In preparation for Easter, our worship committee had pulled out our beautiful wooden cross to be decorated with flowers. Flower crosses are quite a treat if you or your church has ever had one. They exude new life and hope. As I was leaving the church that same day, I noticed the cross was just outside the front door where one of our outdoor sconces is located. The enclosed lamp has a small house finch nest in it with tiny birds that have just hatched. The youth and kids love checking on them and the sound they make when “lunch” arrives in the form of a worm is sweet (and loud).
As I pulled away, though, I took one last look back at the church. Climbing up the cross and making its way across the horizontal beam was a cat! I wheeled it around and pulled back into the front parking lot; slamming the car into park. I left the car running and bolted toward the front door yelling, “Git! Git! Git!” in my best southern speech. The cat pulled its hand out of the opening of the lamp glass and ran across the street. I grabbed the cross by the base and scooted it far away from the sconce and the baby birds.
The cross, after being moved away from the bird nest
“15 When they arrived back in Jerusalem, Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves, 16 and he stopped everyone from using the Temple as a marketplace. 17 He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves.” —Mark 11.15-17 (NLT)
In the text, Jesus finds the temple of God being used for something other than what it was intended for. The money changers had changed the temple. The objective behind worship had been shifted and God decided He would clear out the abominable things that offended Him.
The Church today isn’t much different. In more ways than can be listed here, the objective sometimes gets lost and the purpose of worship gets shifted. The meanings of things get altered; the mission gets supplanted. The Church has lost its way when things like this happen. When worship services become entertaining and preachers resort to therapy, they lose their goal of bringing glory to God by fixating on the self. All of our worship and all of our service is to be for God’s benefit and glory. We serve others in order to serve Jesus. Too often the church offers the bread of charity without the bread of life.
Like the cat who used the structure of the cross to feed its appetite, the Church can make the same mistake of misusing the Cross to fulfill selfish desires. Jesus didn’t die on the cross so that we could do what we want or do whatever we like. He died on the cross in order to restore us unto God SO THAT His will would be done through our lives. When we receive the gift of Jesus’s sacrifice and use that gift to continue in sin, it is as if Jesus never died in the first place. The death of Jesus means the death of sin; and in the dying of sin comes the removal of sin’s grip on us. No longer do we live for ourselves, giving into desires and appetites the world and our fallen human nature offers. No, we live NOW for God’s glory and the doing of His will.
My prayer for you today is that you are using the cross as a reminder that God loves you, and that it reminds you of what He has done for you in order to save you from sin. May the cross never be a balance beam we use to tiptoe from one sin to the next, but instead may the cross be the bridge from sin and Hell to holiness and Heaven.
—Pastor Whit