The Cross and The Cruciform Life

One of the things that... we focused on when you had me share your podcast, which for me is foundational to everything is the cross shaped life.

The cross cruciformity is a word that is never far from my lips for a thousand and one reasons.

And I want to, I want to address some things that I think are really important because within popular, what I would call popular Christianity, It seems as though we've drifted from the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

And you know, you, you know, if, if, if we're at the beach, let's just say we're up at Daytona, right.

And, uh, we're, we're sitting at the beach and the kids are out in the water, but they don't pay attention to where we are at the beach and the ocean tide begins to move.

they can be way past where they entered the water and not realize how much the drift has taken them places and then when they look back at the beach they can't see us and it's not like they're it's not like they're consciously trying to avoid not seeing mom and dad or their parents it's that the the drift the waves the currents and I have said this many times lately, we don't realize the waters we're swimming in culturally and how they have affected not just the culture at large, but the church doesn't realize those cultural waters.

And those cultural waters have caused us to drift in ways that to me is concerning.

And so when we think about the cross, when we think about Christ's death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension, we tend to think in a timeline.

When we both know that this is an event in and of itself, that you can't parse it out as if this means this, this means this.

You have to look at it in totality.

Talk a little bit about why we have to see all of it, including Pentecost, as part of what in the ancient church would have been called Pascha.

Talk about that a little

bit.

Gosh, yeah, there's so much there.

It really is, in my opinion... like the question that needs to be answered, you know, questions like, what is the gospel? I know this sounds very elementary, maybe even Sunday school, but I personally, I think we need like a reintroduction to what we all learned in Sunday school.

What is the faith? Who is the Lord? How has He chosen to reveal Himself? Not how do we choose to explain Him, but how has He chosen to self-disclose Himself? And to remove, nobody can really remove it, but to assume to introduce Him in a way that He has chosen to not be introduced is pretty dangerous water.

You know, to redefine who he says he is is a very dangerous place to be.

And so we have to ask ourselves these questions.

How do we even come to these answers? What's my method? Should I pull my theology off of the bulk of podcasts that are released? Or should my theology be based on what I see occasionally on YouTube from my favorite preacher who might pull large crowds or write songs that a lot of people sing? How am I coming to these conclusions? And we have to go back to scripture, in my opinion, we have to look at the scriptures through the lens of the crucified and risen Lord, because that's the way he opens the scriptures to us.

You know, when you think of Bishop, I mean, not to sound complicated for our listeners, but when you think of like hermeneutics, How many hermeneutical perspectives have we brought to the table that the Lord himself does not employ? So we have to ask ourselves, if the risen Christ were to reveal himself to us, how would he do that? And the beautiful thing about the scriptures is that we have a front row seat to the way he would do that on multiple occasions.

In Luke 24 alone, he basically repeats his method twice between Emmaus and then doing it again in Jerusalem with those who are gathered.

Then from there, in my opinion, I'm going to go from there to the apostolic message, which as you know, is what is there in the creed? And again, I know this sounds very basic and very elementary, but I think when we stop repeating the creed, when we gather and replace that with maybe a creative video, On top of that, I should say, rarely in some contexts receive Holy Communion.

We begin to push out these ancient, glorious commands from the Lord that are meant to keep us from drifting.

And the reason I bring up the Eucharist is because, as you and I know, when people have an issue, for example, with the crucifixion, for example, rarely do they have a high value for the Eucharist.

The Eucharist, yeah, it safeguards the gospel in many ways in our individual expressions, or I should say our corporate expressions, because we declare the Lord's death every time we receive it.