1 Corinthians 11:26 “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” 

What better way to assure us that Jesus’ own body took our place on the cross, that his own blood was spilled to wash away our sins, that all of this was real, that it truly happened, than to give us that very same body and blood in our time? The Lord’s Supper is more than just a bite to eat. It is a preaching of Jesus’ death on our behalf thousands of years later. It is a particularly vivid way in which he preaches the Gospel to you and me.

Someone might be tempted to ask, “Isn’t God’s word enough for that? Doesn’t God’s word preach all the Gospel I need to know?” Of course it does. God’s word contains all that we need for faith and life. But that doesn’t mean God wouldn’t give us more, or that we couldn’t benefit from having more. Consider how intimately, how personally he applies his promise of forgiveness in Jesus’ supper. Here we receive a personal promise from God, given directly to each of us.

“This is my body, which is for you…” Jesus says. Those two little words “for you” are as important as any Jesus spoke on the night when he instituted his supper. Hours later Jesus died for the sins of the world.  He reconciled the world to God. God wants all people to be saved.  I know that.

But sometimes I need to be assured that all of this applies to me.  Jesus died for my sins.  He reconciled me to God. God wants me to be saved. 

When we receive Jesus’ very body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, we receive that personal assurance in a way in which nothing else does. Here my Savior is coming to me directly with his body and blood. He applies all that he lived for, all that he died for, immediately to me. He gives me a personal promise from God.

Perhaps we can better understand why the Lord does it this way when we look back to the customs involved with Old Testament sacrifices. The Lord once made a covenant with the children of Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai. There he made them his chosen people. In the ceremony formally marking this relationship, sacrifices were offered for the whole nation. God assured the people that they were included as a part of his covenant with them. They were reconciled to God, he loved them, and he had nothing but good intentions for them. 

Then, in addition to his word, he gave them something more. Moses took some blood from the sacrifices and he sprinkled it on all the people. As that blood showered down on the people, each person who was spattered received the individual assurance that they were included in all that those sacrifices stood for. They could be sure, “God’s promise counts for me.”

Future fellowship offerings throughout Israel’s history offered a similar assurance. Part of each sacrifice was burned up to the Lord. But a part of that same sacrifice was also eaten by the person who brought it. This made the sacrifice a meal between the worshiper and the Lord. Again, the person who participated in the sacrifice could be sure, “This all applies to me. No sins stood between me and my God. We have eaten from the same table and the same food today.”

You and I were not able to be there when Jesus first hung on the cross. Jesus had no intention of offering himself for sin over and over again, nor did he need to. His one death paid for them all. But we can still say with all confidence, “This applies to me,” because Jesus continues to gives us that same body and blood in this supper. It is our personal promise from God.

Isaiah 40:31 “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

If we think of weariness and exhaustion pulling us down until we collapse in a heap on the ground, then soaring on wings like eagles is as near to the opposite as anyone could relate in Isaiah’s day. For all their impressive size, wing spans as great as 8 feet across, eagles are able to lift themselves into the air without any hint of strain or effort. They soar at speeds up to 45 miles per hour, and dive at speeds up to 100 miles per hour, which were particularly impressive before the days of planes, trains, and automobiles. They do it all without betraying any weariness. Who ever saw a tired eagle?

God’s promises provide a similar lifting power, a power we don’t fully realize until life has laid us low. I can think of no better example from my own life than a number of years back when our son was just a few months old. We had to rush him to the hospital one evening because a virus known as RSV had made it almost impossible for him to breath. After a sleepless night spent in two different hospitals, we were exhausted. The devotion our pastor brought us the next morning on Joshua 1, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go,” was a simple one. But it had an incredible lifting power on a couple of weary souls. Those same promises can give us strength to soar like eagles as well.

And after they have lifted us up, they empower us for the race ahead. “They will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” Do you remember when you were a little kid, and running was just fun? There was the exhilaration of the speed, and wind in your face, the joy of being free to let your little limbs carry you as fast as they can? I suppose that we got tired even then, but it seems that it is when we get old that we feel the burn in our lungs. Our joints ache. Our legs grow heavy. Our faces flush, and it all makes running a drag. Few things tire us as quickly as running.

But those who hope in the Lord “will run and not grow weary.” The race ahead of us may take us through family problems, work problems, health problems, or even church problems. But when we are living in God’s promises, trusting and hoping in the gifts he has promised to give, then the Lord renews our strength. Then we can run through all the tasks and challenges ahead of us with a childlike sense of exhilaration, because the Lord himself will be the breath in our lungs, and the power in our stride, because he has also been the rest and the nourishment for our souls that makes us strong.

Maybe it all sounds too good to be true. Is Isaiah feeding us nothing more than pleasant platitudes, refreshing fantasies, nice sounding words to fool us into feeling better? I’ll let him answer our doubts himself. “Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom” (Isaiah 40:28). The promise comes from the One who has always been there, who made us and all we know, whose power and wisdom knows no limits. He can’t make a promise too big. He won’t make an offer he is not good for. You will run, and not grow weary. You will walk and not be faint.

Isaiah 40:30-31 “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

In our health conscious world many people have the mistaken notion that hard work and exercise make us stronger. Actually, the opposite is true. Hard work and exercise make us weaker. It is the food we eat and the rest we receive that allows our body to build back stronger after exercise has torn our muscles down. Exercise is a healthy and necessary part of the process, it just isn’t the part that, properly speaking, makes us strong.

From time to time life makes this truth clear to us. We hear of entertainers collapsing on the stage and having to be hospitalized for exhaustion. We instinctively realize we need a vacation after months and months of slugging our way through a grueling schedule. On any given day we can say that we have spent ourselves just to get this far. But tomorrow it all starts all over again. Where will we find the strength to go on?

Isaiah is writing these words for the weary, for those who have nothing left to give. At some point in life, just about everyone finds himself at the end of his resources. Isaiah points out, “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.” These young men are the men who were old enough to serve in the army. Picture your well-muscled, physically fit Marine or Navy Seal, ready to face whatever the enemy throws at him. But eventually even such tough and hardened soldiers grow weak, and stumble and fall under the strain of battle.

Whether or not your life has brought you to the very end of your strength at this moment, I’m betting that something in your past has tested the limits of your endurance. Maybe it was something in your family. Maybe it was a health issue. Maybe it just has to do with your overstuffed schedule. You spend too many hours at work. You have too many responsibilities for which you have volunteered at church or at school. You have too many projects that need to be done on the house. You’re stretched too thin to do justice to any of the things that need to be done.

As difficult as these things are to deal with on a purely earthly level, there is a spiritual dimension to this as well. That weariness we know as despair is a great danger to our spiritual health. That’s why, when Luther explained “And lead us not into temptation” in the catechism, he mentioned “despair” by name. “We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us, so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not deceive us or lead us into false belief, despair, and other great and shameful sins…” This is one of our toughest spiritual battles. We may so want to repent – literally, “have a change of mind” – of our despair, but our weary sinful flesh won’t let us. God seems more and more distant. Where can we find the strength to go on?

Isaiah promises that the Lord will renew our strength. “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.” This is not a “self-help” approach to finding strength for a weary soul. Isaiah is not a motivational speaker trying to pump us up with a new attitude, leading us to reach down deep inside ourselves to draw on some untapped spring of optimism. That well went dry a long time ago.

Instead, Isaiah is leading us to draw on the promises of God and his word. Those who hope in the Lord do so because God has given them something real to hold onto. He has demonstrated a love that delivers his people from trouble time and time again.

When sin and guilt threatened to crush us, he sent his only Son to push us out from underneath them, and to be crushed by our sin and guilt instead. Now forgiveness fills us with hope.

When we are afraid that we are not going to have enough– enough to pay the bills, enough to put food on the table, enough to survive– he promises, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” And the fact that we are still here today is proof of his faithfulness. We have enough, and God gives us hope.

When death comes knocking and seems to present the ultimate proof of God’s failure, the indisputable rationale for despair, Jesus promises, “I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me will live, even though he dies.” He converts death into the doorway to an even better life, and we have hope.

These promises are like a bungee cord connecting us to God. Though we may feel like we are falling headlong to our doom, and the cord stretches further and further, and it looks as though we are about to splatter ourselves on despair, the promises snap us back up before we reach the bottom. As long as we stay attached to the promises, we have hope.

John 17:13 “I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.”

If you read through chapters 13 to 17 of John’s gospel, you will see that Jesus understood the thief that threatened to rob his disciples of their joy. It wasn’t the general stresses and disappointments that come with life. By themselves, those things don’t have the power to take away our joy.

The real thieves of our joy are things that rob us of Jesus himself. In the context of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, the disciples were grieving because Jesus kept talking about the fact that he was going away. He was returning to his Father. He didn’t go into detail about how horrible the next day was going to be, but he made it clear that his time with the disciples–visibly, at least–was about to end.

The disciples’ joy was stolen by the thought of losing Jesus. We lose ours by removing him ourselves. The blame has less to do with our external situation, more to do with misplaced priorities and lack of faith. Things have taken Jesus’ place. You know that even when we have plenty, things offer such little satisfaction. Within days children tire of new toys. Adults also fail to fill the emptiness inside with the purchases they make.  All the hopes for joy pinned on material things rob us of the real joy of having a Savior.

The source of this problem lies within our own hearts. This theft of joy turns out to be an inside job. Nothing from the outside takes Jesus or his promises away from us. We replace them ourselves. Hearts fail to value Jesus properly. They let down their guard and ended up giving his place to someone or something else.

Stop thief! It doesn’t have to be this way! The truth remains: Jesus gives us reason for joy!

Remember that Jesus was praying at this very moment, praying on behalf of his disciples. He still prays for you every day. He never stops praying, even for a moment. John says in his first letter, “If anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (1 John 2:1). Do you still sin? Jesus doesn’t hold those sins against us. He is constantly praying for us, reminding his Father of the sacrifice he made to take those sins away. His unending prayers for our salvation are effective. He has saved us completely, and that gives us reason for joy.

The things Jesus said to give his disciples the full measure of his joy aren’t limited to prayer, however. During these hours at the last supper and on the way to Gethsemane he gave them words and promises specifically aimed at removing their grief. He promised to prepare a place in heaven for them. He promised to give them whatever they asked in his name. He promised to send them the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who would give them comfort and peace.

We have those words from Jesus and more. Because Jesus has come we have redemption, forgiveness, the light of the gospel, eternal life, and peace. If we will only listen, if we will only believe, these all combine to give us the gift of joy.

We Christians can have such joy even in the worst situations. James urges us, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance” (James 1:2-3). Pure joy James says. Paul writes almost the same thing to the Romans: “But we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance…” (Rom. 5:3). Peter takes up the same theme in his first letter. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering…But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ…” (1 Peter 4:12-13).

If you come to your pastor with some grief, what do you expect he will do? He will take some time to listen to your problems, and he will listen with a sympathetic ear. If he hears any sin that need to be confronted, he will confront it so that he can promise you forgiveness. That is what pastors do. If he has any solutions to offer, he will propose them, though he knows that often what you seek isn’t solutions so much as a chance to get things off your chest.

In the end he will close with a word of promise, a devotion on Jesus’ words, a reminder of our joy. Then he will lead you to God’s throne to lay your grief before him in prayer. In those words and prayers, we can still find the full measure of Jesus’ joy.

Romans 8:35-36 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble, or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’”

In order to open our eyes and help us see God’s love, Paul gives us two lists. We might call the first one “Love’s skeptics” or “Love’s deniers.” So often our experience seems to contradict the idea that God loves us. If God really loves us, then why? Why does this list exist? Why is my life full of trouble and hardship? Ancient life was not so different than our own. Behind the words “trouble” and “hardship” in Paul’s Greek are experiences we know all too well. “Trouble” literally has the sense of “pressure.” We feel the “squeeze.” The weight of our responsibilities is crushing us. We feel pressure to compromise our integrity from people for whom we work or peers at school. “Hardship” puts us in narrow place, a tight spot. The walls are closing in. The options are running out. Finally we are cornered and trapped.

Why, if he loves us, does God let us be persecuted? How come I can’t just fit in and be accepted by everyone else? Why should they be making jokes because I try to live my faith? Why should my job, my reputation, my safety be threatened because of what I believe?

If I am God’s child and he loves me, then why should I suffer famine or nakedness? Or to put it in more 21st Century American terms, why should I be living on the edge of poverty? Why should I be struggling to make ends meet? Doesn’t God promise our daily bread? What gives?

What about danger or sword? My house has to be a little fortress–dead bolts and alarm systems, maybe even a weapon–to keep me safe these days. Even these offer no absolute guarantees. Has God stopped loving us?

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Notice that Paul doesn’t deny these things happen to Christians. But in all these things, we are still the conquerors. God is still loving us just the same. Faith learns to trust that God’s promises are more real, more true, more certain than all we see or experience, because nothing stands between us and Christ’s love.

In support of that assertion, Paul brings his second list. Here are the leading candidates for getting between us and God’s love for us. Every one of them is destined to fail.

“I am convinced that neither death nor life…” Death can’t do it. Although death was at one time the penalty for sin that cut us off from God, now it is the gateway to life, and it is the last step in bringing us home to him. It actually brings us into the direct presence of God and his love, not farther away.

Life can’t do it, either. Maybe more than people fear death today, they fear the things that life can throw at us. We don’t want to suffer. But the worst that life has to offer is just temporary, and God promises to love us through it all.

“Neither angels nor demons…” Spiritual powers, whether good or evil, cannot do it. They deserve our respect because their powers greatly exceed our own. But they are no match for God and his love. Even if all the good angels were to turn against us (which they would never do), God’s love would remain the same, always protecting us, always saying to them, “You may go this far and no farther.” These most powerful spiritual beings (other than God himself) cannot separate us from his love.

“Neither the present nor the future nor any powers…” Nothing in time can do it. We may not like the times in which we live. They seem evil. Christianity and Christians seem to be in retreat. We may fear the future with all its unknowns even more. But present or future, from now until the day Jesus returns, we will be the objects of God’s love, every minute, every moment until the final tick of the clock and time itself comes to an end.

“Neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Build a space probe and travel to the farthest edges of the created universe. Dig a hole and keep digging until you come out in China. God’s love for you is bigger and more powerful than anything else that exists. You will never find anything anywhere that can separate us from God’s love in Jesus Christ.

Romans 8:33-34 “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died–more than that, who was raised to life–is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.”

You know that you are constantly being accused and condemned. Job was a man famous for the terrible tragedies he suffered. The Bible tells us that behind those tragedies were the Devil’s accusations. “Job’s faith is shallow and untested. Job is a fair-weather Christian. Job loves God out of selfish interest, but make his life a little uncomfortable and he will curse you to your face,” he told the Lord. He wanted to turn Job against the Lord, and the Lord against Job. He picked on the weakest thing he could find in the man to do so.

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, says that the devil is still “the accuser of our brothers.” He is still trying to turn God against us by reminding him of our sins. When he gets no satisfaction with God, then he turns on us and goes after our own consciences. He plays on our guilt. He whispers in our ears, “Look at what you have done.”

Did you ever see the Disney movie, “The Lion King”? The young lion Simba is playing in the canyon where he doesn’t belong. His jealous uncle Scar starts a stampede of wildebeests that threatens to trample the future king of the beasts. When Simba’s father Mufasa rescues his son, Mufasa barely escapes the canyon himself, only to be thrown back in by the evil Scar. He ends up stampeded to death. But Mufasa’s murder takes place beyond Simba’s view. Scar then plays on Simba’s guilt. “What have you done, Simba?” Look, it’s all your fault your father died rescuing you.

That’s what the devil does to your heart. “What have you done? Look at the mess you have made. You can’t fix this. And God certainly isn’t going to love you anymore.” He charges you with sin. He condemns. He does everything he can to drive us away from God.

But look at the way God defends us. “It is God who justifies.” It would be one thing if we weren’t really guilty of our sins. Then it would make sense for God to defend us. But our guilt is real. It would be one thing if our sin were really only a matter of ignorance. But more often than not, we knew what we were doing. It would be one thing if our sin were really only directed at other people, and didn’t involve God. But no matter whom we hurt, the commands we break are always God’s. Still, he justifies. Still, he defends. Still, he does not hold our guilt against us. How can he defend us this way?

“Christ Jesus, who died–more than that, who was raised to life–is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” God justifies us because justice for our every sin has already been carried out in the death of Jesus Christ, our substitute. God has raised him from the dead as proof that he accepts Jesus’ death in place of ours. God justifies because he cannot escape the evidence that our debt to heaven has been paid.

Two thousand years may have passed since the cross, but there at the Father’s side in glory is the living Lord Jesus. It’s a little hard to miss him, the one who paid for our sin, in that condition. We may continue to sin, but Jesus continues to intercede. He pleads for us. He goes to his Father on our behalf and demands, not asks, that our sins not be held against us. He has paid the price!

Now you can ignore the devil’s accusations, because your God in heaven certainly does. Jesus sits at his Father’s side, defending us to this day.

Romans 8:31-32 “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

Have you ever heard of the “new atheists”? They aren’t content to let people believe what they want. They feel the need to proselytize, and to do so aggressively. Men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris try to convince people that all religion is harmful, that there is no God, no spirits, no life beyond the grave. They write books, host seminars, organize debates to motivate their followers to make new converts.

We should take their movement seriously, because in many ways it is sync with the spirit of our age. But while they may succeed in picking off some Christians on the fringe, I don’t think they will ever become the dominant point of view.

The problem for most is not, “Is there a God?” The problem is: “Is God on our side?” If God is on our side, then why do we suffer so? Why is my health such a mess? Why do my relationships bring me so much grief? Why do I have to deal with issues for which other people seem to get a pass?

These are old, old questions. In Romans chapter 8 the Apostle Paul doesn’t attempt to tell us what God is thinking for every problem we might have with his decisions for our lives. But he does tell us all we need to know to be sure that God is on our side.

If God is on our side (and he is), then we are in a position of absolute safety. We are beyond harm. How can we be so sure? “He…did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.” It’s not that he sent Jesus to be our other-worldly advice columnist. One religious group claiming to follow Jesus never refers to him as “Savior.” On their website they consistently call him their “Way-shower.” In other words, for them Jesus is nothing more than a source for solid advice.

Paul says that God did not spare his own Son. He was fully aware of the sacrifice Jesus was going to have to make. He knew about the suffering, the torture, and the death. It was part of the plan. Do you know how hard that must be? This was his one and only Son, the Son he loves. This was the ultimate demonstration of his love for you and me. This was the gift that has no equal.

Truly, if God would do that, “…how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” After that gift, what could he possibly withhold if he knew it would help us? At various times, he has made the earth turn backwards, sent the angel of death to wipe out invading armies, given life back to those who have died, and worked many other miracles to save his people. After sacrificing his Son to save you, he is not going to let you slip through his fingers over some smaller need. If you truly needed a billion dollars for the good of your soul, what is that compared to the gift of his Son? And if the billion dollars doesn’t show up, we can safely assume it’s not what we truly need.

Do you want to be sure that God is on our side? Look at the gift he gave us. The gift of his Son convinces us it is so.

1 Corinthians 1:22-24 “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

 God wraps himself in human flesh and lives among the Jews for 33 years. He stills storms, heals the sick, raises the dead. But his own people don’t know him. They want a sign. Which sign? Pick a sign. I mean, really, was Jesus stingy with the miracles? But they can’t see him. They crucify him instead.

God paints his wisdom all across creation. He plants the wisdom of his laws in human hearts and consciences. He writes the wisdom of his grace down on thousands of pages of history, poetry, and prophecy spread across a millennium and a half. And when Paul brings God’s word to the Greeks, for all their intellect and research and deep thought, they don’t get it.

We still live in this world between those who demand magic and those who want nothing but cold logic, the materialist and the magician as C.S. Lewis once described them. One side or the other appeals to our own hearts and minds. One side or the other is campaigning for our own souls, creeping into our own thinking. Neither side wants, or respects, or appreciates the cross. It is foolishness to our world.

The idea that there is a God who became one of us–not just put on a human disguise, but permanently united his very being to these things he made called “humans;” who then took the blame for all of their sins, which they had committed against him; and then let them torture him to death on a cross to serve their sentence, to endure the punishment they had earned by all their sins–that is just the one thing that prevents some people from believing the Christian faith. They could go along with all the rules and morals, even the ones that seem to restrict their personal freedoms, if only Christianity didn’t ask them to believe this.

The translation above calls it a “stumbling block.” More literally, the Greek says it is the trigger in the trap, the little lever on which you put the cheese or peanut butter in your mousetrap. You know, a mousetrap is just a harmless little collection of wood and wires until that trigger is disturbed. But touch the trigger, and “Snap!” the mouse is dead. Christ crucified, God in the flesh on a cross, is the thing that gets so many people to say, “Okay, that’s it. I was with you up to here. That’s just too much to ask a reasonable person to believe. I’m sorry, but I’m done.” It’s the trigger that springs the spiritual trap, and the soul is dead.

But that’s the Christ we preach, Paul says, Christ crucified–not super role model Jesus, or motivational speaker Jesus, or really wise advice Jesus, but the one who dies for us on a cross. Why? To those God has called to faith, Christ crucified is the power of God. It is the power that gives faith, the power that converts. Like Paul writes to the Romans, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.”

This power of the cross is not the power of carefully reasoned logic. It is not an argument or case so indisputable, so airtight, that you are forced to agree. The gospel is not merely a mathematical principle, a proven formula that works every time your run the numbers. There is something warmer and dearer and friendlier working here.

The power of the cross is not brute force. It is not God taking your arm and twisting it behind your back, wrenching it higher and higher until you cry uncle. “Okay, Okay, I believe, I believe already. Let me go.”

“This is love,” the Apostle John writes in his first letter, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” That’s the cross, and the hidden power behind the cross. Dying on a cross is God at his weakest, weaker than anyone could ever have imagined possible. Still, “the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.”  What human achievement has ever accomplished as much?

The whole world’s debt to God has been settled, millions of hearts have been changed, the history of nations and empires has been altered–all because 2000 years ago God did something “foolish,” and he hid his loving power on a cross.

1 Corinthians 1:18 “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

I can tolerate many things. But I don’t like to be considered a fool. Since I was in high school–no, grade school–peer pressure has played on my pride and my desire to be accepted. It has gotten me to do some really dumb things. I will spare you the gory details.

Peer pressure doesn’t end when our school days are over. A 58-year-old single Christian woman with a page on a popular internet dating sight made it clear in her profile she had not lived a perfect life in the past. Going forward, however, she intended to avoid physical intimacy before marriage. She was surprised and saddened by how many people took time to mock and criticize her for her beliefs. Pressure to conform to the word’s ways hasn’t ended just because she is approaching 60.

Paul wasn’t talking about personal morality in these words to the Christians in Corinth. He was talking about the preaching of the gospel, the message of Jesus’ cross. Our world still thinks that is foolish. They pressure us to think the same. Maybe they don’t use the word “foolish.” Maybe they use words like “not relevant.” “Hey, I don’t need some dusty theology about something that happened 2000 years ago. I need something to help me live a better life tomorrow. I need information I can use every day.” The information they mean is not the message of the cross.

Early in my ministry I read about a conference in Minneapolis at which a “Christian” college professor told those gathered, “I don’t think we need people hanging from crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff.” I know of Christian parents who pulled their children from Sunday School classes because they didn’t want them exposed to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. Why? “…the message of the cross is foolishness…” It doesn’t work for so many. It doesn’t make any more sense to them today than in Paul’s day.

Before we get with the times and throw out the foolishness of the cross in favor of a less offensive, less graphic message, consider where Paul says the world’s opinion is taking them. “The message of the cross is foolishness…to those who are perishing.” Remember the stock question that parents used to ask when their kids wanted permission to give in to the peer pressure, because “everybody else is doing it”? “Well, if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you want to jump, too?” Paul’s words have a bit of that flavor here. Those who think the cross is foolish are perishing. They are dying a slow, spiritual death. Do we want to end up like them?

I am reminded of the brave confession I once heard a pastor in Sweden give. When he was asked, “Why do you want to leave the Church of Sweden (the state church which makes little use of the Bible and hardly believes in Jesus’ saving work anymore) where a pastor can have a nice, comfortable life (as a sort of government bureaucrat)? Why do you want to join a little free church, with just a few people in it?” His answer: “The Titanic was a very luxurious ship. It was big. It was comfortable. But I would rather be sitting in one of the little life boats and live, than stay on that big ship and end up at the bottom of the sea!”

The message of the cross looks like little more than a humble life boat. It is foolishness to our world, but it is foolishness to those who are perishing. To those who are being saved, it is the power God uses to save our souls.