Jesus on the Cross

This week is Holy Week when we remember and declare Jesus Christ’s trial, crucifixion and resurrection. As we approach Good Friday and His crucifixion, I wanted to share the first chapter in my book, Journey of the Messiah — The Awakening. It describes not only the horror of the cross imagined from His perspective but also the ramification of His redemption to a lost world. Note: The book is written in the first person of Jesus, as if He is telling the story. It is from the author’s perspective and imagination.

Chapter 1: To the Cross, from the Cross

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21 NKJV).

From the beginning, I knew My life as the Son of Man would come to this torturous end. It was the redemptive plan of God for man, before man was to be. This knowledge did not make My pain any less but added grief to My agony. The weight of the sinful guilt for man is a knife to My soul as the nails are to My flesh. I hang between heaven and earth, bridging the gap for all time and for all who come by faith to drink My blood and eat My flesh.

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Better and Faster Than Fiber Optic

Living out in the country has many benefits. I am a country boy at heart and in the flesh. I love not having my backyard joined to another. A big disadvantage since the dawn of high-speed internet is living out in the sticks. Our internet has been painfully slow. Hope is on the way, in about six weeks or so, gigabytes will arrive. We have fiber optic internet coming soon. WooHoo!

Some of the line workers have been in our area. Salesmen have been knocking on our doors and we have been saying, “Where can we sign!”

One of the line splicers was working in my yard today. Nice guy! Being the old man with a thousand questions, I was hindering his work like ole men tend to do. He showed me the single strain of the fiber optic. It is amazing the information and signals that can travel that little glass-like, hair-thin wire.

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Lessons from Abraham: SACRIFICE OF THE SON

Remember that God gave Abraham a promised son in his old age. Abraham was one hundred years old when Isaac was born. Abraham’s wife Sarah was ninety years old and passed child-bearing age even by ancient standards.

God had told Abraham that the covenant and promises given to him would flow to future generations through Isaac. All this sounds great until God commands Abraham to offer Issac as a burnt offering.

In our walk with God, at times things will not make any sense. Here is a contradiction, a son of promise is to be offered as a burnt offering. How could Isaac be a link to blessed future generations and a slaughtered son at the same time?

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Take Off Your Sandals

In the desert near Mount Sinai, a fugitive of Egypt is shepherding the sheep of his father-in-law. He was born an Israelite slave in Egypt. It is a point in history when Pharaoh was thinning the Hebrew population by killing all the newborn male slaves.

Surely the enemy of God, Satan himself, had designed this slaughter because a deliverer was destined to be born. The Adversary would plan a similar genocide 1300 years later to extinguish another deliverer—the Messiah.

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Good Intentions

I remember in the late 1990’s having good intentions about door-to-door visitation. I, along with some fellow ministry workers, knocked on every door of a nearby city’s government housing projects. We had good intentions but nothing tangible resulted from it. Maybe one person visited our church but no new converts. I know we encouraged a few people, but we never saw a harvest of our efforts.

I learned that building relationships is more effective than cold-calling.

Churches and mission organizations are full of good intentions. We have to be honest and ask ourselves the question. Are our good intentions bearing fruit or do they just make us feel better about ourselves? We often learn by trial and error.

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From Darkness to Light

Jesus gave an analogy between natural vision and spiritual vision. “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:22-23 NKJV).

Spiritual light enters our lives to bring vision. If our spiritual eyes are good, we will be filled with light (vision). If our spiritual eyes are not good, then we remain in darkness.

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Christian Martyrdom

Most of us have read accounts of religious martyrdom in historical books and the Bible. Few of us have witnessed it with our own eyes. Recently, we saw Charlie Kirk killed at one of his events. Some would argue that this was a political hit, not a religious one. Whether you loved or hated him, he was an adamant Christian who never minced his words.

The original Greek New Testament word for martyr is the word ‘martus’ pronounced [mar’-toos]. Its basic meaning is witness. A martyr is a person killed for his witness.

It is estimated that over 70 million Christians have been martyred since Jesus Christ himself was martyred on the cross. Most of those have been in the 1900s under fascist and communist rulers. Depending on the historian, some estimates say that since 2000 there has been an average of 100,000 per year. Martyrdom is not just in biblical times but also in relative modern times.

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