Loved to Death

Welcome to our inaugural BLOG. Thank you for taking the time to visit with me. I pray that the words you read will, by God’s grace, prove profitable to you.

LOVED TO DEATH
For Christians all over the world, today is known as Good Friday…the day Jesus Christ went willingly to the cross and nailed our sins…all our sins…to that dirty tree. Yet to fully be able to receive and respond to the “good” part of Friday, we have to understand the bad. And what is the bad? You and me! That’s right. We are the bad part of Good Friday. It was because of our sin, our iniquities, our transgressions that our Lord and Savior paid our price on what should have been our cross. The prophet Isaiah writes, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned–every one–to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).

The bad news on Good Friday is that we are responsible for the death of our Lord. We betrayed him. We deserted him. We crowned him with thorns. We drove in those nine inch nails. All we, like deaf, dumb and blind sheep willingly went astray from the only real beauty this fallen world has ever seen…Jesus. And what was the response of our Lord to such sinful and selfish treatment? Love. Unconditional, sacrificial, radical love. So radical was his love for us, he loved us to death! Never think for a moment that those nine inch nails kept our Lord hanging up on that cross. It was love that kept him there.

When you think about it for just a moment, the good news of the gospel simply doesn’t make sense without the bad news. The only reason we need a Savior is because we are sinners who are incapable of saving ourselves. It took the perfect righteousness of Christ; his sinless life, his sacrifical death and his resurrection from the grave, to satisfy the just judgment of God the Father. When Jesus cried out on the cross, “It is finished!” he was making it clear that the payment for sin was paid in full. Nothing we do that is”good” can add to the finished work of Jesus on the cross and nothing we do that is “bad” can take away from it. Because Jesus paid the full price for all of our sins…past, present and to come…God does not come after us when we sin looking to exact his pound of flesh. God himself would be denying his own Son and what he did for us on that cross if he came after us to pay for sins that were already paid for in full. When that sinks down into the marrow of our bones, we can begin to live the life God has called us to with both freedom and faithfulness to the One who saved us. We no longer have to feel guilty about our past or fearful about our future, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No matter what you have done or will ever do, you are never beyond the reach of his radical love and renewing grace. This is indeed good news for every battle-weary believer like myself.

Accepted. Adopted. Assured. Everything we need we have in Jesus. As my friend and pastor Tullian often reminds us, “Jesus plus nothing equals everything. Everything minus Jesus equals nothing.” So the two questions that need to be asked and answered on this Good Friday is this, “Do you know yourself as a great sinner in need of this Great Savior?” “And have you confessed your sins to this Jesus and received him by faith as both your Savior and Lord? If this is true for you, then today is indeed Good Friday. Today is a day of victory and celebration. If you have not, cry out to Jesus. His love is far too radical to let a sincere cry go unanswered. NEVER FORGET THAT…AMEN!