Slide #1 Blank
Slide #2 The Beauty of The Cross
James R. Davis
Slide #3 Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (NKJ)
Introduction:
Slide #4 The cross has become a Christian symbol ... a thing of beauty.
Slide #5 Buy them to wear around neck. You can buy them ... sterling silver, 14k gold, or crusted with diamonds and rubies. Jewelers can make them beautiful. But there was nothing beautiful, about the cross on which Jesus of Nazareth died. First century equivalent of an electric chair or gas chamber.
The Biblical accounts of crucifixion told simply and in few words. “There they crucified him.” Original readers of the gospels needed no elaboration, for they were familiar with the horrible details.
Slide #6 No death was more dreaded by criminals. None so painful or humiliating. So inhumane, Roman law did not permit a citizen of the empire to die by crucifixion.
The cross was an obstacle to Faith. Jesus dying by crucifixion was a great obstacle to the conversion of both the Jews and Gentiles.
Slide #7 1 Corinthians 1:22-25 22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (NKJ)
Jews looked for Messiah to exert his power among men but could not be subjected to humiliation.
The Greeks thought it absurd for the Christians to preach Jesus as Savior; one who died so ignoble a death could not be worthy of adoration.
Slide #8 Anti Christian graffiti was found in the late 2nd Century.
In his book The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey notes that other world religions are known for their brightly painted images and gilded statues. At the center of Christianity, however, rests a cross—simple, stark, and solitary. “What possessed Christians,” ponders Yancey, “to seize upon this execution device as a symbol for faith? Why not do everything within our power to squelch the memory of the scandalous injustice? . . . Why make it the centerpiece of the faith?” Of all the symbols of hope and triumph, the cross is, indeed, the most ironic.
We’ve looked to the virgin birth, miracles of Christ, the matchless life of Christ, the great sermon he preached, but the cross is the central event ... Paul said,
Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (NKJ)
The day Christ was crucified has become the greatest day in history. The Cross has become the highest symbol that men have ever looked upon. The influence of the cross has become the mightiest power in the entire world.
1 Corinthians 1:27-29 27 But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; 28 and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, 29 that no flesh should glory in His presence. (NKJ)
Slide # 8 Ugliness of sin reveals the beauty of the Cross.
Murder
Neglect
Abandonment
Christians see the cross as the ultimate expression of hope. For us, it means victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. We easily forget that Christ’s death is the most graphic of all pictures of humiliation and loss, of weakness before one’s enemies. The first response—and the most human—is to flinch in its presence. The suffering Savior is truly, as Isaiah said, “like one from whom men hide their faces” (Isaiah 53:3).
It’s understandable how someone just considering Christ is taken aback by the cross. Its message confronts our most cherished notions of success and self-assurance. It always has; it always will. The Apostle Paul said it simply: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). It helps me to be reminded of how fundamentally offensive the cross is and how it symbolizes everything in life we most want to avoid—weakness, defeat, betrayal, powerlessness. We’ve seen the cross as a symbol of hope and victory for so long that I tend to forget the stark reality it embodies.
We must kneel at the foot of the cross and find its meaning in our hearts.
Slide #9 • You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross.
—P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross
Slide # 10 Pictures of Christ Scourged.
I. The Meaning of the Cross
Slide #11 To our self-asserting age the cross speaks volumes. The cross is a denial that self-assertiveness can ever be a satisfying way.
—Leon Morris, The Atonement
Self-assertiveness is the way of disaster.
1. Lady found in garbage can in bottom of swimming pool.
2. Lady stabbed and raped this past week.
3. Man disgruntled with job goes to work with pistol.
4. Lately, we are reminded of the Killing Fields in Cambodia.
5. Look at a drunkards home ... wife and children deprived of necessities of life because of fathers self-assertion..
6. Newborn baby left in toilet in Disney World.
Slide # 12 The sad, violent, and destructive history of the world tells the story of human strength gone bad. Aryans dominated other races and exterminated millions of Jews (as well as other “undesirable” populations) because they thought Aryans alone embodied pure stock. Whites rule over blacks because they think they are superior to them. One political party mocks or dismisses another because it assumes it has the edge on truth. The worst cruelties done in world history have been done in the name of strength, not weakness.
Slide #13 Pictures
The cross exposes the danger of human strength, unmasking it for what it is—an attempt to thwart God. It was pharisaical religion and Roman law, both expressions of cultural achievement and strength that sent Jesus to the cross. Both were the products of enlightened people and sophisticated culture. The best of humanity, as it turned out, did the worst thing imaginable.
Slide #14 The Apostle Paul describes “the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14) that separates one person from another, or one group from another. That dividing wall represents strengths that we use to assert our superiority over others—our wealth, education, gender, ethnicity, party affiliation, culture.
The cross tears down those walls. Christ’s death broke down the wall of hostility that separated Jew from Gentile. “He abolished the Jewish Law with its commandments and rules, in order to create out of the two races one new people in union with himself, in this way making peace.
By his death on the cross Christ destroyed their enmity; by means of the cross he united both races into one body and brought them back to God” (Ephes. 2:15–16, TEV). Jewish law made Gentiles outsiders and aliens, an unacceptable group of people. The cross exposed the vanity and emptiness of those laws. Peace resulted from the demolition of the wall between Jews and Gentiles. It does that to all walls.
Slide # 15 Making choices contrary to God’s will is no little evil ... sin is the second greatest force in the world.
The love of God is the only force that is stronger.
It is in the cross that one sees the forces of evil and the love of God clash.
Slide #16 Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NKJ)
Slide #17 II. Suffering of Cross Reveals Its Beauty.
In the cross God is revealed not as one reigning in calm disdain above all the squalors of earth, but as one who suffers more keenly than the keenest sufferer—“a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”
—Oswald Chambers, The Place of Help
Slide #18 1 Peter 2:24 who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. (NKJ)
The beauty of the cross is not in wearing it around our necks, using it as a bookmark, or chiseling it on our tombstones.
Conclusion:
Slide #20 The beauty of the cross is that it opened a door. The beauty of the cross in not in wearing it around our necks, using it as a bookmark, or chiseling it on our tombstones. Its beauty lies in the fact that the death of Jesus Christ on a Roman cross nearly twenty centuries ago has opened the path to eternal life for all who believe in him.
The cross is not simply the means of our salvation, although it is that to be sure! It is also the means of our transformation. It is the way of life we must follow if we want to close the gap between who we are in Christ (as His redeemed children) and how we live from day to day (as sinful humans in the world).
The cross brings good news on two levels. It promises to redeem us; it also promises to change us. Such change is bound to produce pain. It is painful to die to self, to embrace suffering, and to reconcile with opponents and enemies.
Since Christ accepted the thief on the cross just as he was and received Paul after all hisblasphemies and persecutions, we have no reason to despair . . . What do you think it means that He has given His only Son? It means that He also offers whatever else He possesses. —Martin Luther
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first He suffered pain, and entered not into glory before He was crucified; mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
—Book of Common Prayer