Growth

The Lessons of the Cross

One of the great things about being a teacher is that you are not required to come up with any new ideas. Unlike an inventor who must break the mold of conventional thought, a teacher appropriates wisdom for where it can be found and shares it with their audience in a way that hopefully speaks to them where they live. Most of what I write here is not original to me. It’s lessons I’ve learned from others, reformatted to hopefully share the same truth in a different light.

I write all this as a disclaimer because what I’m about to share is the result of listening to someone else. In a recent sermon the pastor of our young adults ministry shared that if you want to learn about Christ, look to the Cross. The Cross is a practical example of every aspect of Christ’s character; His love, His justice, His mercy, and His grace are all on display at the Cross. The pureness of His holiness and its complete incompatibility with our sin is conclusively related on the Cross. Our equality before God as sinners is shown in the fact that one payment was made for all. God’s receptivity to prayer, His completeness forgiveness for those that call Him Lord and Savior, and His abolition of the legal requirements for salvation are all shown through His sacrificial death on the Cross.

And so when we say that our job as Christians is to “take up the Cross” maybe we shouldn’t think of it as just an obligation to bear the burdens of persecution and the perceived inconvenience of living to God’s standards and not our own. Maybe we should see it as a call to display all these attributes of Christ, wherever we go.

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Growth

Weather or Not

During most of the conversations that I have with my grandparents, eventually we’ll get around to talking about the weather. This makes sense as my grandfather is a farmer. Although he has sold most of his land and his garden gets smaller every year, he grew up knowing that the elements would determine his family’s wealth for that year. The proper amounts of rain and sunshine were required for their crops to flourish. This reliance on the weather was ingrained into him and so even now, all these years later, the outlook for the coming days is of utmost importance.
It seems to me that the same should be true for Christians. The One that we depend upon should be a regular part of our conversation because we know that our future is mediated on His grace. We tend to strive to be intentional about the sharing of our faith and as someone who is one of the world’s most reluctant evangelists, I understand this focus. But I think our dependency should be evident even without a specific evangelistic outreach. After all, just like my grandfather can’t help but talk about the weather, I should not be able to relate my life experiences without acknowledging Him who makes my life possible. The proper acknowledgment of His love and His justice is just as important for growth in my life as precipitation and sunshine are necessary for the fields. It shouldn’t matter whether or not I’m trying to “tell someone about Christ”; Christ’s influence in my life should be so central that my life story is His.

Long after my grandfather ceases to farm a thing, I can almost guarantee that the weather will be a primary topic of conversation. I hope that when I reach that age, the subject on my lips has also not changed.

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