It's another Saturday afternoon at the alley where we distribute free chicken curry rice to the motley crowd who come every week. My eyes range over the people seated along the alleyway. Some are regular faces, some are new. No matter. Most are just waiting for the food. That seems to be the story of their lives - waiting, and more waiting...waiting for food, waiting for a job, waiting to strike lottery, waiting for something to happen, waiting to die even. My heart breaks. Even as I take the mike and start to talk about Jesus, again. In fact that's all I ever talk about there, with or without a mike in hand. I guess I could talk of other things like the weather or politics. Or I could just shut up and serve the food. I am sure many can't be bothered to listen to more Jesus stuff. Some are chattering amongst themselves, some just sit quietly, lost in their own world of cares, some roll cigarettes from old newspapers. It's hardly a captive audience.
But I plough on anyway, proclaiming the Name above every other name, quoting the Word of God, sharing my heart out to a people that only God can love and only He can save. It's an old old story, but that doesn't make it less true, for there is something about the Cross that compels me to return to it not just every Saturday at the streets, but everyday in my life.
The Cross stands so high that even now it speaks as a decisive point in historical time. Every time we write the year, we are counting it from that moment when an innocent Man was crucified on a hill-top. Thanks to Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ, the events that led to the Cross have been so vividly captured on film.
Inevitably the first thing that catches the human heart is the sheer 'suffering-ness' implicated in the Cross. More than anything else, the Cross stands as a reality of the ultimate lengths that God is willing to endure for the sake of redeeming mankind. It's not just a symbol of pain or death. It is. But beyond the suffering, there is something more about the Cross, that I have learnt as I plod along on this journey called life...I have found at the Cross....
- the purest love - Hard is the heart that will not respond to this kind of sacrificial love - unsought for, undeserved but given anyway. Over the years, the awesomeness of that truth has never failed to humble me. How could Jesus love me this much?
- the utmost justice - No one could ever complain that God isn't just. A righteous God demands holiness; sin demands penalty, the Cross provides satisfaction.
- the supreme mercy - when it should have been me hanging up there, when it should have been me cast into hell, when it should have been me....God had mercy on me, a sinner.
- the most significant truth - of who I am, why I am alive and how I am to live this earthly life.
- the complete victory - Death was killed at the Cross; I have 'crossed' over from death into life, from old into new, from darkness into light everlasting.
- the richest promise - of eternity, a resurrection beyond the wildest imagination, an inheritance beyond compare.
A writer once said, the Cross provokes and demands an answer from each one of us, once we are faced with it. And there are only 2 answers - Yes/No. There can't be any fence-sitters. God didn't sit on a fence, deciding whether or not to go to the Cross for us. Without wavering, He went all the way. What would it take for us to say Yes? Come to think of it, why should anyone ever want to say No?
What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?.. Romans 8:31
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us...Romans 8:37
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