Well, everything about this night is different.
Not a single chorus sung, no preliminaries, a
simple and straight entering into the word, an
auditorium ten times larger than what we need.
Nothing done that is based on the question
of efficiency or familiarity or convenience.
The Lord knowing that my greatest distaste is
to speak in an auditorium, much preferring crowded
sweaty rooms.
It's as if he has gone out of
his way calculatingly that nothing about tonight or
perhaps all of these days in Monroe is
to be humanly arranged or even understood.
And I think that the words that we've
heard already from Paul are perfectly in keeping
with this spirit and with this mind of
the Lord.
I want to read to you from Matthew
the 27th chapter, the final description of the
final moments of the life of the Lord,
beginning with the 35th verse, and they crucified
him.
Just to show you how contrary the world
is from the kingdom of God, if the
world ever had so noble and mighty a
theme as is expressed in these four words,
they would have had sufficient inspiration for an
extravaganza that cannot be imagined.
But God, contrary to every human reckoning, expresses
the same mighty and epical theme in four
simple words, and they crucified him.
There's not much that's given to description or
to drama or to milking the event sentimentally
or emotionally.
And they crucified him and parted his garments,
casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which
were spoken by the prophet.
They parted my garments among them, and upon
my vesture did they cast lots.
And sitting down they watched him there, and
set up over his head his accusation written,
this is Jesus the King of the Jews.
Then were there two thieves crucified with him,
one on the right hand and another on
the left, and they that passed by reviled
him, wagging their heads and saying, thou that
destroyest the temple and buildest it in three
days, save thyself, if thou be the Son
of God, come down from the cross.
Likewise also the chief priests, mocking him with
the scribes and elders, said, he saved others,
himself he cannot save.
If he be the King of Israel, let
him now come down from the cross, and
we will believe him.
He trusted in God, let him deliver him
now, if he will have him, for he
said, I am the Son of God.
The thieves also which were crucified with him
cast the same in his teeth.
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness
over all the land unto the ninth hour,
and about the ninth hour Jesus cried with
a loud voice saying, Eli Eli lama sabachthani,
that is to say, my God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
Some of them that stood there, whether they
heard that, when they heard that said, this
man calleth for Elias, and straightaway one of
them ran and took a sponge and filled
it with vinegar and put it on a
reed and gave him to drink.
The rest said, let be, let us see
whether Elias will come to save him.
Jesus, when he had cried again with a
loud voice, yielded up the ghost, and behold
the veil of the temple was rent entwined
from the top to the bottom, and the
earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and
the graves were opened, and many bodies of
the saints which slept arose, and came out
of the graves after his resurrection, and went
into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
Now when the centurion and they that were
with him watching, Jesus saw the earthquake, and
those things that were done they feared greatly,
saying, truly this was the Son of God.
My subject tonight is the crucifixion of Jesus,
more accurately the cross of the crucified Christ.
Maybe I'm quick to add of the crucified
Christ, lest you think I am referring to
the thing that is stuck on the dashboards
of cars with suction cups, or hangs around
idle necks, or decorates church architecture or many
homes.
I'm not speaking of that cross, I'm speaking
of the cross of the crucified Christ.
Paul said, I'm determined to know nothing but
Christ and him crucified.
I think that that was a wise determination,
and it probably cost him much being Jewish,
because there's something about Jewish intellect that just
likes to know for its own sake many
things.
It probably took a supreme act of will
and discipline, determination not to know the things
that were extraneous, though interesting.
How many are hearing me now whose minds
are either a battlefield or a playground for
all kinds of things?
And I'll tell you that if you've graduated
from Playboy and Sports Illustrated and other kinds
of worldly things that our minds love to
fasten upon, they will, if you'll give them
no other alternative, even fasten upon things spiritual
and religious, so long as they can be
occupied.
If we knew the importance of Christ and
him crucified, we would clear the deck and
not allow our minds to be a mishmash
of all kinds of things until God has
himself established an understanding that is utterly fundamental
to our faith and to our walk.
Christ and him crucified.
I think that it's the answer to the
kinds of vagaries and self-imaginings to which
we are prone.
I'm becoming conscious that far from God making
us in him, in making us in his
image, we are most of us guilty of
making him in our image.
There's a kind of fancy and fantasy and
projection that takes place in the minds of
many saints, and though we use the name
Jesus, probably every one of us have another
variation on the same theme.
Without exception, if our Jesus is one other
than that which was crucified, it's a self
-serving Jesus which we have projected out of
the fancies of our own mind.
Its inspiration is taken by any of the
number of present portraits which are available in
this generation as posters, every one of them
impressive, and heads and shoulders above the hokey
and corny kinds of depictions of Jesus that
might have been painted a generation ago.
These Jesus's are manful and attractive and beguiling,
but I'll tell you that however great the
artistry and however great the imagination, it falls
short of the Jesus crucified.
We need desperately and urgently to know him
exactly as he is, radically and utterly, and
I have a suspicion that he is nowhere
presented as the reflection and the image of
God more accurately than in his suffering and
death.
You're gonna have to think about what I'm
saying tonight, and this is not going to
be a rah-rah-rah night.
This is thoughtful and deliberate and important.
I want to say that before I go
further, it's my opinion that there has been
no thing more grossly neglected in modern Christendom
than the cross of Christ Jesus.
I think that we have suffered enormously for
the avoidance of the subject, because the cross
itself is ruthless and absolute.
It is, if you can understand it, a
plumb line from God.
It's an unswerving standard by which everything should
be conformed and measured, and if it is
absent, if it has been neglected, if some
other hokey substitute has been put in its
place, though we allude to it as the
cross, if it be not the cross of
the crucified Christ, everything is going to be
out of variance and out of whack, which
I believe is the case and the condition
of modern Christianity tonight.
It is not the root of all of
our ills, our stripes, our divisions, our fears,
our jealousies, our ambitions, the kinds of things
that lead to the rupture and the fragmentation
of the body of Christ.
In the last analysis, the failure to radically
apprehend God as he is.
A lot of us would be shocked if
we could see our hearts and know ourselves,
and realize that when our voices are ecstatic
and our emotions are titillated and we're mentioning
the name of Jesus, to what degree are
we celebrating the crucified and risen Christ, and
to what degree are we just singing a
song to a kind of a blurred image
of our own making that serves our own
vested self-interest.
I get the impression many times hearing what
we call worship, that the Jesus who is
being celebrated is some kind of buddy-buddy,
one of the guides, one with whom we
have an unspoken understanding.
He knows us and we know him, and
everything is just dandy.
He's the one who provides health instead of
sickness, prosperity instead of poverty, and will see
to every material need that assures our well
-being.
If there's any false image which will redound
to things false in our own life, it
can only be corrected by knowing God as
he is, where he has presented himself unsparingly
and accurately, and which I believe is done
nowhere else better than in the suffering and
death of Jesus.
Can you picture that dumb centurion and those
that were with him at the base of
the cross that day?
The densest of men, a professional soldier and
a hack, whose work it is is to
hang men on crosses.
Thick, insensitive, soulish, carnal, a Roman.
He's seen Caesars deified as gods.
He has celebrated all the wrong values, so
why should he have even so much as
a modicum of respect for the pathetic Jew
who's hanging on the cross?
And what a shambles that Jesus was.
Maybe we need even to have our image
of the crucifixion corrected, which has become sentimentalized
through the generations.
Just today we picked up out of a
Bible dictionary this description.
The cross was unanimously considered the most horrible
form of death.
Among the Romans the degradation was also a
part of the infliction, and the punishment, if
applied to freemen, was only used in the
case of the vilest criminals.
The one to be crucified was stripped naked
of all his clothes, and then followed the
most awful moment of all.
He was laid upon the implement of torture.
His arms were stretched along the cross beams,
and at the center of the open palms
the point of a huge iron nail was
placed, which by the blow of a mallet
was driven home into the wood.
Then through either foot separately or possibly together,
as they were placed one over the other,
another huge nail tore its way through the
livering flesh.
Whether the sufferer was also bound to the
cross we do not know, but to prevent
the hands and feet being torn away by
the weight of the body, which could not
rest upon anything but four great wounds, there
was about the center of the cross a
wooden projection strong enough to support at least
in part a human body, which soon became
a weight of agony.
Then the accursed tree with its living human
burden was slowly heaved up, and the end
fixed firmly in a hole in the ground.
The feet were but a little raised above
the earth.
The victim was in full reach of every
hand that might choose to strike.
A death by crucifixion seems to include all
that pain and death can have of the
horrible and ghastly.
Dizziness, cramps, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus,
publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror
of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds, all intensified
just up to the point at which they
can be endured at all, but stopping just
short of the point which would give to
the sufferer the relief of unconsciousness.
The unnatural position made every movement painful.
The lacerated veins and crushed tendons throbbed with
incessant anguish.
The wounds, inflamed by exposure, gradually gangrened.
The arteries, especially of the head and stomach,
became swollen and oppressed with surcharged blood, and
while each variety of misery went on gradually
increasing, there was added to them the intolerable
pang of a burning and raging thirst.
Such was the death to which Christ was
doomed.
We had the occasion just a few days
ago to visit a Catholic shrine, probably the
most humanly impressive grounds that I have ever
visited.
The grounds were absolutely manicured, and it had
the most resplendent fountains, and amphitheater, and supreme
architecture, and the stations of the cross were
enclosed in glass, and you need not even
get out of your car.
There was a road, and you could ride
from station to station, but I'll tell you
that it didn't do a thing for me
spiritually.
If it did anything, it knotted something in
my gut, because the figures depicted in the
stations of the cross were so saccharine, so
sugary, so antiseptic, so bloodless, so clean, so
smooth.
It was sentimental rather than horrible, for which
reason I would prefer no depictions, rather than
the clumsy or the sentimental attempts of men,
which in the end result in having our
knowledge of God distorted.
This Roman centurion, who didn't have a spiritual
iota to his makeup, seeing these things and
those that were with him, cried out, truly
this is the Son of God.
How many countless thousands of religionists are there
occupying pews on Sunday who have yet to
come to that cry and to that revelation,
singing hymns, quoting scripture, reading catechisms, but have
not had the revelation of who and what
that hacked piece of flesh on the cross
was.
There is something about suffering that reveals truth.
Excuse me for speaking the nasty word.
I know we're not supposed to.
I think that the word suffering is as
much neglected as the word cross, and exactly
for the same reasons.
We live in a generation and a civilization
that has no tolerance for pain.
We think that suffering is a sick subject,
and anyone who introduces it must himself be,
if not masochistic, a little psychologically bent.
And yet, despite that, I have a strange
sense that there's something about the nature of
suffering that is what the cross is all
about, and that unlike anything else has a
capacity to reveal truth in its darkest, deepest
meaning.
Truly this was the Son of God.
The many Jesuses of today are soppy, sentimental,
and self-serving, and a complete contradiction to
the Christ who suffered and died.
And if God is to correct our image
of Him, which means also the correction of
our image of ourselves, it's my conviction tonight
that the only place where it can be
done is at the cross of Christ Jesus.
Have you been there?
Here is truth suffering ultimately, and therefore the
profoundest capacity to reveal truth and set free.
You shall know the truth, and the truth
shall set you free.
The real and pathetic condition of the lives
of many Christians, and the woeful condition of
the Church, the enormous fascination of the world,
and its powerful influence on God's people, all
testify to the fact that we have tragically
avoided the cross of Jesus.
If I make extreme statements tonight, I think
that they are absolutely true, though there may
be an occasional exception.
Paul said, he gloried only in the cross
of Christ Jesus, by which the world is
crucified unto me, and I unto the world.
The single greatest factor that explains this fascination
with the world, and that it has compromised
us all, that we reflect its fashions and
its style, that its promotional spirit has come
in into our Christendom, that we've adopted its
hairstyles and its trends, that it has all
made a groovy accommodation with that which is
called Christianity, even to the employment of its
rock music and its amplifiers, and I can
go on down the list, is all to
be laid to one single factor, the absence
of the cross in the experience of the
lives of God's people.
Only the cross can effectually crucify the world
from us, and we from it.
The world is too much with us, because
the cross has been neglected in our understanding
and in our experience.
Nothing less than the cross can separate us
from a world that is powerfully seductive, at
enmity with God, and lying in the wicked
one.
How many of you believe me, even as
I say these things?
I don't mean acknowledge, I mean believe, to
the point where your heart winces, where if
you touch any aspect of the world, a
shudder runs up your spine.
That the world is as abominable to you
as it is to God, and I'm not
just speaking about its ugliest vices, I'm speaking
also about those things that are equally of
the world, which are applauded as virtue and
as good.
You know the scripture in Luke that says,
that which is esteemed of men is abomination
in God's sight.
Do you treat the world as if it
is under the judgment of God?
Do you see it in all of its
aspects, including its culture, the things that are
imposing and elegant and honorific, as also having
its origin in hell and being ruled over
by the prince of darkness?
Is your distaste for the world such that
you can't wait to get out of it,
and you're really here against your own will,
waiting for God to call you to himself?
Do you see yourself as a pilgrim and
a stranger, and confess that you are such,
looking for a city not made with hands?
The answer to every question is, frankly, no.
And I don't know that I've recovered from
a recent overseas trip, which continues now traveling
through the states, in the homes not only
of Christians, but ministers, to learn that the
basis by which their important decisions are made
is not the gospel, but the values of
the world.
You parents that are sitting in this auditorium
tonight, on what basis have you determined that
your kids, when they graduate high school, shall
go on to college or university?
What is the basis by which you decided
to enter the business or the vocation that
you're in?
In any of the real decisions of your
life, though you may speak generally about the
Lord's will, how much more true is it
that the decision is predicated on the values
of the world that have to do with
comfort, convenience, security, and the like?
Now more than any previous time, because the
world is increasing in the power of its
seduction, the issue of God is the issue
of Jesus, and the issue of Jesus is
the issue of Him crucified and risen again.
The cross is the test of everything that
deserves to be called Christian.
Why are so many Christians fixated at the
salvational level, and have not progressed beyond first
principles?
Why is it that the cross is only
acknowledged as the place where the blood was
shed, that relieves us from the weight and
the guilt of sin?
We hardly ever hear any allusion to the
cross beyond that which pertains to salvation, and
for which reason we have fallen short of
the glory of God.
There's another dimension to the cross that enters
the realm of glory called resurrection, for those
who have received the cross as death.
Why the painful disparity between our verbal professions
and what is the actual condition of our
lives?
Why our powerlessness to affect the world?
I think we, every one of us, ought
to be humiliated or humbled every time we
pick up the book of Acts and read
the glory that attended the life of that
first church.
By contrast, the most successful kind of Christianity
that we know, the most charismatic, the most
to be lauded and applauded, is utterly anemic
and does not bear comparison.
How is it that these rude men, fishermen
and louts who had no advantage of the
kind that we have enjoyed, were able to
turn cities upside down and shake the earth?
Why is it we have not had a
corresponding effect in our own generation?
The answer in my opinion is that in
missing the cross, we have missed the power
of the resurrection.
We have sidestepped the cross as a subject,
let alone as experience, because we have no
tolerance or sympathy for suffering.
Our ears have been stuffed full.
Our eyes enjoy continual orgy of sense experience.
It is painful to deny ourselves anything that
bears upon our body, that even if somebody
walks into this auditorium, as happened tonight, heads
automatically turn to see.
You've got to see.
You've got to hear.
The silence has got to be filled.
Your mind has got to be occupied.
Your fingers have got to be occupied.
The denial of self in any form is
suffering, and we have not been encouraged to
that.
We are unable and unwilling to face the
issue of pain.
We have overindulged and spoiled our youth, compromised
truth in our marriages, suffered casualties and losses
among our ministers, and given ground to the
spirit of independence and rebellion in the churches,
all because we cannot stand pain.
We parents who indulge our kids rather than
chasten them, are we being loving or self
-indulgent?
We pastors who condescend to placate men rather
than speak the truth to them in love,
why are we so sparing?
We saints who see the defects and the
things that need to be corrected in each
other, why are we silent?
We're the Pauls of our generation who will
confront the Peters, who have compromised the gospel
by being one thing with one group and
another thing with another.
Paul said he would not entertain that situation
to go on beyond the moment, for the
purity of the gospel's sake, and publicly confronted
Paul, who was the pillar of the church,
confronted Peter rather.
I call that love, but you know that
that kind of love as an act is
painful and it's humiliating.
It's easy to be misunderstood.
For which reason we prefer to keep quiet?
For which reason the world is running amok
with us, and for which reason we move
into increasing carnality, not being corrected by one
another?
The avoidance of pain is a costly avoidance,
and the symbol of the cross at the
heart of the faith is an invitation to
share in his sufferings.
In a word, our Christianity is degenerating into
a middle-class culture, a sanctifying cover-up
for the status quo, a vacuous praise club,
an equating of gain as godliness, a comfortable
religiosity that leaves our real interests unchallenged and
undisturbed in the avoidance of the cross of
Christ Jesus.
How many professing Christians live effectually as atheists,
having no substantial difference in their lives from
those in the world anywhere about them?
Somehow am I naive to think that we
ought to look different, speak differently, act differently,
that there ought to be such a savor
and fragrance about us of Christ that it's
a savor of death unto death to some
and life unto life to others.
The fact that the world can so easily
tolerate us, the fact of the almost complete
absence of reproach, let alone of persecution, is
itself a shameful testimony that we are so
like the world that we cannot be distinguished
from it, and that despite the things that
we verbally profess, our lives are lived hardly
any differently from those that are effectual atheists.
We ought rather to be citizens of another
kingdom, citizens of heaven, but there's just simply
no way to get there except through the
cross.
We have lost even the difference, the sense
of the difference between that which is sacred
and that which is profane, and the God
who called us to be a chosen generation
and a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a
peculiar people, that we should show forth the
praises of him who has called us out
of darkness into his marvelous light, have simply
failed to do it.
And I'm fond now of quoting a God
-is-dead theologian who rightly prophesied some years
ago that if God's people will not be
radically sacred, the world will become radically profane.
I believe that God could lay at the
door of the church the full responsibility for
the present condition of the world, and the
things over which we cluck our tongues and
point our fingers and look this thing from
down our noses about are the things which
can be attributed to us, for we have
not established in the earth a standard and
an alternative to which a dying world might
have turned.
They simply did not know that there's such
a thing as that which is holy and
that which is sacred, for we ourselves are
wallowing in the things that are earthly, common,
unclean, and profane.
The only alternative to that which is earthly,
carnal, sensual, and devilish is that which is
heavenly, and there's no way to attain to
that which is heavenly independent of the cross
of Christ Jesus.
In the religious unreality that pervades our church
services, we are unconsciously yielding more and more
to a spirit of manipulation to produce some
semblance of life against the deadness and grayness
of unresolved conflict, unconfessed sin, nurtured resentments, and
inability to forgive, which are the evidence of
the cross neglected.
What are you going to do with a
carnal congregation who brings in their dead weight
and their grayness?
You're compelled, if you're going to have anything
that's called, quote, a successful service, unquote, to
condescend to manipulation.
Manipulation is the antithesis of faith.
It's a scandal and a shame that many
of our services, particularly in the Pentecostal realm,
look more like high school football rallies and
attempts to pump up flesh in the guise
of spirit because of the avoidance of the
cross.
People simply insist on clinging to their resentments,
their bitternesses, their unconfessed sins, and because we
have cowards in the pulpit, and because we
don't want to be shaken or disturbed, we
put a thin gloss over that whole mess
and try and pump up some measure of
successful religion that will bring a flesh to
our cheek and give us a Sunday hour.
Have you not read the final verse of
the second chapter of the book of Ephesians?
To God be glory in the church.
It is an unspeakable scandal that of all
of the institutions to be found in the
earth in this hour, the church is the
deadest.
Our religion becomes increasingly a performance, monotonous and
predictable rather than a lively and life-giving
communion of the saints.
There's nothing that you can predict with greater
regularity than what's going to happen in church
on Sunday.
Waiting on God in silence that would reveal
our spiritual bankruptcy is drowned out by our
amplifiers and ceaseless activity lest we acknowledge our
condition.
There's a reason why we're uncomfortable with silence.
There is a tacit and unspoken agreement between
clergy and congregation by which the show goes
on for the preservation of a safe status
quo which carnality, while carnality and sin abound,
unchecked and unaddressed in the lives both of
the congregants and the minister.
In the name of being defenders of the
faith, stodgy and fearful men are to be
found actually opposing it, not having the faith
which was once delivered unto the saints.
Thus those who consider themselves the most vigilant
guardians of the faith do violence to the
faith and smother it.
In the evangelical churches therefore one is likely
to find, I'm quoting now another writer, biblicalism
without liberating preaching.
Correct texts and doctrinally sound sermons that simply
do not liberate or convict.
In the Pentecostal churches, nostalgia for the days
of former glory, sentimental and teary in a
salty marsh long since separated from the river
of life that has left it behind.
Proclaiming Holy Ghost distinctives long ago abandoned in
actual experience.
It's been my unhappy experience again and again
to note that no church is more doubly
dead than that which has once known the
Holy Spirit.
The condition of Pentecostal churches in the world
is unbelievable.
In the charismatic realm, sing-song superficiality, the
hardening of the spontaneity of the Spirit into
a fixed liturgy of choruses, pregnant pauses, pontifical
prophecies that are mere truisms and which are
ignored as quickly as they are spoken.
Haven't you noticed that?
You can almost count on it now, the
regularity of the number of songs that will
sing, and then by some kind of unspoken
agreement, a certain momentary silence that'll allow someone
to come forth with a tongue and interpretation
or prophecy of the most general kind that
you would hardly think God would bother to
speak, and which likely he's not, and which
is accepted for the nothing that it is
because we go right on with business as
usual, not at all touched.
It's become performance.
Dear children, there's a God who is very
grieved.
If that utterance is holy utterance, we ought
so to be mindful of it and to
respond appropriately.
But our disregard of it and our nonchalance
itself is the proof of what our real
attitude about such kinds of Holy Spirit quote
-unquote activity is.
Altogether there is an inexorable tendency to brainwash
and conform men to we are all persuaded
we are seeing the Emperor's new clothes while
he is yet pathetically naked.
You know the story of how two shifty
tailors came to town?
A couple of hucksters who told the king
that they had certain golden thread and they
would weave him a gorgeous wardrobe unlike anything
that any king had ever worn?
And so when the poor man came to
be fitted, he saw nothing, but he heard
the ecstatic oohs and ahs of these tailors
and their henchmen and thought, well maybe there's
something wrong with me.
I guess it is beautiful, but I don't
see it.
How many times have you sat leaden in
a congregation and thought, I guess there's something
wrong with me, when the truth of the
matter is there was something right with you
which you should not have squelched and swallowed
down.
If you did it, it was to the
detriment of your spirit and made your discernments
dull.
How much of our modern religion is the
Emperor's new clothes?
Everybody's oohing and aahing, lots of amens and
hallelujahs and loud choruses and exclamations and ecstatic
references till you feel, gee, maybe there's something
wrong with me.
I better enter into this, and you do,
by the flesh.
But the pathetic thing is, the Emperor is
yet naked.
Until we come to the nakedness of the
cross, we'll not have the garment of his
righteousness.
At the time when the Church should be
preparing herself to be a visible place of
refuge in a coming age of disaster, as
an island of sanity and reality in a
world, she herself is declining into pusillanimous faith
and superstition.
She is producing a new breed of super
executives, slick promoters, computer centers, and multi-million
dollar facilities that have elicited even the admiration
of the world, but has no message for
it.
I'm amazed, depression babe that I am, at
what we are producing, or what is being
produced in this generation, in slick religious executives,
promoters of which the world might well be
proud, who build their little petty kingdoms of
multi-million dollar kinds, with hundreds upon hundreds
sitting in their pews, looking upon the Emperor's
new clothes.
Weary millions tramp about in a no-man's
land of religious frustration and defeat, professing for
doctrines realities which they never have experienced, while
legalisms abound in the very name of grace.
I came back with such a cry from
a recent overseas trip, that the gospel, the
everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ needs to be
proclaimed, not so much to the world as
first to the Church.
It is amazing how few Christians know it,
how few understand it, how few have been
affected by it, how few are living in
it.
How many who call themselves Christians, enjoying the
benefits so-called of the new covenant, are
living essential old covenant lives, bound and under
the law, thinking that by their deeds they
can somehow buy themselves something that could be
called redemptive.
You think only the Jews know the law?
Law is any attempt by men, through human
effort, to earn for themselves a modicum of
religious satisfaction and acceptance with God.
God gave his only begotten Son full of
grace, and how many of us have yet
to taste that grace?
Legalisms abound in a no-man's land of
religious frustration and defeat, where weary millions profess
for doctrines realities which they never have experienced.
Just excuse me for being a simple believer
and a naive man, but I just have
a respectful words and had it even as
an atheist, how much more than as a
believer that the things that we speak ought
to be true or we ought not to
say them.
I'll tell you that every glib and facile
easy kind of speaking is going to cost
us plenty in our own spirit and life,
for the Spirit of God is first and
preeminently the Spirit of truth before he is
any other thing.
There are probably more millions today bound under
the law in this dispensation of grace than
all the generations of Israel who awaited a
new covenant.
Only his cross distinguishes belief from unbelief and
even more from superstition.
Are we willing to bring to the cross
the plumb line of God from heaven, our
wish dreams and subjective fantasies, our total life
for his total correction?
I'll tell you that if you're not, if
you have not the cross as a standard,
as a plumb line and as that thing
by which our own life should be squared,
how then are you assured of being built
straight in him?
Are we not rather a people like those
of old who desire a king who would
come down from the cross and we will
believe him rather than be required or invited
to join him on it?
What is our real spirit and with whom
would we agree?
Would we be standing at the base of
the cross two thousand years ago?
It's not that they were Jews that they
cried out come down from the cross and
we will believe you and you'll be our
king.
It's that they were men who have no
stomach for a king who is impaled on
a cross and certainly no desire to be
joined in union with him there.
How many of us who talk about the
cross really in our hearts desire that he
come down from it?
Our attitude about prosperity as being the measure
of our spirituality, our unwillingness to consider that
the sacrosanct rapture theory is really only a
theory, only a century or so old and
that it may well be wrong and if
so it would leave us grievously unprepared for
soon coming eventualities and realities for which we
have been too soft and too spoiled and
too undisciplined to face.
We still want a king who will come
down.
One can well ask whether the veil of
unreality that keeps us from the glories of
God and his kingdom shall ever be rent
until we give up the ghost and cry
with a loud voice.
Have you ever given up the ghost?
The 15th chapter of Mark, a description of
the same event with a slightly different emphasis
and Jesus cried with a loud voice in
the 37th verse and gave up the ghost
and the veil of the temple was rent
in twain from the top to the bottom
and when the centurion which stood over against
him saw that he so cried out and
gave up the ghost he said truly this
man was the Son of God.
You know what I have a feeling about?
That the final revelation of the mystery of
God in flesh which Jesus demonstrated in his
own body is to be reserved for us
at the end of the age and despite
the tens of thousands of bumper stickers rallies
campaigns and other no fuss no stoop no
bother kinds of evangelism which have not saved
the world that the final witness for which
God is reserving and indeed preparing us is
another body impaled on a cross in ultimate
suffering for the ultimate revelation of the truth
of God in flesh that may be not
an unbelieving Roman but unbelieving Jews and those
who share that spirit of that Jewish lifestyle
seeing these things will cry out truly this
is the Son of God nothing reveals like
suffering a whole unbelieving mankind which has deified
man and is becoming brutalized and sensual waits
the revealing of the mystery of God in
dwelt in men when it shall be compelled
to crucify us for the same reasons that
it crucified him it may be that ultimate
truth will again be revealed in ultimate suffering
to the only cry that will save truly
this is the Son of God.
You say what do you mean Art?
That they're going to be compelled to crucify
us for the same reasons for which they
crucified him.
I think it has something to do with
this that a writer has said that Jesus
suffered and died not by happenstance nor only
the fulfillment of the father's plan for atonement
but that he brought it upon himself by
his own character by his own life and
by his message what then shall be brought
upon us if we adopt his character move
in his life and proclaim his message I
wonder if God is not preparing a body
again for burial but a body that will
in the final and ultimate moment of dying
be able to yield up the ghost when
he saw this how are you doing in
yielding up now it's been our experience in
our little community situation in Minnesota having people
come to us who are ardent in their
belief in discipleship and commitment and submission really
believed it that we've heard a screech and
a holler and a copping out and a
flight when it was actually required for the
rubber to hit the road and that we
have seen a depth of revelation of the
independency of spirit and self-willedness and rebellion
in God's people when a yielding is required
that is shocking when he gave up the
ghost when he yielded up the ghost in
ultimate suffering for the truth's sake one whom
we would never expect to be able to
sense or see anything spiritually cried out with
the cry that saves truly this this man
was the son of God I believe with
all my heart that God is seeking and
is preparing again for the end of the
age such a man he'll not be one
who is accustomed to conventional preliminaries and likes
rip-roaring religious times and a lot of
excitement and emotion and going home happy but
I think that that son and that man
will be drafted from among those who could
come to a strange situation as for example
like tonight in the foolishness of an almost
empty auditorium without the advantage of the accustomed
preliminaries of service with not so much as
a note sung or played to hear rather
unusual words spoken or even read without any
of the histrionic and glamorous means of projecting
messages to personality and know that God is
speaking something solemn something needful which has been
grievously left unspoken in our entire generation the
spirit that clamors for prosperity for blessings quote
-unquote unquote and the rapture is not the
spirit that's going to appreciate a message on
suffering and the cross we know that the
spirit of Antichrist is already in the world
and anti not only means opposed but seeking
to be something like him yet not him
how shocked and stunned might we be to
realize to what degree we ourselves have submitted
and may actually be operating in that spirit
if our Christ is not the Christ who
suffered died and rose again not just as
doctrine but in the actuality of our own
knowledge and experience the issue of the cross
is the issue of death suffering is dying
and we have not been prepared either by
our churches let alone in the world to
be disposed to consider it or to do
it the way of the cross is the
way of abandonment a great darkness came over
the earth while Jesus was impaled on the
cross how many of us would be willing
for a great darkness a great nothingness to
come upon us even to the point that
that those things that we thought that we
understood the little notions that we have the
doctrines of which were so assured should also
be brought to the nothingness of that darkness
there's a veil that needs to be rent
torn perhaps this time not from the top
to the bottom but from the bottom to
the top as we give up the ghost
with a loud cry that those who are
seeing us might cry out truly this man
is the Son of God the darkness that
covered Jesus upon the cross must come upon
you also as a negation of all things
even that which we think we have understood
about the cross itself the cross is the
most unreligious symbol that could ever be imagined
the crucifixion of Jesus that pathetic thing that
words cannot describe nor comprehend the ending of
a life in nakedness that began in nakedness
is the complete negation of every kind of
conventional wisdom and religious notion that men could
conjure there's no way to come to it
by your reason the fact that we think
we have is contradicted by our lives you
can only come to it in darkness in
repentance and in no other way because it
is perverse it is ugly it is unappealing
and unattractive for which reason only perverse ugly
unappealing and unattractive people have never had difficulty
in coming to the cross to see him
as he is means also to see ourselves
as we are and to have a distorted
notion of him is to have also a
distorted and self-exalting notion of ourselves if
the prophet Isaiah seeing the Lord high and
lifted up cried out woe is me I
am undone I'm a man of unclean lips
and I live in the midst of a
people of unclean lips what then shall we
say who are not prophets and oracles of
God we need to have our vision and
our sight corrected we need to address our
lives to the plumb line of God the
standard of God the cross of Christ Jesus
not academically religiously or superficially but in the
actual experience of our lives as those who
have come willing to abandon everything to enter
into a darkness to rend every veil that
keeps us from coming into that inner sanctuary
that was described tonight in a willingness even
to yield up the ghost with a loud
voice to the Romans the cross was always
perverse unrespectable anesthetic totally inappropriate to God a
scandal have you made peace with that scandal
would you be willing to suffer expulsion and
death in identification with it only one who
is himself perverse and unrespectable can suffer the
scandal of the cross how many of us
secretly believe that we're doing God a favor
others needed to be saved out of their
sin and though we technically acknowledge well maybe
that was true our deepest heart believes that
God saw in us some virtue and some
ability that he needs to employ for his
kingdom and we have somehow a special basis
for our relationship which is different from that
of others the cross is the only basis
the cross in truth for those who can
receive its scandal a writer says that the
cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the
revelation of God and that we have become
far too used to it we have made
a theory of salvation out of it but
that is not the cross we have sentimentalized
and distorted and taken the sting out of
it we have negated its death and suffering
it needs to be recalled as an event
and we need to make it for ourselves
an event the central pivotal event of all
our faith in life all must go dark
for us become as night in the daytime
of our comfortable religious understanding the
veil was rent the rocks were rent the
graves were opened and the dead came forth
into the holy city it needs to happen
again at the only place that it can
happen in a true coming to the to
this scandalous union of suffering and death with
him now I've spoken what God has
given me it's been my experience in 14
years as a believer and about 11 years
in full-time service that there's no message
more difficult to proclaim than the cross there's
nothing more difficult to press under true consciousness
of God Saints and the glory of this
cross we have become too used to it
we have made of it only a theory
for salvation we've
come to all the calls after all to
call an invitation after invitation we've laid our
lives down before Christ again and again and
again and yet somehow we're still very much
alive the veil of selfishness and self-interest
and vanity and pride is still not rent
the rocks of our heart are still not
split we still remain dead and in our
tombs few of us have entered the holy
city let alone the sanctuary and the holy
place so I'm just going to invite you
to come to this cross it needs to
become an event how many of you will
do it if you realize that you're opening
yourself up for suffering that God in his
wisdom will be pleased to inflict how many
of us will choose to walk in the
way of the cross and not having walked
in the way we have not graduated to
the truth and not loving the truth we
have not tasted of the life it begins
with the way and it ends with the
life there's only one way to enter it
it's at the cross of Christ Jesus the
total negation of all of your life the
doing away with yourself in the yielding up
of the ghost if his glory is going
to be made manifest in the earth it
shall be only through his resurrection life to
those who have been joined with him in
death and in burial and have been raised
with him into that newness how many are
sitting here tonight who have only been dunked
and made wet but not buried because God
will only bury that which is dead willing
for the light to go out willing for
the hours of darkness willing to suffer the
reproach the scandal and the shame willing to
cease from yourself in the yielding up of
your ghost that's the only basis for the
cross in the true Christianity of God so
let's bow our heads before him tonight precious
holy God and we can say grieving God
the God of truth who sees all things
actually as they really are who has winced
and groaned over what you have seen precious
God in the face of the earth on
Sunday mornings Sunday evenings Wednesday evening you've seen
the sham the superficiality the play-acting you've
seen that we've not wanted anything more and
a little Sunday aspect to our life that
would not imperil or jeopardize our true interest
you've seen how we have compromised with a
world that hates you you've seen how much
the cross is despised even among your people
who if their true hearts could be made
known would cry even now come down from
the cross and we'll believe you and make
you king if this has been your arrangement
tonight and the speaking that you've chosen stand
with your nail-pierced hands stretched to receive
as many as will come out of this
audience to meet you in that total place
the place of death that they might also
be joined with you in a newness of
life I don't know what to ask you
to do don't for God's sake
stand or raise a hand or get out
of your seat as some kind of religious
programming I think if I understand God are
right there may be hardly more than half
a dozen in this entire crowd tonight who
have heard and are willing to respond to
this kind of call and I would just
ask that if you're one of those what
shall you do lift
up your seat and kneel stand up come
down to the front do something public something
embarrassing something that will bring some reproach something
that will make you look foolish and unrespectable
but do something because faith is an act
and it's an event that God wants at
the cross of Christ Jesus tonight