First morning devotion prepared for the Crihalma ladies
by Krista Hahne
Good morning! How are you all doing this morning? Did you get a good night sleep? Are you happy to be here? Personally, I’ve been looking forward to it and preparing for it for the past month. And I am so thankful that God has put in all of you such a desire to grow in the knowledge of His will that you would take these days to come apart and learn. That is awesome!
But I have to admit that when Cheryl asked me to teach 4 times on being a woman in Christ, I was a little overwhelmed. It seemed like such a big subject. There was so much to say I didn’t know where to start. But as I prayed and waited on God I began to see that I should start with first things first. And so we’re going to start at the cross.
Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 15:3. This is Paul speaking to the church at Corinth, reminding them of the most important thing he had ever taught them. He says,
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins…”
But you might be thinking, “Lady, we already know that. We learned that a long time ago! We’re Christian women here, leaders’ wives, we’re not unbelievers!”
Exactly! That’s why you should never forget the cross, because for all Christian women, there has been a point in your life when somehow, by the awesome grace of God, you were brought to the cross of Christ as a desperate sinner. As God opened your eyes to the incredible grace of God, that He had given His Son to die in your place, you believed. You received Him as your own Savior, Lord and Treasure. And in that moment God forgave you, saved you and changed you forever. But never forget what you were! In Titus 3:3 Paul reminds us:
“For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.”
Paul says “we.” He includes himself, Titus and all the believers he was writing in this verse. It describes each one of us before we came to the cross, no matter how respectable you might have looked on the outside.
For example, even though I was just a little girl when I came to know Jesus, and seemed on the outside to be well-behaved, God saw my heart. He knew on the inside I was already a slave of sin, full of pride and selfishness, jealousy and anger, unable to love anybody except myself, least of all God. I think of that little girl and shudder to think of what she would have grown up to be without the cross of Christ.
What about you? Do you remember the way you were before you came to the cross? Do you realize that apart from the cross we would still be like that, deserving nothing but God’s hatred and wrath. Psalm 5:4-5 makes it very clear how God feels about our sin:
“For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.”
And Psalm 7:11 says:
“God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.”
Romans 6:23 tells us the sentence God had already passed upon us:
“For the wages of sin is death…”
It’s clear that we were the ones who should have been on the cross, writhing in agony under the wrath of God. But Jesus took our place. I Peter 2:24 says:
“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed.”
Jesus gave us a new life and a new purpose. As Titus 2:14 tells us:
“Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.”
2 Corinthians 5:15 says the same thing another way,
“And He died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who for their sake died and was raised.”
So the cross has changed our lives drastically! But remember this is what God did for us, not what we did for Him.
You know, it’s amazing, but I sometimes hear women boasting about their repentance. I hear them say. I repented! I don’t smoke, drink, or swear now. But I don’t hear these women saying anything about the cross and what Jesus did there. It’s all about their own works of self-improvement.
And that makes me doubt whether those women have ever been to the cross at all, because the cross proves more than anything how worthless all our own efforts are to save us. If we could be saved by our own goodness, Jesus would never have had to die!
So, the cross humbles us. After we’ve been to the cross, it’s not about us anymore. It’s about Jesus. That’s why the apostle Paul said, “May it never be that I should boast except in the cross of Christ my Lord…”
But there are all kinds of misunderstandings about the cross. The other day, I was talking to a lady, who had visited our church a couple weeks previously. This lady had seemed to feel the presence of God as we worshipped, but afterwards decided she didn’t really want to come back. During our conversation, I found out why.
She said, that when she went to her church, she always made the sign of the cross in front of the icons. She said that if she did that, she felt she could start her week feeling God’s blessing upon her. But if she didn’t do it, she felt unprotected, like she would have bad luck that week. And she seemed to think we didn’t believe in the cross, because we didn’t make the sign of the cross as a part of our worship.
As I listened to what she said, my heart broke for her. I thought, ”How can I make you understand, that I believe in the cross more than you do. But it’s not drawing the cross shape in the air with my hand that I value, as if that were some sort of good luck charm, as if we could earn God’s blessing on our sinful lives by waving our hands in God’s face. It’s what happened at the cross that matters! What God did there for us!
I tried to tell her, I treasure the cross, because I know that that’s where Jesus took my place under the wrath of God. At the cross my specific sins, my selfishness, my pride, my refusal to love others, my self-righteousness… all those terrible sins were heaped upon Jesus, the innocent, perfect and beloved Son of God and in their place He gave me His righteousness. At the cross, the punishment for my peace fell upon Him, and by His wounds I was healed.
So I tried to express that to that lady. But actually that only expressed a portion of the worth of the cross. Only a portion of the spiritual benefits that Christ won for his people there. I could have gone on and on.
But there is another way that the cross can be precious to us. And that is as a source of ongoing power to live holy lives as we meditate on God’s great grace to us there. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1:18
“For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.”
How is the cross the power of God to us as believers?, Well, we can’t grow in holiness while we are hiding our sin from God, too ashamed to admit what we are really like. But when we go again to the cross and see again the blood of Jesus that cleanses every sin, when we see the perfection of His sacrifice, then we have courage to confess all and to ask God to deliver us. Furthermore, the cross teaches us to hate our sin. The cross humbles us and makes us patient with other sinners. And the cross teaches us we can obey God by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us.
Unfortunately, as weak and sinful women, the cross often tends to fade into the back of our minds as something that happened a long time ago, while we busily try to live our lives in our own strength. That’s why we need to fight to remember the cross daily and keep it near our hearts.
Right now I’m reading a book by a single lady named Carolyn McCulley. And she talked about this very misconception. She wrote,
“When I became a Christian, I had this faulty idea that the cross was a monument in time, a marker sitting on the calendar date of the day I became a Christian. I thought, somehow I could motor on to maturity in my own strength, only casting a glance [at the cross] in the rearview mirror of my life.”[1]
But then she said she started working for a Christian ministry and guess what? God used that ministry with all its demands and stresses to show her how sinful she still was and how much she still needed the cross. (I can relate!) She said she learned she needed to go back to the cross daily to repent of daily sins and to rejoice daily in the forgiveness that Jesus purchased for her there.
So we need to fight to remember the cross. Forgetting the cross will drastically affect
- the love we feel for God,
- the faith we have in His grace,
- the joy we have in serving Him, as well as the
- power we have over sin.
One godly Scottish pastor, Horatius Bonar, once said,
“If we would be holy, we must get to the cross and dwell there;[2]
And he continued:
“Terror accomplishes no real obedience. Suspense brings forth no fruit unto holiness. No gloomy uncertainty as to God’s favor can subdue one lust or correct our crookedness of will. But the free pardon of the cross uproots sin and withers all its branches. Only the certainty of love, forgiving love can do this…”[3]
So, think about your own life. Can you say you are dwelling near the cross? How often do you think about the cross and what Jesus did there? Is it the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning? Is the cross as fresh in your mind, and as powerful in your heart as if just yesterday you had stood on the hill at Golgotha and watched Jesus die? Can you say your life is cross-centered?
C.J. Mahaney, one of my favorite preachers, has written a book called, “The Cross-centered life.” They have it in Romanian too. CJ, as people call him, likes to say,
“A cross-centered life is made up of cross-centered days.”
So he encourages us to establish some daily habits that will keep us near the cross. I’ll tell you what they are:
The first one is preaching to your own heart. You don’t need your pastor for this. All you need to do is when you’re feeling discouraged about stuff in your life is sit yourself down, get your own attention and say to yourself something like this:
“Hey! Listen to this! This is what matters most! You’re forgiven! You have hope! Your hope is based on the sacrifice of Jesus not on how good you did today!
Or say to yourself:
“Hey! Don’t forget! Your greatest need was to be delivered from the wrath of God…and that has already been accomplished for you through the death and resurrection of Christ. So why doubt that God will provide a much, much lesser need? Trust His sovereignty, trust His wisdom, and trust His love.”
CJ also encourages us to memorize verses about the cross, to fill our prayers with truth about the cross, to sing songs that are full of the cross, and to tell others what Christ has done for you at the cross. But as you do all these things, remember that it is only the Holy Spirit that can light up the truths of the cross and make it a holy fire in our hearts. So let’s pray together now and ask Him to do that.
[1] Carolyn McCulley, Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye?
[2] Horatius Bonar, God’s Way of Holiness as quoted in “The Gospel for Real Life” by Jerry Bridges, Navpress, 2003, p. 164
[3] ibid
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