The Cross is the Place — E.A. Johnston

The Missing Centrality of the Cross

There is a missing element in most preaching today, and its absence is the reason why so few are being saved today. Listen to your popular preachers and mega church pastors, and you will hear predominantly a message on God's love.

The secondary message is what God can do for you to improve your life. That's the message that is widely accepted at this hour, and the main reason people are crawling over each other's backs to get into their crowded sanctuary.

It's a man-centered message on how to make your life better for you and your family. Self-help books sell by the thousands, and self-help sermons are ended with applause. But what is the missing element in our pulpits today?

The Apostle Paul answers this question in 1st Corinthians 118, which states,. For the preaching of the cross is to them foolishness, but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. The missing element in our message today, friends, is a blood-stained Savior on a bloody cross.

We've gotten out our mop buckets and have cleaned up all the blood and gore around Calvary. We've made the cross such a pristine place you can sit and have your lunch there. I submit to you, friends, that is the main reason the Christ to the cross is no longer preached, is because we in the church today have eliminated the need of repentance as a necessity to salvation.

Sin, Hell, and the Full Counsel of God

If you preach up man's duty of repentance, then you have to preach on sin, and if you preach on sin, then you have to warn man to flee from a burning hell, and if you preach the doctrine of hell, then you must preach the doctrine of God's punishment for sin.

Now you've opened a can of worms in your church, angered your good deacons, and run off your largest givers, who are just there for their own power and self-importance. But until our pulpits return to a God-centered gospel message of the full counsel of God, which holds up the great doctrines of ruin, redemption, repentance, and regeneration, then we will continue to grow our churches with the unconverted and stand guilty at the judgment with their blood on our hands.

In the book of Isaiah, in chapter 53, we see the vivid portrait of Christ on the cross. In verses 3 through 6, we read, He is despised and rejected of man, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him.

He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions.

He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. We, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

The Cross as the Place of Saving Power

Listen, friends. Jesus came into this world doing good, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, feeding the hungry. Yet what happened? Men cried away with him and nailed him to a cross.

The cross is the place where men sought to get rid of him. Yet the cross is the place, by his death, where his saving power flows out to all who come in repentance, confessing they are sinners, and own him as their Savior and Lord.

Sin as Rebellion Against God’s Way

Now, there are several aspects from this striking passage of the Word of God, which I would like to bring before you. Number one. Sin is going our way when we know it isn't God's way. Go back to Eden and the Fall of Man, and you will find a couple who chose their own way over God's way, and the result was we entered the world in ruin.

We have a ruined nature and a bent toward sin. My Bible says this about man, that he drinks iniquity like water, and our righteousness is just filthy rags in the sight of God, so we stand under condemnation for sin.

Redemption Through Christ’s Substitution

Number two. Our redemption in Christ Jesus, the sinless sinner who became sin for us, thus taking the wrath of God upon him, and fulfilling the law, becoming a curse by becoming our sin substitute. I know I am a sinner, and I need a substitute for sin in the person of Jesus Christ, and so do you, friend.

Repentance, Faith, and the Judgment of Sin

So do you. Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost. Have you ever been lost? Have you ever been awakened to your lost condition and your need of a Savior from sin? Number three. Repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ.

Jesus declared, unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish. God commands all men everywhere to repent. If you have merely believed in the only-believed Gospel without ever acknowledging that you are a guilty sinner who deserves hell for breaking God's holy law through sin, and you've never exercised true gospel repentance, then you will be kept out of heaven, because God will never allow any guilty rebels into his holy heaven.

God is holy. He must punish sin. The sentencing of the law must be carried out against all transgressors of the law. God requires perfection to get into his holy heaven, and no man is perfect, but all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

The strictness and severity of the law will be laid upon your life, friend, and if you stand there in your own merits, you will fail that test. You must stand in the merits of another, the Lord Jesus Christ.

You must be washed in his blood. Christ was crucified on an ignoble tree. He was nailed to a scandalous cross for the sins of man. Repent of your sins and come to the Christ, the Savior, from sin's penalty.

The New Birth and Regeneration

Number four. You must be born again. Jesus told Nicodemus, Accept a man, be born again. He cannot see the kingdom of God. This speaks of the doctrine of Regeneration, which is a work of grace upon the heart, whereby God takes the heart of stone and makes it a heart of flesh, where the Holy Spirit implants a new disposition in you for holiness.

Most church members today came into church membership by decisionism. You decided to believe a text and made yourself a Christian. That's why you have no taste for things of eternity and no power over sin.

You must be born again. A believer is a sinner who has been washed in the blood and born from above, and it is God who gives saving faith. We've taken salvation out of the hands of God today and placed it in the hands of man.

The Call to Respond to Christ

Well, there you have it. That's the gospel of the Son of God in a nutshell. Now, what will you do with Jesus? Let us pray.