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[Music] The Cross, The Cross, The Cross. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] The scripture reading of the morning is taken from the Gospel according to Matthew, the 27th chapter, beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered 32.

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"As they were marching out, they came upon a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. This man they compelled to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means the place of a skull, they offered him wine to drink mingled with gall. But when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him which read, 'This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.' Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, 'You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself. If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.'

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So also the chief priests with the scribes and elders mocked him, saying, 'He saved others. He cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.' And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthanah.' That is, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' And some of the bystanders hearing it said, 'This man is calling Elijah.' And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink.

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But the other said, 'Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.' And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. I submit to you this morning that it is virtually incredible that two thousand years after the hell of it, Christians still gather at the foot of the cross.

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Were we to observe a company of worshippers singing songs in praise of the stake of impalement, we would call such praise "savagery." If we discovered men and women bowing low before a gibbet and clutching with love its thirteen-coiled noose, we would call that kind of adoration "bestial." Suppose we were to come upon those who wore about their necks tiny golden electric chairs. Or imagine our being caught up in a group whose place of worship by choice and preference was a gas chamber.

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We would call that kind of conduct "brutal" and "barbarous." And yet we, without wondering, worship beneath, sing about, and wear as jewelry as awful an instrument of torture and death as the mind of man has ever conceived. And so I say it again. It is virtually incredible that two thousand years after the hell of it, Christians still gather at the foot of the cross. Christianity has been called by some a "living miracle."

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And I think that is true, and surely part of the miracle is the centrality of the cross, the emblem of suffering and shame to all that we as a church think and say and do. Now how is this so? What has caused this to be? By what strange alchemy has the awful been made into an object of adoration? Well, my words this morning are an effort to answer these questions.

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I ask you to think with me about the cross, and then about the cross, and then again about the cross. And let us think this thought first. The cross is the sign of our salvation. If the writers of the New Testament are unanimous about anything, they are unanimous about this.

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That the cross is the place where by virtue of the death of Christ, sinful men were saved for the kingdom of heaven. Now the metaphors of faith are many splendid things. The Bible is a kind of picture book. Each chapter is an easel, and the words splashed thereon are portraits of an ancient time.

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Sometimes our Lord's atonement is depicted in the Bible in terms of adoption, as if we are adopted as God's children. At other times, atonement is seen in terms of a prisoner before the bar of justice, suddenly being declared not guilty. At other points, it is seen as a ransom that is paid to greedy evil. There is only one particular picture, one particular effort to master the mystery of the cross, which it seems to me includes all of these other pictures, and indeed eclipses them.

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And I refer to that expression of Christ dying, which teaches that he substituted himself for us. That he laid down his life that we might take up ours. The cross is that place where the perfect substituted himself for the imperfect. The cross is that place where the good substituted himself for the evil.

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The cross is that place where the innocent paid in blood for the guilty. Now you ask me how this can be. The question would be properly phrased, how can one man suffer and die and make peace with God for all other men? And the answer is obvious.

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No man can do this for other men. To ask such a question is to answer it. No man is pure enough to die for another's guilt. Who would answer for us?

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What is that paragon of perfection who can say, "Take me, O Lord, weigh me against all the carnage and depravity of men." What then, not guilty anyone? Who here this morning will stand up and raise his hand? Which one of you has never axed a reputation?

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Which one has never inflamed your daydreams with assorted thought? If any of you are led to come to your feet, I urge you before you do so, take the satisfied expression of guiltlessness from your face. Why were you to stand?

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Your very act of standing would be to boast of your virtue, and that is to fall far short of what God would have you do. I tell you this, my friend. If piety, if holy living, if sinlessness is the currency of heaven, then none of us are going to be able to afford a knothole for a peek at paradise.

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And further, no man is vast enough to die for all of us. No man can include within his single soul all the dark ugliness, the virulent impurities, the dry rot and the moist decay of all mankind's malevolence. No human heart could stand that kind of stretching.

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None, not one. I tell you, none. It is on the face of it a silly question. No man can die for other men.

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No man is so pure and vast that he can satisfy justice for other men. No man can stand and brave the wrath of perfect purity for all other men. Only God can do that. Only a Christ, God incarnate, can do that.

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Where is another hand so pierced? Or another brow so bloody? Or another soul so anguished? Who could wear a cross but God in Christ himself?

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For you see, he is pure enough. The transparent one, the crystal of perfection. Men looked at him and said, "God himself could not be better," and they were right. For this was God himself.

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And it was because this Christ was the only one in the world who did not cause sin, that he could be the only one in the world to cure sin. And only Christ is vast enough. It is a law of spiritual physics that only a heart altogether empty of evil

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could contain all of the world's evil. God is the only vessel large enough and pure enough to bear enough. Let us designate man by a minus sign. Still the great perpendicular of Christ comes down into that minus sign

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and makes it a cross, and as it makes it a cross, it makes it a plus. Oh yes, it's true. We can say of that soldier boy lying dead in the Vietnam jungle, we can say of him lying shattered against rude beams that form a kind of cross,

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we can say of him with barbed wire tangled in his hair like a twisted crown of thorns, we can say of such a one and catch our breath while saying or sobbing it, "He gave his life for us." But let this fact be clear.

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He gave his life as our shield. Only the Son of God could fight and suffer and die as our substitute. The soldier dead did not die for us. No man can do that for another or even for himself.

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It takes a God who will suffer to heal a God who hurts. It takes the cross. So when the bustling, busybody fanatic corners you, grabs you by the lapel, and asks you when you were saved, you tell him that it was good Friday afternoon

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at 3 p.m. more than 1900 years ago. This is why we cling to an old rugged cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain, and we cling to that cross, for it is the sign of our salvation.

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So we have thought about the cross, and I ask you now to think with me about the cross again. And let us notice this time that it is the start of our sanctification. Now, sanctification is the big theological name which is given to the Christlike spirit

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which grows in one who has accepted Christ's death on the cross as his own. Our Lord taught us that those who are truly his disciples will produce in their lives certain easily discernible fruits of dedication and discipline. By the fruits of their living you will know the Master's men, and so it has always been.

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When a man truly faces the cross as the sign of his salvation, the spirit begins in him the process of sanctification, of fruit bearing to the glory of God. David Brainerd was the great missionary apostle to the American Indian,

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and he put the point I am trying to make now in very cogent terms. Writing of his preaching in his journal he said, and I quote him, "I never got away from Jesus and him crucified, and I found that when my people were gripped by this great doctrine of Christ and him crucified,

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I had no need to give them instructions about morality. I found that one followed a sure and inevitable fruit of the other." A single sentence can put this truth in another way. Face the cross, and your life faces immediately in another direction.

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I'm not maintaining today that the one who comes to Christ at his cross is instantly transformed into the paragon of Christian practice. The battle against entrenched bad habit, the struggle with well settled sin is never easily won,

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and is indeed never finally won in this life. But still, once a man knows Christ crucified, there is, there will be, immediate evidence of the power of God's grace at work in his life. And this is so because the cross starts that journey of sanctification

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in which every disciple of Christ is constantly and unendingly, in so far as this life is concerned, engaged. How strange then, is the conduct of some who bear the name Christian. Wouldn't you agree?

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Peter Marshall quotes C.E. Montague in a sermon titled "Get Out of Step." And he tells of how a little English boy named Braun was taken to church for the first time by his governess. He watched all of the service with interest,

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but his special attention was captured when the preacher from the pulpit announced a terrible piece of news. It was about a brave and kind young man who years before had been spiked to a cross, ferociously hurt,

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and who still feels a dreadful pain because there are some things not done which he wants all men to do. Now the little boy, Braun, decides that the preacher is telling his story because a lot of people are in the church and they will no doubt do something about this awful news. He sits impatiently on the edge of his pew.

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He can scarcely wait to see what the first good move is going to be. But nothing happens. And so the child decides that after the service, the assembled people will then rush out and help the suffering young man.

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And the little boy, Braun, weeps, but no one else seems to be upset at all. The service ends, and the people walk away as if they had not heard the terrible news, as if nothing remarkable had happened.

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And as Braun leaves the church, he is trembling, and his governess looks at him and says, "Braun, don't take it all so seriously. Someone will think you are queer."

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My Christian friend, it is not clear to find the cross so working in the heart of a man or boy that he feels something must be done. But I'll tell you what I think is clear.

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I think it clear that the church believe a man can know Christ on a cross and not do something about it in his own life and the living of it. I think it clear that we accept as normal that a man cheer at a football game,

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or that he scream and perhaps curse at a golf ball, but we call a man a fanatic or a nut who can't think about a certain hill outside of Jerusalem without getting a lump in his throat and a knot in his heart

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and a will in his spirit to love the kind of living and to live the kind of loving that Jesus Christ did. I think it clear that the church excuse a man who claims Christ and the cross and then gives no evidence of either.

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At the exit to the National Gallery in London, there's a large waste can, very large one. I asked the doorman about its use and he explained to me that's where the art students drop their conceit as they go out.

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Well, I want to say this morning that I think it clear that any man or woman or boy or girl can truly see Calvary and keep his conceit. Life under the cross is life changed.

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The sculptor wrote down, saw and bought a cross once, not alone because he honored Christ, but also because as an artist he admired its proportions. When he took it home he found that it was too high for his room,

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so what did he do? Did he will down the cross? Not at all. He rebuilt his house. Just so I submit to you that any man who takes the cross into his heart

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will have to rebuild that heart, will have to restructure his way of living, will have to erect new standards of conduct and commitment, and it's clear to think that anything less than this should be so.

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You just can't see Christ on that cross and live like you've been living. Before him and before it, all your trophies at last you lay down. It may be old and it may be rugged, but it changes lives. And that's one of the reasons it is.

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That's one of the reasons the cross is so precious to all those who believe. It is the start of the process of sanctification. Now think with me one last time about the cross. And notice this time that the cross is the source of our service.

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Jesus tells us, and the fact is recorded in the 16th chapter of Matthew, "If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind, he must take up his cross and come with me." Now in these words the master is not referring to his cross,

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for as we have already noted, only he could bear that cross beneath which we worship and from which we derive nothing less than eternal life. And in these words our Lord is not speaking directly of the sanctifying power of the cross, although the ability to lay aside one's own concerns

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and to take up the concerns of another is surely a fruit of the Spirit. No, Christ here is making specific reference to the awesome fact that the man who faces the cross finds himself ready and willing and anxious to bear the cross for others.

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Like that little boy, Ron, whom we mentioned a moment ago, he is ready to help the agony of the Christ by relieving the agony of his brother man. He sees the cross Christ bore and he is ready to bear the cross of another. Now at this point we must pause long enough to make a very clear distinction.

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I heard a woman in a shoe store once exclaim at not being able to find a pair of shoes to fit her, and this is what she said, "Oh well, I guess that is the cross I have to bear." Now please don't think me holier than thou when I say this, but I winced at that sacrilegious remark.

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A cross, you see, is not a pair of shoes that doesn't fit. It's not a personal burden or a discomfort. A cross is not even the illness because of which one suffers, and it's not some hard and painful task which one is constrained to complete.

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No, a cross is the burden or the task which one takes on voluntarily. A cross is not what you know in your life by reason of circumstance. A cross is what you take voluntarily from another's life because of what Christ voluntarily took from yours.

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A cross is deliberate and costly service, and one is inclined to accept that kind of service, indeed to seek it, only after one is fully and dramatically aware of the power of Christ's cross in his own life. That's why I say the cross is the source of our service.

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But this raises a question, doesn't it? How is it that men so glibly claim the forensic effects of our Lord's dying, and yet are unwilling to take up the cross for another? If seeing Christ in his cross leads to personal cross-bearing,

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then it seems that many who claim Christ in his cross are at the least deluding themselves. We are to be imitators of Christ. Like him, we are to be so tired in the service of men that we can sleep through a storm. Like him, we are to be so forgiving of men that we can hold out the sock of honor to the very ones who betray us.

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Like him, we are to be so loving that we are ready to crucify ourselves in the helping of others. This is what it is to be a soldier of the cross. You know, no area of my pastoral work throughout all the course of my ministry has given me greater joy and pleasure than serving for six years some time ago

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as the chairman of the committee that received young candidates for full-time church occupation for the largest presbytery in our denomination. It's a thrill indescribable to be a part of the preparation a young man or a young woman knows as they get ready for lifetime service in the church.

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I really enjoyed my six years of this task. Now when a candidate would come before us for the first time seeking to be enrolled in study for the ministry, in other words, at the very first appearance,

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long before we began to make any demands of the candidate, we would ask how the candidate knew the call to full-time church occupation. Now sometimes the young man or young woman would say that they had a feeling that this is God's will for them.

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And these we would turn regretfully away for feelings change as circumstances change. There's not enough on which to build a lifetime of occupational service. And some would come before us and tell us that they looked upon the ministry as an exciting field of service and they wished to pursue it for that reason.

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And these too we would turn away, though their words would thrill us, because the work of the ministry you see is not always exciting and if one takes up the task for excitement and excitement fades away, well then the drive for service will be gone.

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And some would tell us that they felt cut out for church occupation and these too we would deny, for it's not enough to be cut out for it, you have to be ready to be cut down in it. Only one claim was considered by us to be adequate,

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and that was the claim of the cross. When a young man or a young woman stood before us and said, "I come to serve because Christ served me all the way to die." Or when a candidate would affirm,

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"Knowing what's been done for me, I cannot do less than the same for others." When the youth before us would say something like this, and I heard it said a hundred different ways, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously,

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then we were joyously ready to open the doors to church occupation and bid the candidate to enter. The cross, you see, is the only source of service that never fails. It's the only spring for service that never runs dry.

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It is the only motivation to service that never lessens or fades away. Why did Paul go to Macedonia? Because of the cross. Why did Livingston go to Africa? The cross.

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Why do the missionary servants, the cross-bearers of this day, move out across the face of the world? Because of the cross they bear. Why does that high school girl read and study every night with her blind friend, helping her blind friend to learn? It's the cross.

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Why did that automobile dealer in Detroit get up and ask a prominent public official in the midst of an address to stop taking the Lord's name in vain? The cross. Why does that dentist go to the mountains of West Virginia every year to minister to the needs of the mountain people there without any charge for his services?

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It's the cross. Why does that teacher go to the north side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, three nights a week to teach struggling black students? It's the cross. Why do those members of suburban churches move their memberships into ghetto city churches

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in order that Christ might be proclaimed in the slums and back alleys? It's the cross. Why does that old lady with so little money, why does she tie? Why does she give up a new coat in order to help to build a chapel in Hong Kong? It's the cross. Every one of these people I've mentioned I know.

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I know them personally, I know them all, and I know that they are motivated, empowered, and driven by the cross and nothing less than the cross. [bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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There's an old Irish superstition which instructs one to scratch a cross upon the earth before one dies, and Genevieve Taggart has put that superstition in diverse. It goes like this. Mark the earth with a cross before you die. Take a small stick and bend down and make two marks, two only on the ground.

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Ask no one why. Mark before you die the earth for a sign. You are not a soul, you cannot die rightly until you scratch a mark on the ground. Lean and write and be done and gone and the wind be with you. Well that's a poem about a superstition.

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But what I'm talking about today is no superstition. It is reality. It is the call that every true Christian hears to leave somewhere on the face of the earth the sign of the cross written in the blood of his own life.

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There is in the Christian the desire that the sign of love, the sign of sacrifice, the sign of service that reminds men of Jesus Christ, the sign that marked time and eternity, heaven and earth, that that sign be evident in them and that they leave the mark of that sign upon the world.

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So you can see, incredible as it may seem, two thousand years after the halibut, Christians still love the cross. Is it really amazing that we should set it atop our steeples

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and plunge it into the midst of our hearts? What leads us to do such a thing? Why the cross is the sign of our salvation and the cross is the start of our sanctification

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and the cross is the source of our service. To us then, it's not just a song for fireside and it's not just a hymn for youngster singing and to us it's not only a melody that makes bold, shy memories.

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To us, these words are the truth. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. And we love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.

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And we'll cherish that old rugged cross till our trophies at last we lay down. We will cling to the old rugged cross and exchange it someday for our crown.

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Strange. One of the members of our church told me she thought it very odd that I should entitle a sermon

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"The Cross, The Cross, The Cross." You know, I don't think it is odd at all. Let us pray. O God, claim us by thy cross.

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Convert us by thy cross. Commit us to thy cross. Send us into all the world carrying the cross. For we ask it in the name of our living Lord,

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the Christ of the cross. Amen. [organ music] I have a Savior, he's leading in glory.

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The dear, loving Savior, the Word's friend he's few. And now he is watching in tenderness for me. But, oh, that my Savior were your Savior too. For you I am praying.

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For you I am praying. I'm praying for you. I have a Father, to me he has given a hope for eternity, blessed and true.

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And soon he will call me to meet him in heaven. And all that he'd let me bring you with me too. For you I am praying. For you I am praying.

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For you I am praying. I'm praying for you. When Jesus has found you, tell others the story that my loving Savior is your Savior too.

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Then pray that your Savior will bring them to glory. And prayer will be answered, 'twas answered for you. For you I am praying. I'm praying for you.

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[END]