The Cross of Christ | All is Well

My heart is so full of thoughts, that I have no words for this night. We spent the night at home as a family, for I still struggle with the images of where I was just a few short years back when, on Good Friday, I came to grips with the burning need to know whether God was truth coupled with a sense that I was going to die-soon-not knowing.

But now I know. I know God not only is truth, He adopted me to be His daughter. He taught me to love my family. He has made me different. And all because of the cross and the resurrection.

So tonight I share some passages from one of the most instrumental books I’ve read: The Cross of Christ by John Stott.

“We may well respond, of course, that we do not want God to change us, especially if the necessary means he uses is pain. ‘We may wish, indeed,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘that we were of so little amount to God that he left us alone to follow our natural impulses-that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves, but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less….to ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God.'”

“If it was reasonable for Job to trust the God whose wisdom and power have been revealed in creation, how much more reasonable is it for us to trust the God whose love and justice have been revealed in the cross?”

“God striving with God” “The fact that this fighting God is not two different gods but the same God causes his pain. The pain of God is ‘a synthesis of his wrath and love’ and is ‘his essence.’ It was supremely revealed in the cross. For ‘the pain of God results from the love of the One who intercepts and blocks his wrath towards us, the One who himself is smitten by his wrath. This is strikingly bold phraseology. It helps us to understand how God’s pain continues where his wrath and love, his justice and mercy are in tension today.”

Stott states, “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”

If we have never sought, we seek thee now

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars,

We must have sight of thorn-marks on your brow

We must have thee, oh Jesus of the scars.

The heavens frighten us, they are too calm

In all the universe, we have no place

Our wounds are hurting us, where is thy balm

Lord Jesus by the scars we know thine grace.

If when the doors are shut thou drawest near,

only reveal those hands, that side of thine

We know today what wounds are; have no fear

Show us thou scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong but thou wast weak;

They rode but thou didst stumble to a thrown

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak

But not a God has wounds but thou along.

(Edward Shilleto: Jesus of the Scars)

John Stott died today. He was 90 years old. A good friend introduced me to his book, “The Cross of Christ”. I read it, begrudgingly. I didn’t want the things that Stott wrote about, to be truth. For if things that Stott taught—the centrality of the cross, the necessity of the cross, the authenticity of the cross–were truth, than who Jesus was and the reason He died on the cross would be truth also, a hard thing for my agnostic-leaning, athiestic-embracing soul to bear. That God would send His Son—would SACRIFICE–His Son out of love for me was overwhelming.

And yet, read I did. Page after page. I devoured “The Cross of Christ”, digging deeper into each and every page, marking it up with highlighters and notes in the margins—“Is this true?” “What if this is truth?” “Why would Stott write this very logical paragraph?”. And So Forth. And So On.

Until I came to the last chapter, and one of the last sections, titled “The Pain of God”. My soul. Could it be truth that God could know pain? Could it be truth that He could see and know the pain my soul was in? For I had settled that there could not possibly be a God. Because if there was a God, than the forsaken nature of the pain I felt was for nothing. And yet…..and yet I learned through Stott’s writings and through the Biblical story of the Garden of Gethsemane and the Cross itself, that God not only sees my pain–He knows it. He knows it.

Here it is in Stott’s own words:

….the cross of Christ is the proof of God’s soldiery love, that is, of his personal, loving solidarity with us in our pain. For the real sting of suffering is not misfortune itself, nor even the pain of it or the injustice of it, but the apparent Godforsakenness of it. Pain is endurable, but the seeming indifference of God is not……….If love is self-giving, then it is inevitably vulnerable to pain, since it exposes itself to the possibility of rejection and insult. ‘It is the fundamental Christian assertion that God is love, ‘ writes Professor Jurgen Moltmann, “Were God incapable of suffering…. then he would also be incapable of love,’ whereas ‘the one who is capable of love is also capable of suffering, for he also opens himself to the suffering which is involved in love’

Godforsakenness. Yes, that is what it seems like some times. But my God, my Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. And that love knows suffering, and thus that love knows the suffering of my heart—-and it matters. It is not nothing to my God.

Stott said of his own personal theology: “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”

The God I worship is not immune to the pain of this world, nor to the pain of my life. O, how I often forget that! May I strive to remember that as I fight for survival and to stand fast, as I fight to immerse myself in the grace that my Jesus so freely gives me.

John Stott is home tonight. He is with my God and my Jesus. He is experiencing peace. Experience rest. Me too, one day….Me too.

****UPDATE: John Stott’s obituary and a very brief, humbling clip of Stott stating how he would like to be remembered.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/religion-obituaries/8668l938/The-Rev-John-Stott.html