Sermon Tone Analysis

Living Above the Line II

Two Sides of the Cross Part One *1 Cor.

15:3 *

   A very large majority of Christians only know about one side of the cross.

Much of modern preaching is nothing more than a steady diet of Christ died for the forgiveness of your sins.

Week after week preachers deliver this message and already saved Christians are perfectly happy hearing it again and again and again… The problem is that most audiences in churches on Sunday morning are already saved; their sins are already forgiven.

And if and when another message is offered it is typically having to do with some external compliance or keeping some commandment.

Much of my life I heard these messages and thought that there has got to be more.

This is not getting me any further along than I already am.

It was like a rehearsal Sunday after Sunday, but never any performance.

Lots of effort but no action, no growing, defiantly no growth spiritually.

Why?

Why is there no growth?

Because only one side of the cross is being preached; the local church is being feed a steady diet of only half of the cross.

The church is being sustained on only one half of Gods daily requirement of nutrition.

Now one side of the cross has a strong enough nutritional value to sustain life but that’s all.

It sustains life but does not provide growth.

And where there is no growth the body’s development becomes stunted.

So what we have is a body with an Identity problem as we saw last week, but also a problem in its development.

Let me take you back two thousand years this morning.

You are in Jerusalem for vacation.

It is Passover week and you can not believe you did not read up on the travel brochures and find out never to come during one of the local peoples religious festivals.

But all the talk is see the Holy Land.

You’re out shopping and you hear that there is to be a crucifixion that day.

Two local thieves and some man accused of being a political extremist, an enemy of Caesar.

….Your disappointed in the place, the food is bad, the climate is hot, public transportation stinks, so you say to your wife lets go to the crucifixion and see what that’s all about.

…That is what we see in the seen and temporary realm.

So you go out in the middle of the afternoon, and they nail the man in the middle to a cross and He dies.

Being Americans, nothing holds our attention for any length of time, so we immediately ask, What else is going on.

But then, a very strange thing happens.

A voice within says, this was no political extremist.

This is My Son.

I AM God the Father.

This is God the Son.

And He died for your sins.

If you will receive this, your sins will be forgiven.

We hear this and respond yes, I will receive that from Him. …

    All of us who have believed, had faith in, who have trusted into Christ, have had this experience.

It is not important that you know the date, or the time, *but that* you know it happened, so that you can say MY SINS HAVE BEEN FORGIVEN!

That is a revelation from the Holy Spirit.

Nothing from the seen and temporary realm, below the line, tells you that your sins are forgiven.

It is a truth from the unseen, eternal realm above the line.

This is the first side of the cross.

Christ died for you.

*1 Cor.

15:3 */For// I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins./

And this message is spread throughout the New Testament.

(Eph.

1:7-8, Col. 1:14, Col. 2:13, 1 John 2:2)

   And it is a thrilling thing to have your sins forgiven.

Just knowing that we are forgiven and now have a right standing with God is usually enough to carry even the weakest of Christian for at least a few months, as we marvel at God’s amazing grace toward us.

And that is all most preachers preach, a steady diet of Christ died for your sin’s, a constant diet of Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me and Are Washed in the Blood fully trusting His Grace this hour.

You know, week after week, are washed in the blood, are your garments clean, are they white as snow, and we scream yes, yes, yes, …hallelujah…

   But very soon, and in some case very, very soon, we encounter a problem.

Why, because there is only one lesson that the Holy Spirit can teach us from this event in Jerusalem of Christ dying for us: Your Sin’s Are Forgiven.

That is the basic truth this event contains.

But once we are forgiven, Jesus said *its time to start living*.

… and so we ask, how in the world do I live this thing out.

How on earth do I get my act together?

How am I going to keep from sinning?

And we discover the truth that we are forgiven, does not tell us one thing about how to live the life.

It only addresses the question, what do I do about my sins.”

It has nothing to do with living the life.

Forgiveness is the only inner revelation we have so far from the Holy Spirit.

We do not have any revelation on how to live the life.

So we take this one single revelation, that our sins are forgiven, and we try to stretch it out to somehow cover how to live the life.

And how do *we* do it?

*We* go out and try to live the Christian life, but *we* just can not quite pull it off.

Instead, we sin a little bit, or a lot, and then we get forgiven before we go to bed at night.

Or we get forgiven on Sunday at church.

Preachers take their congregation through this week after week after week.

They say, this is what we have done wrong; now let’s ask God to forgive us.

Then let’s do out best to make it until next Sunday.

The People say, Thank you preacher, you made me feel twice as bad as last week, and I’m twice as glad I’m forgiven this week, oops, now its 12:00 o’clock time to pass the potato salad, got to go.

And that’s the way it is for far too many, either at church, or in their individual lives.

And there is no way out, because we do not have anything from the Lord yet on how to live the life.

So we become preoccupied with whom?

With ourselves and on our sin’s.

We still see ourselves externally, based on our performance.

And this is like being on a roller caster, because our performance goes up and down and we never measure up.

So we are very unhappy, but we smile, a fake smile, sometimes.

We go to church and say IM fine when asked.

We think IM actually miserable, but it is Sunday, I can not say IM miserable in here because everyone is so happy.

I mean Happy happy.

So we say where’s the coffee?

I need more spirit.

More caffeine please, turn up the music.

See, after you get over the trill of being saved, you’re stuck on this treadmill.

And It is worse than being lost.

And by that, I don’t mean it is really worse than being lost, but I mean it feels worse than being lost.

… Why, because when you were lost you were comfortable being lost.

You do not have to do anything to be lost.

Have you ever seen a book on how to be lost?

Lost people are good at being lost.

…It is easy to walk on two feet, it gets difficult when you have to drop to your knees and spend the day crawling.

It is against our nature to crawl.

We are comfortable being lost because it once was our nature.

And it is easier being lost than being saved and trying to live off of only “IM forgiven,” trying with all your might to be a good Christian.

Because that is simply only one side of the cross; it is only half of the Gospel Jesus proclaimed.

And it will give you only a partial, fragmented view of salvation.

With only half the Gospel, we go back to the old way, into our independent self-effort, trying to make the rest of it happen on our own.