Boasting in the cross

We are people of the cross.

The cross is the source of our spiritual life.  It is the reason for our hope.  It is the foundation of our victorious living.  Paul says it this way:

“But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal. 6:14; NASB)

So we love the cross, we embrace the cross, we boast about the cross.  This boasting is not in the spirit of a braggadocio, but it means a proud and exulting joy — a revealing of God’s glory and our delight in Him.

Now to say that we delight in the cross does not mean that we find great satisfaction in the physical aspects of the cross, for in fact it was a horrible place, as Joy Davidman (C. S. Lewis’ wife) well noted:  “Our generation has never seen a man crucified except in sugary religious art; but it was not a sweet sight, and few of us would dare to have a real picture of a crucifixion on our bedroom walls.  A crucified slave beside the Roman road screamed until his voice died and then hung, a filthy, festering clot of flies, sometimes for days — a living man whose hands and feet were swollen masses of gangrenous meat.  That is what our Lord took upon himself…”

So then, what is it to be a person of the cross, to delight in and embrace and love the cross?

It means to delight in the One who died, and rejoice in what He accomplished for us, bragging and boasting not in our own puny and insignificant accomplishments, but in the single and great accomplishment in our lives — the crucifixion and death of Christ.

Paul said it this way:  We boast in Christ because through Christ the world no longer has any hold over the believer.  No longer does sin control us.  No longer does the world system, under the domination of the evil one, guide and direct our thoughts and passions.

Our delight and joy and the great revealing glory of our lives is that at the cross Christ made it possible for us to respond to him in obedience and refuse the temptations of the flesh and to “disobey” the calls of the world.

Davidman summarized this when she concluded her thoughts by writing, “That is what our Lord took upon himself, ‘that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them, who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.'”

We glory and boast in the cross, because it is — like Christ — everything to us.