Heart Tracks - No Escape

"How shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?" Hebrews 2:3....."At Calvary, the naked truth is staring down at us, challenging us to drop the pose and own the truth." Roy Hession..."At the cross we see who we are, and we are humbled. We see the ugliness of our sin and we are speechless. We know we can make no claim of our own righteousness before God. But Jesus is our claim. We bow before Him. We know He's there for us." Chris Tiegreen

I'm going to ask a question that cannot ultimately be avoided; to what degree are you and I ignoring the infinitely great salvation offered us in Jesus Christ? Here's a second question; how can we think we will ever escape the consequence of the ignoring?

To truly come to Christ means that there will be no escaping the cross. He brings us on a collision course with it. We can try to bypass it, sneak around it, deny it is even there, but to be His, really His, means we will come to it, and what we do there sets not only the course of our lives here, but into eternity as well. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, this truth has been missing in much of the message of the western church. We offer Jesus, His blessings, His wonderful plans for us, and all the benefits that come in the "Jesus package." We don't make a lot of mention of His cross, not our carrying of it, and certainly not our dying upon it.

Many churches don't even display a cross anymore. "Experts" have told them that the unchurched find it offensive. It is offensive. The cross of Christ offends every aspect of our flesh. It exposes our sin and our complete inability to save ourselves or to have any degree of our own righteousness. As Hession says, it brings us face to face with the reality that we can't maintain our "pose" any longer. We can't escape the truth; we are lost, and our only hope of salvation, of life, healing, wholeness, comes by way of His cross. Our trust in all and anything outside of Him is shattered at the cross. Only He remains, and He bids us to come and die so that we might truly and finally live. The old rugged cross is harsh and rough. So too is the truth about ourselves, our condition and our need that we find there as well. Many have no qualms about coming to Gentle Jesus, the Savior who walks along doing good......especially to us. Coming to the Christ of the cross can be, is, another matter altogether. Many have come to Him, but not in eyes wide open understanding of their condition and need. They come as they are, and stay as they are. The piercing light of the cross has not laid bare their sin and their need. Jesus is an add-on to their life. He is not Life itself. Only at the cross do we really see the Light. Only at the cross is the burden of our sin rolled away. We ignore that to our own eternal destruction.

Yet it is not just the lost who cannot escape the consequences of ignoring this great salvation. Countless of His people have come to His cross, have seen His Light, have had their sins forgiven, yet they have never gone on to the fullness of His resurrection life that is offered beyond the cross and the grave. The enemy of their soul has deceived them into thinking that such life is not possible this side of heaven. Healing, wholeness, abundance, freedom, these things can never be realized here. So he holds them captive with his lies. They have not so much ignored His great salvation as they have failed to believe in it. So despair, discouragement, weariness, exhaustion, is their lot. Though total victory was won at Calvary, the lies of the enemy keep them defeated. All of this is the consequence of ignoring, not believing in such a great salvation.

So again, to what degree are you and I ignoring this salvation? It is to that degree that we won't escape the consequences of doing so. There is no escape but one; the cross. Run to it. Cling to it. Die upon it, and then live through it. The cross still leads to the crown. Have you been led to the cross?

Blessings,
Pastor O