Gazing At The Cross

Today, our pastor taught on the glory of God. At one point, he said that “we must go to the cross”. He said that we must think about all that Jesus did on the cross on our behalf and in that we will see the Glory of God as the Son is lifted up. I do not disagree with any of that. But, I feel, that it stops short of the whole message of the cross. To see and experience the glory of God, we must not only recognize the cross and what Jesus did there for what it did for us, but we must see that in the cross Jesus was meeting a need in our lives that no other person could meet. During Jesus entire ministry He tried to get us to see the needs of others and endeavor to meet those needs to the extent that it meant that we forgo the meeting of our own needs. Jesus called us to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Him. Where did He go? To the cross. So, as we gaze at the wonder of the cross, we also should see the other sub text. In dying on the cross, Jesus was denying himself to meet our needs and we are to do the same. For us, this will not be a death on the cross. It may be spending your money to feed and cloth the poor. It may mean taking time to visit with a hurting friend. It may mean enduring the hurt and pain of broken people in order to show them love that they seem to reject. Going to the cross of Jesus means taking the walk that He took to get there. It is a walk of self sacrifice. It is a walk of love. It is a walk of pain. In the end you come to the base of the cross a changed person. You see the savior from the eyes of one who too has given their lives for others and you can then, and only then, truly see and experience the fullness of the glory of God. The cross is not just a spectacle that we should marvel at, but an example of how we are to live and die. It is true that Christ died for us, but in His death we should be compelled to follow his path to the cross and join Him there. Being a Christian has to mean more than gazing at the cross, it must be marked by living as Jesus did which ultimately means that I give sacrificially to better the lives of others. This is a more eternally significant response to the cross than simply gazing at it.