9/16/2012 2:49:00 PM —
One of the greatest miscalculations of cultural Christianity is the presentation to the world of a Jesus that leaders believe the masses will accept. As a result we have churchgoers who join us throughout the Christmas season but won't darken the door for a Good Friday service – because they relate to the baby Jesus of Christmas, but not the suffering Jesus of Good Friday.
We think we get to choose which Jesus we worship, but God doesn't offer us options. The Jesus God gives us is one who came to earth as a baby, certainly. But more importantly, He suffered and died the cruelest death imaginable to redeem us from an even more horrific fate. That is why we worship Him, and why we must always remember the cross.
I am committed to Christian education because it is where our children and youth learn the essential truths of our faith. The problem is that far too often, we don't progress in our knowledge as we get older. One of our professors at Valor Christian College calls this phenomenon ‘flannelgraph syndrome,' in a nod to the visual aid used to teach Bible lessons to so many members of my generation.
Those lessons aren't the problem. Our intellectual laziness concerning the things of God is the problem. Too many of us in our churches know no more about Jesus's life than we were taught by Miss Mildred on a flannelgraph when we were 5 years old!
I have many purposes in mind for my new book The Cross: One Man…One Tree…One Friday. One of them is to combat the effects of flannelgraph syndrome – to catch up our brothers and sisters in the pews who are ignorant of the supreme sacrifice Jesus made for each of us:
(M)ore often than not the admirers of Jesus the Teacher and Jesus the Prophet shrink back in horror and embarrassment from Jesus the Lamb of God. This Jesus was slain for the sins of the world. Spat upon. Nailed to a tree. Writhing in His own blood. Tainted and Taunted and mocked by sneering cowards who, only two days prior, would not have dared to even look Him in the eye.
The scene at Calvary is too ugly. Too shame-soaked. Its implications about sin, sin's toll, and the severe demands of cosmic justice are too troubling to ponder for long. "No, you can keep your shattered Jesus of the cross," the spirit of the age seems to say. "If we must have a Jesus, and we'd prefer not to, we'll take the pretty Sunday School illustration version with children on His lap."
And thus a generation silently slips the cross down from its conspicuous hook on the wall of its theology. Pleasanter, less demanding images are found to hang in its place.
Today in some churches, if the cross is mentioned at all it is often only to warp its meaning and message into something more palatable to the modern sensibility.
I'm convinced that our commitment to sharing the Gospel with others is directly proportional to our understanding of what happened at Calvary and what it means.
Perhaps Baby Jesus is so popular in the culture because, by our own design, He makes no demands on us. The Jesus who agonized over His fate in the garden of Gethsemane, went through a sham trial on trumped-up charges and submitted to a torturous death once reserved exclusively for slaves – He's a different story. That Jesus, we owe more than we want to give.
What I believe will occur through The Cross is that a new generation of churchgoers will confront and embrace the reality of what Jesus sacrificed so that we could, by faith, live eternally with Him. Revival will come to our churches and our nation when every believer is as committed to sharing the Gospel as the apostle Paul proclaimed to the churches at Corinth:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. - 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, ESV
Calvary's reality is horrific, and sobering, and finally glorious. Those who come to even a basic understanding of it are profoundly and permanently changed, every time. It's time for our understanding of Jesus to become nothing less and nothing other than a sobering reminder of His sacrifice.