cross

The Suffering Servant

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“The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong,
on him, on him” (Isaiah 53:2-6, The Message).

As the old preacher used to say, that’s my Jesus! He didn’t wink at my sin or tell me not to worry about it. He Himself bore my sin on His body on the cross. He took the punishment that I deserved for my sins. He as an infinite being suffered infinitely and died in my place.

There have been lots of renderings and pictures of what we think Jesus looked like. According to Isaiah 53, He was nothing much to look at. He wasn’t anything that would catch people’s eye and hold their attention. The Bible says that there was “nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance” (Isaiah, 53:2, NLT). Basically, He looked like a lot of other 30something year old Middle Eastern men in the 1st century.

But He’s the only one who lived a sinless life, perfectly keeping the law of God. He’s the only one who willingly took up a cross and laid down His life for others. He’s the only one who took peoples’ sins on His own body and paid their penalty. And He’s the only one who walked out of an empty tomb after three days.

That means He’s the only one worthy of worship. He’s the only one worth singing about, talking about, praying to, and praising. And if I had been the only one, I still believe He would have gone through it all even for me. That’s a kind of love that’s worth singing about and celebrating and living out. That’s my Jesus!

Palm Sunday 2026

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Something I read today has stuck with me all day. Today we celebrate Palm Sunday, when the crowds were yelling and singing as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey in clear fulfillment of an Old Testament Messianic prophecy. Yet those were the same ones who were weeping over His death just a few days later.

I wonder what they were expecting. Were they hoping that Jesus would somehow lead an overthrow of Rome and restore independence to Israel? Were they hoping He would set Himself up as a King over Israel?

He didn’t have an army that they could see. He never once spoke about raising up an army. He never told them they needed to rebel against Roman rule. In fact, He’s the one who told them to pay their raxes because the coins which bore Ceasar’s likeness belonged to Caesar.

I wonder how many understood that the kingdom Jesus kept talking about was not one of this world. It wasn’t defined by boundaries or geography. It was God’s active rule in the hearts of all who would believe in His name and have eternal life and be indwelled by His Holy Spirit. It was the Church that would explode in numbers after He ascended back into heaven.

But most of them didn’t get it. Jesus even said they wouldn’t. Their hardness of heart and spiritual blindness kept them from seeing what was right in front of them. Only a few understood, and even they didn’t fully realize what was happening until after Jesus rose from the dead. Even the twelve were most likely expecting what the crowds were expecting.

No one could have foreseen a suffering Messiah. No one predicted that instead of leading a rebellion against Rome, He would lay down His life for them and His own people and the whole world. No one was prepared for Him to die, especially not on a cross reserved for the worst of criminals in a manner that was the worst kind of torture the human mind could conceive.

But to those who believed, He gave the right to become sons and daughters of the living God.

On the Night Before Palm Sunday

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It’s hard to believe that tomorrow is Palm Sunday, which means a week from tomorrow is Easter Sunday. That will be when people who would normally not go to church will show up feeling uncomfortable and not knowing when to sit, stand, or kneel. Many of them will know very little about why we’re celebrating Easter again this year because mostly what they know is rabbits and candy and hunting for plastic eggs.

Although Christmas is my favorite, Easter is not far behind. It represents why Christmas has meaning. If Jesus died on the cross and remained buried in that tomb, then His birth has no meaning and His life has no value. Anything He said or did would in turn be worthless.

But because there is an empty tomb and a risen Lord, we celebrate. We come together to remember that Jesus laid down His life for us to make our salvation possible. He then rose again to make that salvation secure. We can trust that nothing can separate us from the love of a Savior whom the grave could not hold and death could not defeat.

I do love everything about Easter. I love how people still get dressed up in their best Sunday outfits. I love that little kids still get excited about Easter baskets filled with candy and other goodness as well as hunting for those plastic eggs filled with more candy and sometimes money. I love seeing the world explode in pastel colors as the earth comes back to life after having lain dormant for so long during the winter months.

Palm Sunday represents the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem when the people lauded Him with hosannas. Most of them were thinking He was about to instigate an overthrow of Roman rule and a return of kingship to Israel. They wanted a king just like all the other nations, just like another Saul who looked good and said all the right things.

But a few knew that Jesus’ kingdom was not of this world. They knew that His kingdom wasn’t just for Jews. His kingdom was for anyone who would put their faith in this Messiah. This road that led to a kingdom wasn’t covered with palm branches and hosannas laid down by the multitudes but instead lead to a hill with Him carrying a cross while multitudes jeered at Him and called for His execution. This road would lead to suffering and death, but we know that soon that crown of thorns He bore on the cross would soon be exchanged for a throne that He would never relinquish.

Easter Sunday is a reminder that the worst part isn’t the end. As one writer puts it, your story never ends with ashes. The resurrection means that no one is ever too far gone or too lost to save. It’s never too late to be who God made you to be or to live out His purposes for you.

May our hosannas ring out just as loudly as they did 2000 years ago, but may we also look to the cross and the tomb where Jesus lay for three days and remember that it was for us that He lived and died. But may we never lose sight of that Sunday when He rose again. May our song from now on always be an Easter song because we are an Easter people with a risen Lord!

Staying Salty

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“For everyone will be tested with fire. Salt is good for seasoning. But if it loses its flavor, how do you make it salty again? You must have the qualities of salt among yourselves and live in peace with each other” (Mark 9:49-50, NLT).

I learned something new today. I had always wondered how salt could cease to be salt by losing its flavor? Maybe it goes bad? Gets stale? I had never really understood what that meant, especially in the context of believers as salt and light to our culture.

But my teacher explained that salt loses its flavor when it gets mixed with other things like sand. Basically, salt is no longer effective as salt when it is compromised and corrupted.

I think in the same way, the Church loses its status as salt when in trying to reach the culture, it becomes too much like the culture and loses its own identity. When the Church waters down the gospel or eliminates parts of Scripture that it deems offensive, then the salt becomes less salty.

Finally, the Church gets to the point where the message is no longer distinguishable from any self-help guru or quasi-New Age teacher. There is no actual gospel or Bible left in its teaching but human wisdom dressed up in spiritual clothing and marketed as Christianity.

The problem is that the Church too often has had the goal of being successful rather than faithful. We focus on numbers rather than growth. That leads to compromised convictions and doctrines, or basically what the Bible would call speaking what people want to hear instead of what they need to hear. That also leads to easy believe-ism where there is no repentance required and no sin to be repented from.

I heard a pastor say once that the world doesn’t hate Christians because we’re different but because we’re not different enough. If we look and act and speak just like those we’re trying to reach with the gospel, what good is our gospel message? If we have the same message that the world is sending out about love being about what you feel and tolerating anything and everything, then we cease to become the Church and forfeit our very right to exist in the first place.

The true gospel starts off with the bad news that all of us have sinned and that the wages or the results of that sin are eternal separation from God in a literal place called Hell. The good news is that God took on human flesh in the form of a Savior, Jesus Christ. He lived a perfect, sinless life that we could never live and died on the cross in our place. He died and rose again three days later and offers salvation to anyone who places their faith in Him as Savior and Lord, truly repenting of their sins and committing the rest of their lives to Him.

Lord, revive Your Church. Forgive us for not preaching and teaching the whole gospel for the whole person. Raise up faithful men and women who will not be ashamed to proclaim the name of Jesus and the true gospel. Help us not be a place where people can be comfortable in their sin but convicted and changed by the power of the Spirit to become sons and daughters of the living God. Amen.

To Love Is to Tell the Truth in Love

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“Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world” (James 1:26-27, The Message).

I’ve been watching videos on Youtube from a guy named Becket Cook. He’s a former homosexual who is now a kind of apologist for orthodox biblical Christianity. One of his tenets is that it is not truly loving to affirm anyone in their sin, whether it be in the LGBTQ camp or pre-marital cohabitation or any other sinful lifestyle. He say that the most loving thing you can do is to tell someone the truth in love.

If I believe that the Bible is true, then I must live by it and I must also be willing to abide by what it teaches when it comes to alternate lifestyles and behaviors. I must come from the place where I view my sin just as seriously as I do anybody else’s. Homosexuality or adultery is no more sinful than my pride or my judgmentalism. It’s all sin to God and we are all called to repent.

To love is to be compassionate as Jesus was. He reached out to those who were marginalized and excluded from society. He never turned away anyone who sought Him out in faith. But He also always told them the truth. He never compromised for the sake of acceptance and peace. In fact, many people quite following Him because He spoke the truths that made them uncomfortable and convicted.

We need both. Compassion and conviction aren’t mutually exclusive. We need to hold to our convictions in the midst of compassion toward those in need but we also need to be compassionate when we’re sharing our convictions about what we believe and why.

The point is not to change an aspect of the person. It’s not to get a liberal to vote conservative or to get a gay person into a straight marriage. It’s about redeeming the whole person with the whole gospel. That means that every part of the person needs to be transformed and renewed. The gospel isn’t about making bad people good or making good people better but about making dead people alive.

We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glorious standard. We all need to repent and to be forgiven. We all need a Savior who will pay the debt for those sins that we could never hope to pay. We all need a righteousness that we can’t produce on our own but has to come from somewhere else. We need Jesus.

Old School Wisdom

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“We have nothing under our own control but our wills. Our feelings are controlled by many things . . . but our will is our own. All that lies in our power is the direction of our will. The important question is not what we feel or what we experience, but whether we will whatever God wills. That was the crowning glory of Christ: that His will was set to do the will of His Father” (Hannah Whitall Smith).

That’s true. Feelings are fickle, but faith is constant. Especially if it’s in the God who never changes. I remember someone said to me long ago that what I think and feel will sometimes lie to me, so I need to go with what I know.

And what I know is this: the best place to be is in the center of God’s will. The best course of action is to teach myself through discipline and surrender to will what God wills. To be like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and pray, “Not my will but Yours.”

I can never choose what my circumstances will be like from day to day. I can never choose how I will feel on any given day. I can never choose how people will or will not respond to me. I can only choose how I respond. I can only set my will to do my best to glorify God in my own actions, thoughts, words, and deeds.

Lord, align my will with Your will. Help me to want the things You want and to love the things You love. In Jesus, You showed what it looks like to be perfectly obedient and perfectly in line with Your will. I know I can never be perfect as Jesus was perfect, but I thank You that because of the cross You look at me and see Jesus’ perfection. May that same resurrection power that now lives in me manifest in me so that I long more and more to do Your will and only do what pleases You. Have Your perfect way in me. Amen.

Ash Wednesday 2026

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“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the Cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us” (John Stott).

Lent has officially started. I’m a newcomer to this season of fasting and repentance that leads up to Easter Sunday, but I’m already a fan. I’ve gone through several years where I give up social media for Lent and found myself not missing it as much as I thought I would.

But Lent isn’t primarily about giving up or abstaining. It’s really about preparing your heart and mind for Easter Week, from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday and leading up to glorious Easter Sunday. It helps remind me that Easter really is more than baskets of candy and bunnies (although I’m not against those myself).

Easter is about God in the flesh taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient to the point of death, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Philippians 2. Instead of me and you dying deservedly for our own sins, Jesus took up the cross and bore our sins on His own body. Instead we get His righteousness and when God sees us, He doesn’t see our flaws but Christ’s perfection.

The best part of course is Resurrection Sunday when Jesus rose from the grave and forever defeated satan, hell, death, and the grave. There is now nothing to fear for anyone who has been made a new creation by Christ. We know that no matter what happens, the worst part will never be the last part because of the resurrection. As Tim Keller put it, the resurrection means that everything is going to be okay.

Cancer won’t have the last word. Dementia won’t have the last word. Terrorism won’t have the last word. Not even death will have the last word. One day, Jesus will descend and every grave will open up and we will all rise to be with Him in the air. That will be the best day ever for anyone who has trusted in Jesus for salvation.

My prayer for anyone who is observing Lent this year is that we will be more inclined and attuned to the voice of God than ever before. I’m praying that we will experience more deeply than ever before the glorious reality of the empty tomb and the risen Christ.

It may seem like a perpetual night of hopelessness these days with so much doom and gloom over every headline and social media feed, but Easter Sunday’s comin’!

The Real Winners

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So I watched the Super Bowl (or at least most of it). I low key wanted Seattle to win, but I was not going to be a bit disappointed if New England won. Still, I made it into the 4th quarter when Seattle was up 19-0 and decided that it was basically over, so I went to old school Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury.

Spoiler alert: Seattle won.

My favorite these days isn’t so much when my team wins, which is probably a good thing. My Tennessee Titans haven’t won very many games lately and watching them sometimes is about as fun as a root canal. Actually, the root canal may be more enjoyable.

But I love seeing where former and current players have given their lives to Jesus. I love how they can boast not in any individual statistics or games won or lost, but in the fact that they are known and loved by the God of the universe.

That’s the real victory. I know the cartoon is probably supposed to be mocking heaven, but I’d love to think that’s how I will enter heaven. It will be such a sweet relief and an overwhelming joy. I won’t be able to point to a single thing I’ve done for the reason that I got in, but I can say with the thief on the cross that the Man on the middle cross said I could come.

It’s only by the blood of the Lamb. Because Jesus died for me and took my place on that cross, I can live eternally. Because instead of my own sin I now possess the righteousness of the only One who ever lived a perfect and sinless life, I can come boldly to the throne of God. Because of Jesus, I will one day walk through those pearly gates confidently because my confidence is on the grace that saved me and sustains me.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to hoist that Lombardi trophy and be able to have bragging rights about being the best team in the world for at least the next year. I know that the percentage of people on Super Bowl winning teams has got to be minuscule compared to all those who have played football at any level and are watching from the comfort of their couches.

But I will know the joy of walking victoriously into heaven and that victory will last not just for the next year but all the way into eternity. And that offer goes to anyone who says yes to Jesus.

More Amy Carmichael Wisdom

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“Let us end on a very simple note: Let us listen to simple words; our Lord speak simply: ‘Trust Me, My child,’ He says. ‘Trust Me with a humbler heart and a fuller abandon to My will than ever thou didst before. Trust Me to pour My love through thee, as minute succeeds minute. And if thou shouldst be conscious of anything hindering that flow, do not hurt My love by going away from Me in discouragement, for nothing can hurt so much as that. Draw all the closer to Me; come, flee unto Me to hide thee, even from thyself. Tell Me about the trouble. Trust Me to turn My hand upon thee and thoroughly to remove the boulder that has choked they river-bed, and take away all the sand that has silted up the channel. I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. I will perfect that which concerneth thee. Fear thou not, O child of My love; fear not.’

And now…to gather all in one page:

Beloved, let us love.

Lord, what is love?

‘Love is that which inspired My life, and led Me to My Cross, and held Me on My Cross. Love is that which will make it thy joy to lay down thy life for thy brethren.’

Lord, evermore give me this love.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after love, for they shall be filled” (Amy Carmichael).

All I can say after that is that you need to go right away and find as many Amy Carmichael books as you can, as well as any biographies (especially the one by Elisabeth Elliot). Or better yet, read good books by missionaries who have invested lifetimes in the field for the Lord. Those are just about always worth it.

We Cannot Wait

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The Bible says that in the fullness of time, or when the time was ripe, God sent Jesus into the world. From a purely human perspective, it would have made more sense to wait until the world was more advanced technologically. God could have waited until we had the ability to communicate instantly to any point on the globe, but He didn’t.

The moment God chose was the moment God chose. In a divine wisdom that is higher than our understanding, God chose that precise moment in history to take on flesh and blood and dwell with us. That was the point that has defined how we measure time, B.C. for Before Christ, and A.D. for Anno Domini or in the year of our Lord (after Christ).

I found this lovely poem by Madeleine L’Engle about God choosing the perfect time to be born into our world:

“He did not wait till the world was ready, 
till men and nations were at peace. 
He came when the Heavens were unsteady, 
and prisoners cried out for release. 

He did not wait for the perfect time. 
He came when the need was deep and great. 
He dined with sinners in all their grime, 
turned water into wine. 

He did not wait till hearts were pure. 
In joy he came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt. 
To a world like ours, of anguished shame 
he came, and his Light would not go out. 

He came to a world which did not mesh, 
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn. 
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh 
the Maker of the stars was born. 

We cannot wait till the world is sane 
to raise our songs with joyful voice, 
for to share our grief, to touch our pain, 
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!”