Letters to the Cross

This Sunday at Christ Memorial Temple we will be kicking off our Easter Sermon series called Letters to the Cross. Over the next five Sundays, we will be examining the doctrines of the Cross and how it applies to us today.

Week One: Substitutionary Atonement
Week Two: Justification
Week Three: Redemption and Reconciliation
Week Four: Propitiation and Expiation
Week Five: Victory

Week One Introduction:

It was 2000 years ago… What does the cross have to do with me?
Christianity is in danger of losing the cross. We have become commercialized and institutionalized to the level where the cross and Calvary are deemed irrelevant in the best cases and irreverent in the worst cases. Long gone are the ideas of suffering and hardship- to be associated within the Christian lifestyle. Instead we hire and desire preachers and chruches that preach a new age version of the power of positive thinking or victory and eternal security, but we rarely get around to talking about the price that was paid for us to enjoy these benefits.

Especially we Christians, the ones who label ourselves Pentecostal, are guilty of reducing the cross to a seasonal fable. (God forbid! an Easter ploy to boast church attendance.) We are guilty of screaming Pentecost Sunday at the top of our lungs while Good Friday becomes a whimper. We beat the drums of doctrine in Acts chapter two, but nary a squeak about John chapter 19. Our reality reveals that we have founded a religion that arrived at truth backward. The way we go about our religion is at times a threat to producing a Christianity without the Cross.

Acts 2:38 was not a part of Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. HE DID NOT PREACH IT! Instead he preached a sermon about the death, burial, a resurrection of Jesus, "That same Jesus, whom ye crucified…" (Acts 2:36)
When the people heard the preaching of the cross… they were convicted (pricked) in their heart and wanted to know what to do to be saved…
Acts 2:38 is the altar call, not the sermon.
We want a revival of Acts 2 proportions, but we will never achieve it without the timeless preaching of the cross of Jesus Christ.

We have no Holy Ghost without the cross.
We have no Pentecost without Good Friday
We have no salvation without Jesus.

People don’t want preaching about the cross because it is a violent shameful story.
People don’t want preaching about the cross because it strikes a nerve of guilt in their own lives and hearts.
People don’t want preaching about the cross because the cross is offensive.

The cross was an offense. It’s a true story about murdering an innocent men. It's the story about how WE (not the Jews, not the Romans) killed God.