Daily Affirmations - Day 2 - What Shall I Cry? - Christ and His Cross

Day 2: Christ and His cross

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

I came to you... not... with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power (1 Corinthians 2:1-5).

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[Paul] had once been a great opposer of Christ and His cross, and had shown his opposition by furious persecutions. When he became a disciple of this same Jesus, whom he had persecuted, he [became] a very ardent one, and [brought] all his faculties to bear upon the preaching of Christ crucified. His conversion was so marked, so complete, so thorough, that [he was] as energetic for the truth as once he had been violent against it.

Paul... determined to know nothing else but his crucified Lord. Yet, do not think that the apostle was a man easily absorbed in one thought. He was, above the most of men, a reasoner, calm, judicious, candid, and prudent... [Still,] … he determined... only to know Jesus Christ, and Him crucified...

What a task this must have been for Paul! He was not like some of us, who are neither familiar with philosophy, nor capable of oratory. He was so great a master of both... He kept to the doctrine of the cross, believing that... therein [was] an instrument which would effectually accomplish his one [goal] with all classes of men.

Paul desired... to arouse sinners to a sense of sin, and what has ever accomplished this so perfectly as the doctrine that sin was laid upon Christ and caused his death? The sinner, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, sees at once that sin is not a trifle, that it is not to be forgiven without an atonement, but must be followed by penalty, borne by some one or other.

When the guilty one has seen the Son of God bleeding to death in pangs unutterable in consequence of sin, he has learned that sin is an enormous and crushing burden. If even the Son of God cries out beneath it, if his death agony rends the heavens and shakes the earth, what an awful evil sin must be...

 But Paul wanted also to awaken... that humble hope which is the great instrument of leading men to Jesus... Christ crucified is the one ray of light that can penetrate the thick darkness of despair, and make a penitent heart hope for pardon from the righteous Judge.

Need a sinner ever doubt when he has once seen Jesus crucified? When he understands that there is pardon for every transgression through the bleeding wounds of Jesus, is not the best form of hope at once kindled in his bosom, and is he not led to say “I will arise and go unto my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned”?

~ C.H. Spurgeon, The Man of One Subject

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