Today's Devotional

July 25, 2005

Subject:  Don't Move The Cross, You Need To Adjust

1 Corinthians 1:17 - "For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect."

We were really excited about the new LCD projector that I bought for the church last week.  This Sunday was our first opportunity to try it out and we did, but after service.  What phenomenal capabilities it had and the picture was brilliant.  Our only problem was finding a big enough screen to show the picture.  We solved that dilemma by simply using the back wall of the church, directly behind where the pastor stands in the pulpit.  It's big and has a simple design, but in the middle of the wall is a huge 10 or 12 ft cross.  As we fidgeted with the camera and it's many buttons and levers for adjustment, we decided that we wanted the picture to sit right below the wood that makes the "t" on the cross.  When we did this, we realized that it was absolutely necessary to have the picture completely straight or it was immediately noticeable because the cross was completely straight and its straightness magnified the crookedness of the screen.  I thought at one point, perhaps we should slightly adjust the cross so that the picture and the cross would then agree in position, but the message was clear as I thought about it, "don't move the cross, you need to adjust." 

That's a good message for us today because referring to the passage above in Corinthians, when we use our own intellectual arguments for the cause of Christ, we've moved the cross.  See the message of the cross is plain and simple and it's not rejected by men and women today because of its difficulty to comprehend.  It's rejected because it magnifies our crookedness.  It says that we were so bad that this is what the Son of God had to endure on our behalf.  With many churches more interested only in growing numbers, that is normally not a message that draws a crowd.  Many don't want to hear a message of what they might describe as gloom and doom.  However, Philippians says that Christ was "obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."  If we're going to preach the gospel message, then we must include the cross and what it meant to us and what it means for us; the requirements for us to suffer as He suffered.  He died in obedience that we might not only die in obedience, but live that way also.  When we defer to our great catch-phrases, clichés and quotable lines in contradiction to God's message of suffering and pain via the cross, we've decided to adjust the cross to agree with our camera's picture.

Today as you preach the gospel message to the world through your lives, I say, "don't move the cross.  You need to adjust."

Carlen