Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Over fifteen hundred years ago, on Good Friday, Ambrose the Bishop of Milan ascended to his pulpit in the Cathedral of Milan and said to his congregation, "I find it impossible to speak to you today.

The events of Good Friday are too great for human words."

Centuries later the great English poet John Milton sat down to write a poem on the cross and the atonement.

After 8 introductory lines he stopped, and he wrote this note which is included in his collected works: "This subject the author finding to be above the years when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

Here was a great preacher and a great poet who could not finish their works on the cross.

Fortunately, for us and all mankind, sermons and poems and the works of men on the cross are not a necessity.

What was a necessity was for Jesus to finish His work on the cross.

Infinite and eternal loss would be ours if Jesus had stopped short of the cross.

No words were ever more essential than the words Jesus spoke from the cross when He said, "It is finished."

The cross is the greatest of all necessities.

The worst that can happen if we are deprived of all other necessities is death, but because of the cross we still have eternal life.

But deprive us of the cross and all is lost.

The cross is no luxury.

It is the greatest of necessities.

It you buy a cross at the jewelry counter, you pay a luxury tax on it.

Such a cross is not The Cross.

Crosses you can buy are luxuries, and they are irrelevant to life, death, sin, and salvation.

The symbol of the cross often has no relationship to the cross of Christ.

Some years ago controversy broke out in Russia over the new fashion of wearing a cross on a chain around the neck.

Provada said that an investigation discovered that the fashion had been started by two 20 year old girls who were clerks in a store in Moscow.

Neither was a religious believer, and both were members of the Young Communist League.

They just found that people were eager to follow a fad, and that there was profit in it.

The cross was nothing to them but a luxury completely unrelated to the necessary cross of Christ.

In the little village of Chabham near London and accountant erected a 270 dollar cross in the local pet cemetery for his Great Dane.

Here again the cross was totally a luxury, and of no necessity.

A man asked another why his church had a cross on it, and he replied, "Well, I don't know of a better way to decorate the top of a church.

Do you?"

When it costs so little to be a Christian there is a tendency to think of the cross only as a luxury and a ornament.

People let the necessity of it fade from their minds, and they do not realize that they could better do without air and food than without the cross.

Whoever heard of listing the necessities of life and putting the cross at the top of the list?

Yet, that is where it belongs.

Without the cross there is no salvation, and without salvation life is worse than meaningless.

There would be no hope, but only the guarantee that no matter how bad things are, they will be worse.

We would have to face a holy God with nothing but the filthy rags of our own righteousness, and be cast into eternal darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Unfinished sermons and unfinished poems on the cross need not disturb us, but we desperately need a finished plan of salvation.

We need an atonement for our sin, and so we need the cross.

That is why it is such a joy to see Jesus committing Himself to finishing His work on the cross.

He tells us in this passage that the cross is a necessity for 3 reasons, each of which is vital to our salvation.

We want to look at these reasons.

First of all the cross is a necessity for-

I. THE MAGNIFYING OF THE FATHER.

The work of Christ was to glorify the Father, and there was no way to do this but by means of the cross.

No one wants to die, however, and no one wants to die at 33, and still less does anyone want to die at 33 on a cross.

Jesus was no exception.

If there was any way to accomplish God's will and save man without the cross, Jesus wanted to take it.

John does not tell us of Jesus in Gethsemane where He prayed, "If it be possible let this cup pass from me." John, however, shows us that the agony and struggle of Gethsemane was not just momentary, but that Jesus had wrestled with this issue for days as He approached the cross.

Verse 27 says that Jesus was troubled, and the thought entered His mind of escaping the cross.

Jesus was not forced to go to the cross.

It was His free and voluntary decision.

He was free to ask God to save Him at any time.

Even on the cross 12 legions of angels were prepared to rescue Him if He requested it.

If Jesus had no alternative but to go to the cross He was not free.

But He did have an alternative, and He could have avoided the cross.

He could have prayed for His Father to save Him from that hour, and His prayer would have been heard.

We tend to think that the cross was automatic, and that Jesus was carried by a stream of fate to the cross.

This is not so.

The cross was not a necessity in the sense that it could not be avoided, but rather in the sense that there was no other way for God to triumph over sin and Satan, and thereby be glorified.

It was not easy for Jesus to go to the cross, and His soul was deeply troubled.

He held the destiny of every human being in His decision.

His Father was counting on Him, but He was repulsed by the cross and the bearing of the sin of the world.

Let no one say it is a sign of a lack of faith to be troubled in a crisis.

Jesus knew of the fruit of the cross, and yet He could not avoid being troubled.

No one ever faced such a decision before.

He could be the saved or the Savior.

He could have avoided the cross and been the only man to be saved, or He could go to the cross and be the Savior of all men.

Jesus had to give up His salvation or ours.

Our salvation depended upon Him not being saved from the cross.

It is thrilling, therefore, to read verse 28 where Jesus yields to the Father's will and says, "Father, glorify thy name."

And then for the third time in the life of Christ God speaks from heaven and says that He has glorified it and will glorify it again.

God had already glorified His name in the miracles and works of Jesus, and in His victory over Satan in temptation.

He did it also in the casting out of demons, and now He is about to glorify it again in the victory of the cross.

God only spoke three times directly in the life of Christ.

It was at His baptism, which symbolized His humanity and death; then at His transfiguration symbolic of His deity and resurrection, and now here as He came to the point where death and resurrection are no longer to be in realm of the symbolic, but are to become historical facts.

No event in history could match the cross in bringing glory to God.

John Milton said, "The cross is the key that unlocks the gate of glory."

The heavens still declare the glory of God as they did to the Old Testament saints, but the cross speaks louder than the heavens.

The heavens in all their wonder glorify God by telling us of His power, wisdom, and love of order and beauty, but only the cross tells of us His love for us as sinners.

The cross was as necessary as God's love.

Let us never get confused and think that the cross is a basis for God's love.

God does not love us because Jesus died for us, but Jesus died for us because God loves us.

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

The cross did not purchase God's love, but it was an expression of His love.

Had God not loved us before the cross there would never have been a cross.

'Twas not to make Jehovah's love toward His people flame,

That Jesus from the throne above a suffering man became.

'Twas not the death which He endured nor all the pangs he bore,

That God's eternal love procured for God was love before.

Author Unknown.

The cross magnified the Father and glorified Him in revealing His great love for man.

A Mohammedan tradition pictures God at creation taking a piece of clay from which He intended to create man.

He broke it in two and tossed one piece upward and said, "These to heaven and I care not."

Then throwing the other piece downward He added, "These to hell, and I care not."

Such is not the God of Scripture, for the cross glorifies God and exalts Him as a God who cares for all men.

He had provided a way to heaven for all men.

To glory in the cross with the Apostle Paul is to glorify God and magnify His love, for the glory of God is the glory of the cross.

Studdert-Kennedy wrote,

God, the God I love and worship, reigns in sorrow on the Tree,

Broken, bleeding, but unconquered, very God of God to me.

All that showy pomp of splendor, all that sheen of angel wings,