Day 6 – Issue 11

Be Still Know

Romans 8:1 NLT

“So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.”

I was recently speaking at the Pioneer Theology Forum and found myself inviting my audience to reflect upon the cross of Christ in two forms. Initially, I asked them to think about the empty cross that speaks of the resurrection and ascension. It is a picture of God’s triumph over the fracture of sin and the restoration of the relationship between divinity and humanity, so mysteriously combined in the person of Jesus.

We thought about the freedom and hope that arises from the reality that the barrier between God and creation has been removed: just as Jesus was incarnate and fleshed out the character God with its message of forever love, so we have been invited to live in the joy and reality of free and ready access to our Lord and God.

In my days at the Evangelical Alliance, I was fortunate to work on the international portfolio at the time the Berlin Wall came down. I was glad to meet with families who had not met each other for several decades while the Iron Curtain remained. I was glad to meet with families that had been reunited. Knowledge of each other was replaced with actual physical reunion.

Knowledge of each other was replaced with actual physical reunion. And so it is with God, who completes the restoration of relationship with the creation generally and with humanity specifically through the cross, the resurrection and the ascension.

I need to remind myself that I am living in a situation that generation upon generation before Jesus could only dream, imagine and pray for. God was distant and unknowable. Even God’s name remained unspoken; that’s how distant humanity was from God. Then God chose to come and live among us, and invited us to live with him every moment of every day.

QUESTION: Consider the empty cross and all the hopes and fears that have been addressed as a result.

PRAYER: Thank you, Jesus, that you have torn down the barrier separating us from God, and made a way for me to be reunited with our heavenly Father. 

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright C 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc, Wheaton, Illinois 60189 USA. All rights reserved.