Today is the much ballyhooed “Super Bowl” game.  I am sure those of you with Baylor connections are proud that Fred Miller (former Baylor Bear) is playing for the Chicago Bears and another Baylor Bear, Justin Snow, is on the Indianapolis Colts team.

Another item of interest is that both coaches are African-American, a first for the Super Bowl.  The Christian community is probably well aware that both coaches are devout, committed Christians!

Black coaches at the pinnacle of the football world . . . both unashamed, non-cussing, Bible-reading, praying, church-going disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ?

What is the NFL coming to?

Kenny Cheshier read the text a few minutes ago from First Corinthians.  Just as the Super Bowl is being held in Miami, Florida, a port city, Paul was writing to Corinth, another great port city.  He had visited that city after one of his less successful witnessing ventures in Athens.  He reminded the Corinthians of his frame of mind when he had come to see them the first time.

Paul knew what a wicked, worldly city Corinth was.  Much like our great Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.  Every week there are murders, kidnappings, rapes, break-ins, car-jackings, and rampant exchanging of drugs and money.  Add to the street crimes the blatant, insidious white collar theft and intrigue, and you have blaring headlines that scream the dangers of big city life. 

It must be a stench in God’s nostrils!

Paul had tried to match wits with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill without much success.  He was determined to come to Corinth and know nothing “except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”  (v.2).

The cross of Jesus Christ is the central point of the gospel story.  It is the most dramatic, crucial, pivotal, world-changing event of all time and history!

ne of Baptists’ favorite hymns is “The Old Rugged Cross.”  In the late Fifties, I was a student at Oklahoma University.  My roommate was a music major.  He told me one day that the head of the OU Music department came to his class and related to them that he had just heard on the radio that the favorite hymn of all time, according to a new poll, was “The Old Rugged Cross.”  He then confessed to the class that he had never heard it!  He asked these Bible-belt kids to sing it to him, and they did!  Wow!  Imagine!

I want to give three good reasons why the cross is everything Paul said it was.

I.  Cross One: It’s the Heart of the God Story!

n Old English, God’s-story is “God’s spel,” the word that through much use became our “Gospel!”  At the very heart of the gospel is the cross! 

The cross was not an afterthought of the Lord.  Rather, the Bible tells us that “from the foundation of the world” (from the very beginning!), Jesus was headed to the cross because of the inevitable fall of humanity into sin.  God, who knows the end from the beginning, saw the need for the cross before Creation!

Revelation 13.8 speaks of  “. . . the lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.”

I Peter 1.19-20 proclaims, “ . . . with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.  He was chosen before the creation of the world.”

The cross of Christ reveals both the love and justice of God.  In this kind of world, a god with no cross in his story is no god at all!  Therefore, since the Koran of Islam has no cross in it, “Allah” is no god!

Elijah proved on Mt. Carmel that Baal was no god.  The prophets of Baal strove all day to get Baal to do something.  They were rewarded with a deafening silence.

Elijah, late in the afternoon, moved to an old, abandoned Israelite altar.  He placed together twelve stones, one for each of the Twelve Tribes.  He stacked the wood, dug a trench around it, placed the bull on the top, and poured water over the whole thing until it ran down and filled the trenches.

 He bowed his head and prayed a simple, quiet prayer.  The fire from Yahweh’s heaven fell like a lightning bolt!  It sucked up the sacrifice, licked up the water, and consumed even the stones! 

There was nothing left but a black, scorched spot and a small plume of smoke!

The cross tells us that God loves us!  He loves the whole world.  He loves you, and He loves me.  Wonder of wonders, God is love!

We instinctively love the cross, not just the hymn about it.  We love to wear the cross around our throats and on bracelets.  We pin it to our lapels and stick it on our ties.  We put it prominently on the steeples of our churches.  We hang it from the baptistries.  And, what must seem the final indignity, we place the cross, an ugly symbol of ancient execution, over the graves of our loved ones!

Unless!  Unless the cross is the central focus of the greatest event that ever occurred in human and divine history!  Paul tells us that it is!

We sing “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” but we know that wearing the cross is not the same thing as bearing the cross.  Of course, we must bear the cross also.  Jesus told us that.   

Dr. Carlyle Marney, in his book, Structures of Prejudice, said that, for the modern disciple of Jesus Christ, bearing the cross is maintaining the tension between the ideal world we long to have and the realities of the world that result from our sin.  Where the real and the ideal clash, in that painful twisting and wrenching, there is the cross we must bear.

The follower of Jesus who truly wants to help bring in the Kingdom of God will know inevitably know what the cross on his back feels like! 

II.  Cross Two: It was the driving force of the Apostle Paul

Paul resolved to make the cross the central subject in his teaching and preaching at Corinth.  No cleverness.  No human wisdom or philosophical fireworks.  No oratorical finessing.  No high blown rhetoric or posturing.

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”  (Gal. 6.14)

Paul didn’t have to explain the cross as a means of execution.  Thousands of people were executed each year on crosses in that brutal world.  Nowhere in the Bible is a crucifixion described or explained.  Everyone listening to Paul knew what a crucifixion looked like.

A person would be splayed on cross beams.  Long spikes were driven through the wrist and instep of the hands and feet.  Without food or water, the victims would languish in unspeakable pain for days before death would mercifully come.  Sometimes a vulture would land on the cross beam to pick at their eyes! 

Weakened by the brutal beating he took at the hands of Pilate, Jesus died quickly, to the great surprise of his enemies.  Within only a few hours, he cried out his last words: “It is finished!  Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!”

Normally, the soldiers in charge of an execution would break the legs of the victims to render them unable to push up and gain a breath.  Death was then swift.  When they saw that Jesus was already dead, they simply pushed a spear under his ribs to “make sure.” 

Paul didn’t have to describe the scene of a cross.  Everyone in his audience knew!  That’s what made his statement so powerful and arresting.  That he would boast only in the execution of Jesus of Nazareth.  That comment both shocked them and piqued their curiosity.

Paul had tried a different approach in Athens.  He had held his own pretty well with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill.  But whatever admiration he derived from these arrogant pagans he lost in effectiveness in presenting Christ as the central focus of the human race.

Paul knew that even when the gospel is preached without the adornment of famous quotations and philosophical brilliance, there still must be the accompanying empowerment of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus still has to underscore the gospel message with his convicting power.  Paul had learned, just as modern evangelists do that without the Holy Spirit, our words fall flat to earth, and no heart is changed.

Even Billy Graham says that he is just “a farmer from North Carolina sowing the seed,” that without the prayers of thousands of supporters and the power of the Holy Spirit, he would see little success in his ministry.

I have experienced it for forty years.  When I preach on the cross, there is a different atmosphere in the room.  People give rapt attention to the story of how and why Jesus died.  Paul, post-Athens, had learned that truth and never lost track of it again.  The cross was what motivated Paul to put his life on the line every day for Jesus.  He took the message of the cross to the ends of the earth!

III.  Cross Three:  It’s the central focus of Christian preaching.

Last week Pastor Glen gave us some good words about reconciliation.  What God was doing with the cross and his Son was effecting reconciliation.

In the mid-80s, we were privileged to have Dr. Ted Gill from Princeton University speak at Cliff Temple during Holy Week.  He preached a sermon on reconciliation that I will never forget.

Dr. Gill pointed out that the Bible begins with the story of “a naked couple in a garden.”  But, before long, we realize that the story is really about us!  After the Fall into sin, God began his work of reconciliation.  That’s what the whole Bible is ultimately about.

Dr. Gill said that two big Biblical concepts, forgiveness and eternal life, draw their significance from reconciliation.  We talk more about the former than we do the latter.  However, forgiveness is crucial because it makes reconciliation possible and eternal life is significant because it keeps alive what God has reconciled!

Without the cross, there can be neither forgiveness, reconciliation, or eternal life.  Paul knew that and made the cross the central focus of his preaching.  No preaching is legitimate without the matrix of the cross event!

In the cross both the love and justice of God come together.  Isaiah 53.6, a verse I memorized with I was a seven year old Royal Ambassador, says, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  It wasn’t that God had no choice; He chose this plan “from the foundation of the world.” 

And, God did NOT abandon his Son as he hung on the cross!  When Jesus said, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  He was quoting Psalm 22.  It wasn’t a “cry of dereliction;” it was a cry of identification and affirmation!

As George Buttrick described it to us at seminary: When Jesus was nailed to the cross, the nails went through the tender flesh of the Son of God and into the splintery beams . . . and through that knotty wood into the “shadowy hands of God where they were melted in light and fire!”

He was there all right!

Until you stand at the foot of the cross in your imagination and see yourself hanging there, and realize that you should be hanging there, only then can you appreciate the sacrifice Christ made and the escape you were offered!

The writer Robert Fulghum, in his first book, tells the story of one afternoon when he was working in his second-story study at home.  It was the fall of the year, and a huge pile of leaves had been amassed in his back yard.  Several neighborhood kids were playing “Hide and Seek.”

He watched in amusement as they chose someone to be “it.”  He shut his eyes and began to count to one hundred.  The kids scattered like autumn leaves themselves!  One little red-haired kid crawled into the big leaf pile!

After the long count, “it” began scouring the area for hidden playmates.  One by one, he either found them, or they scurried “home free!”  That is, except the kid under the leaves.

As darkness descended, house lights came on, and female voices called the children home for supper.  Still the boy had not emerged from the leaves.  Robert began to worry about him.  Could he not hear a mother’s call?  Under the cover of dry leaves, was he oblivious to the twilight that was deepening into night time?

Finally, all the children were gone home.  Echoes ceased as their “See ya tomorrow!” to each other faded away.  Where was that kid?

Fulghum said he wanted to throw open his window and yell, “Hey, kid!  GET FOUND!  It’s getting late!”

I want to say that to you.  Get found!  It’s getting very late!

Think of the last scene in the movie, “The Poseidon Adventure.”  The survivors of that awful ordeal are scrambling out the bottom of the great ocean liner which is now upsidedown in the waves.  Rescue boats are poised to grab them and haul them to safety.  That’s how we should think of ourselves, snatched from the angry fangs of death and hell.

If you did not see that movie, try visualizing the end of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” when Scrooge realizes that the midnight visitors were only a dreamed warning, and he has a chance to make things right and learn how to live with Christmas joy all year long. 

He dances around the room in his white night shirt and cap.  He throws open the window and tells a boy to go see if the big turkey is still for sale at the butcher’s shop. 

We should feel like that!  We are survivors!  We haven’t been double-crossed by the devil.  We’ve been triple-crossed by God!

GET FOUND, KID!