeling is restored and we renew our devotion with the same vigor as
before. This is the way of those who are young: they dress themselves
and go where they wish.
But when we are
older in the Lord, the life of faith commences as we stretch forth
our hands in surrender and allow Another to dress us and carry us
where we do not wish to go. We no longer dress ourselves and go our
own way. We no longer walk, but we are carried. We may no longer
consider our own wishes. We may no longer act according to a will of
our own apart from God's will. Instead, we have finally submitted to
God's dealings with us. We recognize at last how we have until now
been full of ourselves, speaking many words in addition to what God
had given us, and performing many acts apart from the ones that God
was calling us to perform. Likewise, we see how often we have failed
to speak and act on many occasions because we simply loved ourselves
more than we loved God.
This transition
between a life of feeling and a life of faith, from being self-ruled
to being Spirit-ruled, does not happen in a few days. What stands
between the experience of the young and the experience of the old?
What is it that brings about this maturity? How is this growth
achieved? By what means does God accomplish this work of
transformation? In speaking to Peter, the Lord is telling him by what
death he will die to glorify God (v.19). We know that Peter was
eventually crucified upside-down and died a martyr's death. But, the
daily cross of self-denial that Peter bore was the means by which God
was able to subdue his wild nature and transform him into a man of
faith. His was a living sacrifice. The physical cross upon which he
died was a testimony to his having already laid down his life a
million times prior to that final act.
The death God
really seeks in us is not the future laying down of our physical
life, but the moment -by-moment laying down of our self. It is not
the once-and-for-all martyr's death but the daily dying and living
unto God that brings Him the most glory. In fact, those who have not
denied themselves in the seemingly insignificant matters of daily
life will find it difficult, if not impossible, to lay down their
physical lives should that be required of them.
God is calling us
to become foolish in order to be wise; to give up everything in order
to get back everything; to become weak in order to become strong; to
come back to the cross and die that we may live. In these pages we
hope to communicate this urgent call. Today, let us ask God to
quicken this to our hearts, and grant that we may become People of
the Cross, experiencing the Death of the Lord that we may have the
Life of the Lord. Let us determine henceforth to know nothing, but
Christ and Him crucified: for the disciple is not above the Master,
but the disciple shall be as his Master (Luke 6:40).
Copied from
www.watchman.net. Placement here does not necessarily mean that
Chip Brogden endorses Fellowship Of The Martyrs (although we like Chip). |
