Over the next three days, I want to post some thoughts on the death of Christ.
Because my access to the internet is limited, I will probably not be able to post anything on Resurrection Day, but I pray that anyone who may run across these thoughts will be better prepared to appreciate the joy of Resurrection Day by meditating on the tremendous grace displayed in the death of Christ as our substitute.
As God’s people, I believe we all desire to truly love one another. We want to be a community of selfless, giving, servant-hearted brothers and sisters in Christ. As God’s people we also long to love lost people with God’s love. We want to be compassionate and caring and earnest in our love for those who do not know Jesus the way we know him–as Savior and Lord.
As God’s people, we know that these desires are within us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ. And we know that these desires can only be fulfilled in us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.
We understand that love for one another flows from the love that God has shown us at the cross. But isn’t there often a disconnect between knowing this in our heads and experiencing it in our daily lives? What exactly is the connection between God’s loving act in sending Jesus to be our Savior, and the loving acts that we desire to see manifested in our relationships with one another as believers and with the lost people around us?
As we celebrate passion week, I want us to meditate together on the Scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to help us “connect the dots” between God’s love for us shown at Calvary, and our love for each other shown in our life together as a community of believers and in our evangelism of unbelievers.
Basically the dots can be connected with this truth: We can only love with the love that we have received. We must be experiencing the love of God in our lives if we hope to love those around us. And the Scriptures are clear that the way we experience the love of God in our lives is through considering the supreme manifestation of that love at Calvary.
Here are two important Scriptures that point to this truth: 1 John 4:9 and Rom. 5:8.
1 John 4:9 In this was the love of God manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…10 In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
God’s love was “manifested” among us when he sent Jesus to die as our substitute. Therefore, when we meditate on what Jesus did for us at the cross, it is a means of experiencing personally the love of God that was manifested at the cross of Christ
And Romans 5:8
But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Here Paul says that God “shows” us his love in THIS: “Christ died for us.” It is Christ’s death on the cross that shows us God’s love. This is why the Lord Jesus left us the sacrament of Communion. If we want a present experience of the love of God for us, we should consider the cross of Christ, because it is in the sacrifice of His Son that God DEMONSTRATES (present tense) his love for us.
However, even understanding this and doing our best to apply it, there are still two barriers that often keep us from experiencing the love of God when we take Communion or whenever we think about what Jesus did for us at the cross.
1. We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.
2. We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.
Obviously, since Jesus paid our debt these two barriers are related, and therefore, the more we see the magnitude of our debt, the more we will understand what Jesus did for us. Likewise, the more we see the magnitude of what Jesus experienced as our substitute, the more we will understand what we owed.
Imagine that you are a small business owner whose accountant comes to you and informs you that you owe a huge amount in fines, taxes and penalties. But out of his generosity, he pays everything you owe and then comes to you and says, “You know, you had a huge debt, but don’t worry about it, I paid it for you.”
If that is all he says, you may think that he paid just a few dollars, and you may very well appreciate his generosity. But there are two ways that you can begin to appreciate better what he has done for you. First of all, he could show you all the paperwork in which the fines and penalties and taxes are listed. You could look at each one individually and after awhile begin to get a sense of the magnitude of the financial problem you were faced with. Secondly, he could show you his bank account and as you begin to add up the payments of everything that he had paid for you and see that it cost him everything he had, you would understand the magnitude of what he had done for you.
Applying this to our spiritual debt, we can do the same thing. First of all, we need to consider our debt, and then we need to consider the payment that Jesus made for us. Over the next two days, I want to post some thoughts on these two things.