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The Cross-centered Life
Believers are engaged in an ongoing battle to stay cross-centered. The problem is most are unaware of the
importance of the struggle. Due to our depraved natures, every saint faces the
very real conviction that he or she does not measure up. A pervading sense of condemnation turns like a little dynamo inside of
us. It may slow, but it never
stops. Law continues to expose our sin
after we are saved. The great paradox is that the better we are at any given aspect of
ministry, the more tempted we will be to make that area of ministry production
a defining contributor to our relationship with God. That’s the rub – the law makes its overtures to our strengths. “Do in order to be” is the law’s
rationale. It makes its solicitations
to our gifts and talents. It promises
to invest our gifts and talents into the account of our favor and acceptance
with God. How subtle this is – for the use of our gifts and talents have been a
legitimate blessing to the Body of Christ.
The saints have been built up through our ministry diligence and
exertion. We rightly long for the
Lord’s approval. Our usefulness is not
the question. The issue of cross-centeredness focuses upon whether or not we regard
our productiveness to be a contributing factor to our favor with God. “Is my work and service central to my
interface and acceptance with God?” If
so, the law principle may be operational in my life -- EVEN if I am a strong
proponent of grace truths! Certain temperaments are prone to specific departures from
cross-centeredness. The “catalytic
extrovert” has a personality that makes things happen. He shies away from introspection. He seldom retreats into the “grey castle of
self.” He prefers to manage his
dereliction (depravity) by performance, production, and by the generation of
massive amounts of work. The extrovert’s problem is harder to see than the person’s who is
neutralized by condemnation. Yet the
extrovert’s deviation from cross-centeredness is just as real – he may be operating
by law, not grace. By contrast, the person laboring under a yoke of condemnation feels
that heaven is staring at him in one large cosmic frown. Thus he retreats into the grey castle of
self and attempts to comfort his soul with sensual things justified by self
pity. Having lost sight of the cross, he does not entertain high prospects of
the Lord’s desire to meet him and commune with him. Comfort from the Lord seems light years away. For the person stuck in the castle of self, the sense of divine favor
can only be restored by a fresh view of the cross by faith. For the cross alone is God’s answer to our
paralyzing depravity and dereliction. The cross alone can bring the condemned saint out of hiding and back
into the joy of communing with his Lord.
The cross lifts the believer out of the exasperation of not measuring
up. It places the saint back upon the
grace plane of abiding and being that constitute the life of sonship. So also, the cross is necessary for the extrovert (or workaholic –
“human doing”) to be restored to a place of communion that rests solely upon
the Savior’s work. Only the cross of Christ can rightly align the workaholic’s motives
with God’s purposes of grace. When the workaholic is in full production mode, he is often blind to his
utter dependence upon the cross for all fellowship and usefulness. Busyness is his drug – while in the
whirlwind of urgent ministry tasks, he doesn’t have to stop long enough to look
in the mirror and feel any guilt for not measuring up. He is so far “ahead of others” in his
ability to generate Christian works, he takes solace in his productivity. But a “small” detail is missing.
Paul mentions it in 1 Cor 15:10.
In that passage, the Apostle attributes his productivity to God’s grace
alone: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did
not prove vain: but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the
grace of God with me.” Paul was careful to stress that his ability to excel in work for the
Lord was solely a function of grace.
Therefore, he did not see his labors as contributing to his acceptance
with God. He regarded his work as an
evidence that he was a trophy of God’s grace.
Productive people in ministry who lack Paul’s mindset, tend to
use their output of labor as a means of offsetting any feelings of not
measuring up. Those on the receiving end of
the workaholic’s ministry may heap praise and gratitude upon him, but his soul
is a dry salt waste of a wilderness. If
he stopped long enough, he would discover that his heart was no longer a
garden. It is the Spirit’s constant work of grace that teaches us that Christ
alone is the ground of all our acceptance, favor, and communion with
God. Our greatest works and service
do not add a single atom of weight to any of these three. Yet untold numbers of believers live as if
their doing is an essential contributor to the three. No one lives a cross-centered life without an intentional “curriculum” of self-talk. These little “sermons” we preach to ourselves are gospel sermons that reaffirm our utter dependence upon the cross for all favor, acceptance and communion with God. This self-talk is the necessary way that we “do business” with our
souls. All of our thinking and feeling
must be rectified by gospel self talk.
The cost of not doing so is high indeed. Without cross-centered living,
the law will necessarily dictate the method by which we manage our souls. If the cross is not clearing the way daily
for us to receive God’s love and grace in our souls, we will by default
automatically gravitate to methods of soul management that are born of law. These law methods come natural to us – they constitute the “religion”
we were born with – a religion of measuring up, of doing in order to be. How many gifted ministers gradually began to
support their soul’s life on the husks of their own productivity? The number must be staggering. One of the symptoms of departing from the cross-centered life is a “law
method” of dealing with others. When we
abandon the grace-based perspective that flows from cross-centered living, we
cannot help but deal with others by the same manner we deal with our own
souls. It will “leak out.” So also, when a person is living a cross-centered life, he cannot help
but appeal to the grace of God in the cross for all advancement in work,
worship, and sanctification. The cross alone can lead us out of self (whether a performing self, or
a condemning self). The Lord calls us,
just as He did the Laodicians, to commune with Him and to receive His love in
our spirits. He wants us to come as the
beggars we are. He desires that we rest
the whole acceptance of our souls upon the grace wrought by His cross and His
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