More Insight

Insight

(Dragonfly Ministries President, Mary Hamrick)

April 2004

I saw “The Passion of the Christ”, and – like you – I experienced the horror, the heartbreak of what happened to my Lord, Jesus.  For several days, I have been working to process all that my eyes saw.  The answer came to me this week, through “My Utmost for His Highest”, by Oswald Chambers.  “The Cross was not something that happened to Jesus – He came to die; the Cross was His purpose in coming.  God made Jesus to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).  God came in the flesh to take sin away, not to accomplish something for Himself.  The Cross is the central event in time and eternity, and the answer to all the problems of both.”

Jesus knew that this was His purpose, to die for the sins of the world, and He fulfilled that purpose with love, great love.  I often wonder, had I been there, what would I have done differently?  Like Peter, I would have denied Christ out of fear of receiving the same treatment that was being given Him.  And I wonder, by Peter’s denial of Christ, if his life was spared – and thus by his sinful act of denial, God used Peter’s repentance to bring glory to Himself by building / beginning the church by working through Peter.

In the Old Testament, we are taught that a sacrifice must be made for the forgiveness of sin – that blood must be shed for the forgiveness of sin.  This is God’s law – the sacrifice had to be perfect, without flaw.  In the New Testament, God fulfilled the need for that perfect sacrifice by sending His Son, Jesus, to earth to live and teach and show us how to live, and then to die to give us the greatest gift of all – forgiveness of sin and a life of eternity with Jesus.

As the movie portrayed, Jesus didn’t just die – He suffered and bled.  He suffered pain, desertion – in dying for the sins of the world – in carrying the load of sin that we have heaped on Him both before His birth and since then.  His death had to be ugly, brutal, horrific, for He had to suffer and carry the pain so that our sin would be paid for, by His blood and by His suffering.  He had to bleed because blood is required for the forgiveness of sin.  He had to suffer to take on the true nature of sin.  

Through His passion for us, His gift of forgiveness to us, we can kneel at His feet, in our spirit and in our heart, and ask for forgiveness.  As we kneel at the cross, at His feet, His blood spills on us, covers us, and washes the sin away from our lives.  The blood is not visible to our eyes, we can’t see it – but in our spirit, as we kneel at the cross of Jesus and ask for forgiveness, His blood covers our body and cleanses our heart from sin – and when we stand up to leave the foot of the cross, we are pure and righteous.

In your spirit, you can be made new and pure and holy by asking our Lord Jesus to cleanse you with His blood – to purify your life and to help you walk upright and holy in your daily life.

Friend, I invite you today to kneel at the cross of Jesus.  It doesn’t have to be a literal cross; kneel where you are.  Ask Jesus to purify you, to forgive you from all sin, to remove the guilt from your life, to live within you, to teach you and to guide you.

And then, spend a lifetime telling others about this great gift, spend a lifetime reading your Bible and learning about God’s grace and mercy; spend a lifetime getting to know this precious Jesus, in the spiritual sense, by talking to Him in prayer, by studying about Him in your Bible, by learning from others who know Him.

What a life changing experience you will have.  What a gift He has given us in the forgiveness of our sin and the removal of our guilt.

And what a glorious celebration of Easter - that though the evil of this world crucified our Lord Jesus, God used that evil for good, for through His death, we have forgiveness of sin, and through His resurrection from the dead, we have eternal life.

Friend, what better way to secure your future than investing in an eternal life with Christ!

Come, Lord Jesus.