The Cross and the Person of Christ # 5

The Person of Christ Illumined by the Cross (continued)

This perfect no condemnation fellowship with God, made actual by the Holy Spirit taking up residence within us through our believing into Christ, is the possession of those alone - but is surely the birthright of such - who have come to the Cross in realization of separation from God, in deepest longing for restored fellowship with Him, and in acknowledgment that sin is the cause. Thus, looking to Christ crucified as the author and perfecter of salvation, they discover that He is more than a man, even man at his greatest. They discover that in Him - and in Him alone - God is found.

Then it works the other way. Can we imagine what Saul of Tarsus felt like - he who had believed Jesus of Nazareth to have been but a man and an impostor among men, and to have been executed as a fraud and blasphemer - when he saw on the Damascus road that this glorified, exalted One was God's eternal Son? It needed a time in Arabia to let the implications of that adjust and revolutionize his whole outlook.

When we see Whose Cross that was it puts the Cross so far beyond all human ideas of 'dying for ideals,' 'heroic death for a great cause,' and all such lesser and altogether inadequate interpretations of Christ's death.

"Ye killed the Prince of Life" (Acts 3:15) was the charge laid at the Jews' door by the Apostles.

So we come back to our starting point. It requires the Cross to really see Who Jesus is; and in the seeing of Him truly by the Cross we see how great, wonderful, sacred, and awful is that Cross.

No wonder that satan has ever sought to take from His essential Person and make Him something less! No wonder that he has so persistently sought to strip the Cross of its truest meaning! Let all who do either of these things recognize from whence their inspiration, or blindness, comes, and with whom it is that they - though unintentionally - are in league.

Let Christians also realize that all enmity; lack of love, divisions, and strife; all prejudice, suspicion and spiritual blindness; with all spiritual death, is because the Cross has not been apprehended right. Somewhere uncrucified flesh is holding the ground. It is impossible to be a truly crucified man or woman and at the same time either have personal interests or be at variance with other children of God, i.e. without love for them. The essential basis of life, light, and love - which is Christ in full manifestation - is the Cross as a  working reality in the realm of the old creation, and the risen power of Christ in the new.

All this is but saying in other words that the Cross of Christ brings us into living union and oneness with God, and if we will but live in the full meaning and value of that union we shall be living epistles of Christ in terms of life, light, and love. Failure in these means failure somewhere, and for some reason, in our fellowship with God in Christ. The measure of our walk with Him will be the measure of these three features of Christ.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 6 - "The Cross and the Holy Spirit")