8 Mar 2024
This is the “season” in the church to remember, in gratitude and humble submission, what God has done for us on the CROSS.
In Jesus Christ, God has given the world a Saviour whose great salvation more than matches man’s great need, and whose great love will not be turned away by our unloveliness and ungodliness.
Each Christian can say with apostle Paul: “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Christ’s death was an act of righteousness, for he endured it in obedience to the Father, and, as such, it wrought redemption, freeing us from the curse of God’s law – that is, from divine judgement – at the cost of Christ’s own suffering.
His death was redemptive because it achieved an act of propitiation, quenching God’s rightful wrath by dealing with the sin that evoked it. It propitiated God by being an act of substitutionary sin-bearing, in which the judgement which our sins deserved was diverted onto Christ’s head – from the cross to the risen Christ’s gift of a permanent new relationship with God. -it achieved our justification (pardon plus a righteous man’s status) and adoption ( a place in the family of God with certainty of inheritance);, and sanctification (acceptance by God, on the basis of consecration to him).
Our new status is “accompanied” by new birth, the indwelling Spirit, progressive transformation into Christ’s image, and glorification – complete renewal!
Our Response: Our call to resolute endurance and perseverance as his disciples; it is not a practice of stoicism which teaches that it is beneath human dignity to give way to feeling of sorrow, pain, grief, regret, or any kind of hurt. But certainly it is following our Master Jesus, the perfect Man, who demonstrated what it means to “learn obedience, the practice and cost of it, through what he suffered.
Holy endurance of this Christlike sort is an expression not of pride (demonstrated by the Stoics) but of humility, of ready obedience, of resolute submission (often accompanied by pain and suffering) to a loving Lord, of whom it has been said that Christ does not lead us through no darker rooms than he went through before. This is what it means to “deny self, take up the cross, and follow him”. As we observe “Good Friday” and “Easter”, it is not just being sentimental and emotional – it is a call to perseverance, endurance, love and gratitude toward the Master, and obedience and humble submission even though the path the Lord desires of us may not be what we look forward to.