Good Friday

This material taken from a Biblical Study done by a good friend and kind Shepherd.


We must never minimize the awful cost of our salvation.
Is it possible that some Christians become tired of hearing about the cross?
Paul wrote to the Galatians, “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”. (Galatians 6:14).
I am not suggesting that we “stop at the cross”, that we become so fixated with the suffering and death of Christ that we forget the empty tomb.
But there must be that Friday. We must come to the cross before we can come to the empty tomb.

What does that mean, “to come to the cross”? We hear it a lot, don’t we? How often do we hear, “I want to sit at the foot of the cross”?
But what does that really mean? And what are we to do when we come to the foot of the cross?
There is only one thing, my friends. And that is not to ask for comfort. It is not to ask for encouragement. It is not to ask for physical healing, or even worse, to demand healing. In fact, it is not to ask for blessings of any sort.
There is only one thing we are to do at the cross, and that is to repent of our sins, and to ask for His forgiveness. And then it is to thank Him. And to continue thanking Him every day for the rest of our lives for bearing our sins on that cross.
Yes, there will be comfort; there will be encouragement. There will be healing of our hearts and souls. But that is not why we go to the cross.
To think that we can skip the “repentance part” of the meaning of the cross is to mock the very cost of our salvation, to mock the cost of Calvary.

Without the cross, there would be no forgiveness. Without the cross, there would be no salvation. Without the cross, our sins would still be upon us. Without the cross, we would never be reconciled with our God, our Creator. Without the cross, we would be lost forever.
It cost Christ everything to redeem us. Let us never make light of what cost Him so dearly.

I read the story once of a father whose young son was killed in a tragic accident. In grief and enormous anger, he visited his pastor and poured out his heart. The man then said to the pastor, “Where was God when my son died?”
The pastor paused for a moment, and with great wisdom replied, “The same place He was when His Son died”.
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

This cry from the cross is for all the lonely and hurt people of the world. It is for the abandoned child . . . the abused child…. the widow. . . the divorcee struggling to make ends meet . . . the mother standing over the bed of her suffering child . . . the father out of work . . . the parents left alone . . . the prisoner in his cell . . . the aged sitting day in and day out alone in convalescent homes . . . wives abandoned by their husbands . . . singles who celebrate their birthdays alone. And yes, it is for the parents struggling to find meaning when a child dies.

This is the word from the cross for you, my friend: No one has ever been as alone as Jesus was on that cross that Friday we call Good Friday.
You will never be forsaken as He was. No cry of your pain can exceed the cry of His pain when God the Father turned his back and looked the other way.
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

But my friends, in absolute humbleness and gratitude, we can only thank God that it is true.
He was forsaken that you might never be forsaken.
He was abandoned that you might never be abandoned.
He was deserted that you might never be deserted.