Jo Vitale [00:00:35] So welcome to the podcast where we invite you to Ask Away. I can still remember being eight years old when a preacher visited my elementary school and he shared the gospel at the whole school assembly. And this is the story he told. He said there was a bus driver who was one day had to drive kids up and down this big hill on the way to school. But one day he was coming down the hill with a bus full of kids when suddenly the brakes stopped working and the bus started just careening out of control down the hill and he couldn't stop it. But then he remembered, oh, thank goodness at the bottom of this big steep hill, I know there's this field and the gate is always open so I can just go into the field and it'll slow the bus down and it will save all the children. So he comes around the corner to get to the field and who should he see standing in the gate to the open field? His only son who's there, just waving at him. And so the bus driver has to face the sickening choice. Do I run over my child and save the rest of the children or does everybody die? And so he makes the decision to just run over his own son. Now, obviously, that harrowing story has stuck with me for years. I can still tell it to you today. It's been 30 years, actually. But as I got older, I began to ask the question, hold on, what is that story really saying about God?  

[00:01:52] Although he's supposedly running the universe, he's lost control. And the only way to regain control is for him to deliberately run over his own son, this innocent victim who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And you're telling me that is good news? What kind of story is that? Even as well-meaning Christians, we sometimes just don't know how to talk about the cross. And so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised when we encounter people outside of the church who are just baffled or offended by it because there's just so much they don't get. And that makes sense, doesn't it? In fact, the earliest archeological evidence that we have referencing the cross is this ancient graffiti cartoon found in Rome, which is drawn sometime between the first and the third century AD. And it's a drawing of-- you can see it more clearly here. It's a man who's bowing down to worship a figure hanging on a cross. And the one on the cross has the body of a human, but the head of a donkey. And it has this mocking inscription, "Alexamenos worships his god.” And with this kind of hostile reception, it's no wonder that we find the Apostle Paul writing in his first letter to the Corinthians, Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but those to whom God has called both Jews and Greeks. Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.  

[00:03:21] New centuries may have passed, but the criticism actually hasn't changed all that much. In the words of the prominent atheist biologist, Richard Dawkins, he had this to say about the death and resurrection of Jesus. He said, "It's so earthbound. It's so trivial. It's so petty. It's local. It's unworthy of the universe." So which is it? Is it petty or is it the power of God? Is it unworthy or is the wisdom of God. What does it mean for us to preach Christ crucified? Well, as a starting point, if the cross means anything at all, then it's because we're preaching a real Christ who really was crucified. I'm not going to get into all of the historical evidence tonight because Vince will be diving into some of that next week when he talks about the resurrection. But I do just want to point out that whether we're talking about the Quran, which denies that Jesus ever actually died on the cross, or those who try and lump Jesus in with all these other ancient myths about dying and rising gods, there have always been those who've tried to undermine the eyewitness accounts of the gospels. And yet this very idea of a god being worshiped precisely because he died on a cross, is so absurd to an ancient mindset that it just makes no sense to claim that this was a religion the disciples intentionally made up. In the words of the famous Roman orator Cicero, the very word cross should be far removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. Even the mere mention of it is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man.  

[00:04:59] And likewise, this idea that their holy God strung up to die on a tree, that was just a huge stumbling block to first century Jews who took with utter seriousness these words of Deuteronomy 21. Anyone who's hung on a tree is under God's curse. And that is language that the early church clearly applied to Jesus. And as for the Greeks, their idea of a son of God was someone who goes out to slay a nine-headed hydra. So why would you worship this defeated son of God when you can have a champion like Hercules? There he is. If these first Christians were just making this whole thing up for their own agenda, why on earth would they center a fake religion around a god who's shamed, cursed, and crucified in utter weakness? No. These first followers of Jesus, they're not trying to fake anything. They're simply saying what they saw. That in the words of the Nicene Creed, Jesus Christ, the son of God, really was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died, and was buried. But if the first century disciples didn't come up with this story, then it begs the following question: Why would God? Seriously, what kind of God would think to do a thing like this?  

[00:06:20] And I think this is where a lot of us get stuck. And we kind of wind up misinterpreting the gospel. I've been a Christian most of my life. But about two decades in, I realized that I had somehow veered into this seriously skewed perspective on the gospel, and it went something like this. God the Father was really mad at me and he hated me. And so Jesus' son was forced to step in and die to rescue me so the Father wouldn't kill me. And the Holy Spirit, well, honestly, who knows? He was probably just off doing what ghosts do, just ghosting us. Yes, seriously. But this was such a fundamentally flawed view of the Holy Spirits. Some of the later creeds, like the sixth century. Athanasian Creeds spell out God's attributes are not split between his persons. It's not the origin story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. We don't have grumpy God over here, and here's happy God Jesus, and here is bashful God, the Holy Spirit, and he's just really shy. It's quite the opposite.  

[00:07:17] When we're talking about the Holy Trinity, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are talking about a God so united in His will and His purpose, in His character, that to speak of the actions of one person of the Trinity is really to see the heart of all three persons. As Francis has been powerfully reminding us over these past months, it all starts with the love of a father, specifically a God who is father. To the prodigal, the father who misses his absent, rebellious child so much that every day he has his eye out on the horizon. And when at last he sees his son come staggering home, he just takes off and he runs and he embraces him and he kisses him and he gives him the family signet ring as a sign that his status as a son is restored and he throws him the most ginormous party. Don't get it confused. This is not a God who wants you dead. This is the God who longs to restore you to life. He doesn't just give you up for lost. He is overjoyed when you're found. And once we understand the heart of the Father, it completely flips everything that we thought we knew about the cross. To put out of your head any notion that Jesus the Son somehow needed to twist the arm of the father or coerce him into loving us. In the words of the theologian John Stott, God does not love us because Christ died for us. Christ died us because God loved us.  

[00:08:50] It all starts with the love of the Father. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. And as a follow up to that verse, we could also say this: The only son so loved the world, that he willingly came. Perhaps one of the most vicious criticisms brought against the cross in recent years has been that Jesus was somehow coerced or bullied by the father as if he himself were a victim of cosmic child abuse as one embarrassingly UK pastor once said of him. This criticism it just doesn't track with how Jesus describes his own mission. Throughout his entire ministry, he emphasizes that he specifically came to seek and to save the lost and to give his life as a ransom for many. Yes, the Father sent him, but Jesus chose to come. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. I lay down my life. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. And it's one of the things that the bus driver story just got so wrong. Because Jesus is no helpless victim who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and just got run over by the father. In fact, we do Jesus a huge dishonor and disservice when we imagine him to be some kind of bystander or third party who's caught awkwardly in the middle between God and humanity. That's actually kind of Arianism and that's a heresy. That's what the whole Nicene Creed was coming against.  

[00:10:21] Because when we do that, we completely overlook the fact that Jesus himself is fully God. God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How is it that this is a demonstration of God's love? How is Christ dying to show that? Well, only if Christ himself is God. Only if God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Only if God was pleased to have all of his fullness dwell in him. And this is where it's just vital that we get our Trinitarian theology right. Because on the one hand, only one person of the Trinity, God the Son, dies on the cross. He's the only one who could because he's the one who's taken on human nature and therefore can die. And yet on the other hand, Jesus is not acting on his own. Rather, the cross was this act that expresses the whole heart of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the words of theologian Fleming Rutledge, "The Father and Son are doing this in concert by the power of the Holy Spirit." This is a project of the three persons. The Father is acting not over against the Son, but through and in the Son whose will is the same as the Father's. The awesome transaction is taking place within God.  

[00:11:43] The cross is the work of a Trinitarian God. Yes, each play a different role, but none of them are disengaged. Far from it. To see the cross is to see the very heart of God. We talk a lot about the price that Jesus paid for us and rightly so, but what about the father? As a mom, there are many things I can imagine willingly giving to save somebody else's life. There are even situations in which I really hope I would give my own life. But you know what I would never willingly give? My beloved son. Now, I'd rather give my life a thousand times than give the life of my child. And yet, as much as I love my children, I know that God the Father loves his son more, his only beloved, eternally beloved son. So to give up that son in order to rescue and restore his prodigal children, it just answers every question we ever had before we ever even needed to ask it about whether the God the Father really loves us or how much. In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, "The son suffers the dying, the father suffers the death of the son." The grief of the father here is just as important as the death of the son. The fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the sonlessness of The Father.  

[00:13:15] Yes, the cross displays the ultimate victory of our God, but it wasn't a victory without cost. So why would God put himself through this? Well, three little words in the Nicene Creed clue us in here: For our sake. For our sake, he suffered. A while back, I was speaking at a formal women's event at the Dallas Country Club, and it was the kind of evening where every single woman was so immaculately put together. They had this big, beautiful hair because we were in Texas after all. And you had to focus on only taking like really shallow breaths so you didn't inhale too much hairspray and pass out. But it was easy that night to look across the room and just assume their lives must be perfect. Must be perfect. So it's kind of a shock when the talk ended and then during the Q&A, this woman immediately came up to the microphone. And then she said, Jo, you've been speaking about human trafficking as if it were an international problem. But I was trafficked here in the city of Dallas by my own parents for 20 years. And then later that evening, she rolled up her sleeves and she just showed me all the scars on her body from all the different things that had been done to her. Into that stunned silence in the room, this was the question that she asked. She said, "What does the church have to say to somebody?"  

[00:14:54] And you know what is so incredible? Is that Jesus Christ has a direct answer for her. This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you. For any parent who's ever experienced the devastation of losing a child, there's a Father God who knows exactly how you feel. For anyone who's felt in such a dark place that it's actually hard to even see a future ahead of you, there's the savior who's sweat drops of blood and cried out the night before he died. My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. To the ancient world, a God who suffered was a God who was weak, a god who was unworthy of worship. But in Christ, we encounter a God unlike any other God, who isn't interested in power plays because he has nothing to prove. He's gentle and humble of heart. A God who loves us so much that rather than watching on from afar as we're down here suffering, he not only enters into our world, but he actually enters into all woundedness. In the words of the first world war poet, Edward Shilito, "The other gods were strong, but you were weak. They rode, but you stumbled to a throne. But to our wounds, only God's wounds can speak. And not a God has wounds, but You alone.".  

[00:16:28] For our sake, He suffered, but He didn't stop there. And it's so sad to me that for some people, this is actually as far as they're willing to let God go for them. They look at the cross and they think, wow, what a beautiful sacrificial expression of human love. But that's enough for me. I actually don't want any more from you. Thank you very much, God. Like Gandhi, who once said, "I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the cross was a great example to the world. But that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous, virtue in it, my heart could not accept." And I get it. I get why Gandhi has such a hard time accepting that because if Jesus is just another good human example, then he's an act that we ourselves can follow. But if he's a divine savior, then that means admitting that we needed saving so badly that help had to come from the outside. And who wants to own up to that? Here's another oversight in that bus driver gospel presentation, because that story implies the father is responsible for killing the son, while the rest of us are just passengers along for the ride, we're just spectators at a tragedy.  

[00:17:46] The reality is so much more sobering for us. A while ago, I was speaking at an evangelistic tea party in a small village in England. And yes, even evangelism is served with tea in England. Nothing like offending people with the gospel over a slice of cake. But there was a 70 year old woman who was there and she'd been attending church every Sunday of her life. But then after I finished speaking, she approached me in anger and she just pointed her finger right in my face. And she was so indignant as she said, "I'll have you know, I've never sinned a day in my life." You and Jesus, yeah. Vince and I realized how ingrained this perspective had become when, as an American, he had to take his citizenship test to stay in the UK. But in the paperwork, one of the questions that he had to answer no to in order to be allowed to remain in England was the following. Have you or any dependents who are replying with you ever engaged in any other activities which might indicate that you may not be considered to be persons of good character? I mean, isn't that crazy? It was basically asking him to say he'd never done anything wrong, and if he ticked yes, he had, he would be deported. Apparently, everybody in England is very well behaved.  

[00:19:02] We do this, don't we? We like to think of sin as somebody else's problem, but it just doesn't work that way. The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who served in a Soviet labor camp for eight years in the 1940s, so he had a pretty good insight into human nature. He put it this way. "If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human person. And who's willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" A while ago, I was reading my goddaughter, Charis, an English children's nursery rhyme. I don't know if you guys know it. You probably do; it's called Humpty Dumpty. Show of hands, who here knows Humpty Dumpty? Good, you guys are well educated. But in case you don't, this is a children's poem about an egg called Humpty Dumpty who's sitting on a wall and then he falls off the wall and he breaks. Okay, it's not an overly sophisticated plot, but bear with me because the message itself is quite profound. And this is how Humpty Dumpty goes.  

[00:20:14] Humpty dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. The end. How brutal is that? They couldn't pin him back together again! And that's a story we tell our two-year-olds! And yet, at a deeper level, I think the truth behind this story is striking because Humpty Dumpty it's the story of the human condition. We've fallen off the wall. We are lying in pieces and nobody and nothing, no matter how hard they try, can put us back together again. The Bible describes it this way. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We've broken trust with God. We've broke other people and in turn, we have broken ourselves. You may look around you and think the world is in pretty bad shape, but truthfully, I think it's so much worse than we think. In Jeremiah 6, God is frustrated with false prophets who he claimed, "They dressed the wound of my people as though it were not serious. Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace." So how do we find peace again? How do we get back the peace that we so desperately need? Peace with God, without which we will never find peace in any other part of our lives.  

[00:21:36] This brings up another, one of the most frequently raised objections to the crucifixion. Why can't God just make peace by forgiving us instead of putting himself through this torturous death? Isn't that what we're taught to do in Sunday school? Just forgive people. Why can't God practice what he preaches? Vince and I were at a dinner party a few years ago and we were speaking with an agnostic woman when Vince fairly abruptly just asked her the question if she believed hell exists, which was a great conversation for a dinner party. But intriguingly, this was her response. She paused for a second and she said, "Well, I don't know, but I sure hope so." That was not the reply that I was expecting. It made me wonder what had happened to her in this lifetime to make her long for justice in the next? Because there's kind of a naivety to the statement that God should just forgive everybody without cost, that any real victim of injustice, like the woman at the Dallas Country Club, instinctively recoils from. And the truth is that even here tonight, some of you have been treated really badly. And that matters to God. It truly, deeply matters to Him.  

[00:22:56] We think of love and judgment as opposites, but actually the two go hand in hand. It's precisely because God loves each one of us so much that there must be judgment for the ways that we wrong each other. If he didn't judge, it'd be like he was saying that he doesn't really care about the ways we've been wronged and hurt as if it's just no big deal but to sweep it under the divine cosmic carpet. That's not love, is it? That is not love. And it's why I'm so grateful to be able to point to the cross as proof that the Christian God is absolutely committed to justice, that he is a good, righteous God who cannot stand evil in any form. That's what wrath means. He is light. In him, there is no darkness at all. And the cross is the strongest and most overt statement that the lives we're living are not okay. And that the ways that we demean and devalue and dehumanize and abuse and destroy one another, they're not alright. And that there are profound consequences for that. Justice demands judgment, and yet love requires mercy. And you'll often hear Christians talk about how those two values, the love and the justice of God, they intersect perfectly at the cross. But how does that actually work?  

[00:24:16] As one author put it, how did one man's bleeding body stretched on two pieces of wood for six hours of torture and death on a particular Friday, one spring, outside a city in a remote province of the Roman Empire, change everything in the universe? Recently I've spent hours banging my head against a wall, trying to come up with an analogy or a story or a metaphor that can actually capture everything that the cross does for us in one perfect and simple example. And as I've done so, I've actually found myself suddenly much more sympathetic to whoever it was who came up with the bus driver analogy, because truthfully, although some stories are much better than others, it is impossible. It is impossible to come out with a perfect metaphor, one way or the other, every story we tell is going to be limited in scope. But that is not because, as some people would claim, Christians don't know what they're talking about when they talk about the cross. Rather, it's because the death of Jesus Christ, it just does so much. It does so much. And in that sense, the solution mirrors the problem.  

[00:25:20] Just as the damage that sin does is so extensive, so too is the way that Jesus' death saves us very extensive. No wonder the New Testament works through so many metaphors to describe the cross, whether it's homecoming, triumph over evil, being washed clean, redemption from slavery, the guilty acquitted, enemies being made friends, adoption into family, new life beginning. Each one of these analogies that highlights a different angle from which we can marvel and wonder at the cross. But while there are all these metaphors to help us take hold of what God did at its most fundamental level, this is an act of substitution, of Jesus serving our sentence and getting what we deserve, death, and of us receiving from Jesus what he deserves, life. Put that way, it sounds so clean and sanitized as if we were balancing a math equation or something. But you know what, there is nothing easy about the death that Jesus died for us. Because when Christ prays in the garden, "Lord, if you are willing, take this cup from me, but not my will, but your will." The cup that he is speaking of is an Old Testament symbol for drinking down the entirety of God's judgment.  

[00:26:40] And a while ago I was reading a passage from one of the Narnia stories by C.S. Lewis from Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When the ship begins to approach this dark island and it's this terrifying place where every dream comes true, but these aren't good dreams, these are nightmares. This is every kind of nightmare that the human mind can conjure up and conceive of. And terrified of this all-consuming darkness, the ship tries to get around it, but it's pitch black and they cannot see a way out. And then just when the darkness could never be any thicker and the fear never stronger, Lucy whispers, "Aslan, Aslan if you ever loved us at all send us help now." And then suddenly a light shone. And Lucy looked along the beam and presently saw something in it. And at first it looked like a cross. Then it looked an airplane. Then it looks like a kite. And at last with a whirring of wings, it was right overhead. And it was an albatross and it circled three times around the mast. And it called out in a strong, sweet voice. And after that, it spread its wings, rose, and began to fly slowly ahead. Bearing a little to starboard, offering good guidance. But no one but Lucy knew that as it circled the mast, it had whispered to her, courage, dear heart, and the voice she felt sure was Aslan's.  

[00:28:05] In the hours leading up to the death of the Son of God, we are told that darkness covered the land. And I honestly cannot begin to fathom the horrors that Christ endured during those hours of darkness. Those hours when He took on Himself every sick and twisted nightmare that humanity has made into a reality on this dark island of sin that we have all had a hand in creating. Facing our deservedly bleak fate, is there any one of us who wouldn't cry out, "God, if you ever loved us at all, send help now." What unbelievable grace that he answered that prayer. How remarkable that when we are confronted with the horrors that we ourselves dreamed up, the God of the universe whispers in our ear, courage, dear heart, and he leads us out. But he can only do that because he was willing to save others by not sparing himself when he himself faced his darkest moment of fear. When death was swallowing him up, Jesus too cried out for help, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But this time, the cry was met with deafening silence. As theologian Christopher Wright puts it, "There was nothing but that why trying vainly to bridge the darkness. He had to be dealt with, not as son, but as sin."  

[00:29:58] The Bible describes it this way. God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. 1 Peter 2, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." Earlier I mentioned the children's nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty as this illustration of human brokenness, that we're all in this unfixable mess. But the writer Ellis Potter notes that actually for the Christian, there's one really important line missing from that poem. And the line is this, Humpty dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. But the king could, and the king did. And the king cried out, it is finished. Stepping in a substitute, Jesus became God forsaken so that we could be reconciled to God. The wrath of God falls upon God himself by God's own choice out of God's own love. I just don't know of any other love like this. I just don't know of any other love that would or could go to such lengths, a love so generous that he gave and he gave until he'd given everything.  

[00:31:46] The God of the universe, the one who breathed life into us, strung up on a wooden cross, body broken for us, blood shed for us gasping out with his last breath. It is finished. In the words of one writer, the world takes us to a flickering screen on which images of passion and romance play and as we watch the world says, this is love. But God takes us to the foot of a tree on which a naked and bloodied man hangs. And he says, "This is love." When we look at the cross just what it cost God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to save us, it is not hard to see how very much He loves us. So just one question remains, where is the justice? A couple of years ago, Vincent, some of our students at the time, they were in a taxi with a Muslim taxi driver and as they were speaking with him about faith, they asked him how he felt about Judgment Day to which he replied that he was terrified. And then he said, "Ask any Muslim and they'll tell you that they're terrified because we never know if we've done enough." What incredible pressure that is to have to carry the weight of your own sin? And yet, is there another choice?  

[00:33:10] In the words of the Quran, "Every man's fate, we have fastened to his own neck on the day of judgment, we shall bring out for him a book which he will find wide open and it will be said to him, read thy book, sufficient is thine own soul as an accuser, a reckoner against thee this day. And no bearer of burden shall bear the burden of another." No bearer of burden shall bear the burden of another. In other words, it's the guilty who owe a debt for their sin. So if Jesus is punished instead, how is that justice? The irony of the question, of course, is that it hits right at the heart of our own self-interest. Because in the same breath, we find ourselves demanding judgment for those who've wronged us and yet begging for mercy in the face of those that we have wronged. As Christopher Wright put it, "Every victim of sin is also a sinner. There is none who is only sinned against." Although, actually, that isn't quite true. There is one, isn't there? There is one who is completely innocent and it's God Himself. And because God alone is completely just, He alone has the authority to determine the conditions of justice. As Romans puts it, only God is both just and the justifier. He's just and he is the just fire.  

[00:34:43] And there is a lot more that could be said here. But for now, I just want to say one thing, just because Jesus served our sentence, it doesn't mean that our lives just carry on the way they did, unchanged and unrepentant. God's forgiveness through the cross, it comes with such a form of radical transformation and new life when we truly repent and become Christians, that it's literally as if the person we were before has ceased to be. It's not that we're getting away with anything here. There is no miscarriage of justice. Rather, in the most meaningful sense possible, we have been put to death with Christ and we've been raised to life a new person in Him. We truly are born again. The Bible speaks of it this way. So from now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though once we regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone. The new is here. In Galatians 2, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."  

[00:36:03] Out of everything that we have covered tonight, I actually think this might be the hardest bit of all for us to believe. Because after years of studying and seeking, I've come to a place where I actually don't doubt for a second that Jesus is the Son of God, and I believe with all of my heart that He suffered, He died, He was buried, and He rose from the dead. But a clean slate for someone like me, a fresh start for me, no more beating myself up about the poor choices that I made this morning, yesterday, three years ago, 15 years ago. I met Vince at a time in my life where I was struggling with so much guilt and I just felt so unworthy of love. And I was convinced that if Vince really knew me, there's no way that he would want to be with me. And so I just figured it's better to get dumped sooner than later. So I decided to tell him all about the stuff and all the mistakes that I'd made in the past before our relationship got too serious. But as I told him, I was so ashamed, I actually couldn't even look him in the eye. I just stared at the floor and I cried.  

[00:37:08] And then Vince just said, he said, "Jo, look at me." And I said, "No, I can't." And I just carried on crying. But then he said it again. He said, "Jo, look me." And he took my face in his hands and he raised it until we were looking eye to eye. And then he said to me, "That is not who you are anymore." That's when I finally got it. All those years I've been so afraid to look into the eyes of God because I was so sure that all I would see would be judgment or condemnation or disappointment or rejection. But in that moment I just knew that at the cross when we come and we kneel there in repentance and we say, "God have mercy on me at sinner," it's as if he takes our face in his hands and he raises it until we're looking eye to eye with him and then he speaks this unbelievable truth over us. That is not who you are anymore. That's not who are. Therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Reflecting on the breathtaking magnitude of what God has done for us, Christian professor John Lennox responded to Richard Dawkins in their debate that actually the real question is not whether God is worthy of the universe, but it's whether the universe is worthy, of Him.  

[00:38:48] I can tell you now, it's not. It is not worthy. The cross of Jesus Christ changes everything. The question is, what will we do with it? And during that taxi ride, Vince had the opportunity to share with that Muslim driver the good news of the gospel. And as he finished, the driver just responded with tears in his eyes, "It's a beautiful story. I wish it were true." It is a beautiful story all the more so because it's true. So how do we tell the world that story? You can start with two ways. First, by allowing the beauty of the gospel, not just to be this idea in our heads, but to revolutionize our lives. In the words of Brennan Manning, which I find very challenging, "The word we study has to be the word we pray. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly, or we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places that we have never visited." How terrible would that be? To spend your life handing out the Gospel, handing out brochures to places that you yourself have never been with God?  

[00:40:20] I don't want to be an unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agent inviting people into this reconciled relationship with God that I myself have never known or into this intimacy with God that I have never experienced. I want to go to those places. I want encounter Jesus Christ there and I want to live there with Him. I want live in His love. So where do we stand this evening? Do we just look at the beauty of the crucifixion like someone who's just watching from afar, judging it skeptically? Or will we come and kneel at the foot of the cross and look into the face of Jesus and actually take him at his word and believe him when he lifts up our faces and speaks over us, that is not who you are anymore. It's not who are anymore. And secondly, once we're captivated by his beauty, we need to boldly preach the truth of Christ crucified. So how will we do that? Well, we could, as Richard Niebuhr devastatingly accused the 20th century American church, preach a watered down gospel of a God without wrath who brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. Or in order response to what he has done, we could preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to the gentiles, but to those whom Christ has called and is calling still, Christ the wisdom of God and the power of God. 

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