NAILED TO THE CROSS
A Sermon by
Colossians 2
13And when you were dead in trespasses [and the uncircumcision
of your flesh], God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all
our trespasses, 14erasing the record that stood against us with its
legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.
It was a
soul-stirring worship service. The
leaders asked us to write down on a small piece of paper the personal sin that
was holding us down in life. Then we
were to take a hammer and nail that sin to a large wooden cross, allowing
Christ now to carry that sin for us. We
were finally free of it. I described
that service once to a group of young people planning the last night’s worship
at summer camp. Of course they decided
to improve upon it. And of course
disaster hovers near every improvement project.
The youth chose to
use a large Styrofoam cross and to have the worshippers stick candles
representing a particularly grievous personal sin into the Styrofoam. Then we would draw the cross out to the
middle of the lake by means of a hidden line to show that God takes our sins
away. Well, we had no boat so we spent
most of the afternoon trying to cast a line across the lake with a fishing rod.
With people neck deep in the water on
both sides of the lake we finally made the connection and secured the line to
an inconspicuous tree stump. For a
special touch of beauty in the Vespers area we made luminaries (paper sacks
filled with sand, a candle placed in each one).
As all sat in silence that night, confessing their sins to God, one of
our worship team members, a young lady named Anne Wynn, noticed that one of the
luminary sacks was catching on fire. The
dry woods all around guaranteed that we would soon be rid of all our sins since
we would all be barbecued. With great
solemnity and no facial expression, Anne Wynn walked over, picked up the
burning bag and walked calmly to the water’s edge, flames licking up to her
elbows. But instead of just dropping it
into the water, she wound up like a windmill and threw it halfway across the
lake.
Once the laughter
died down, sins were confessed, sin-candles were lit and stuck in the Styrofoam
cross, and the cross was carefully carried the few feet to the lake’s
edge. There it was connected to the
hidden line, placed in the water and a signal was given to Bob who waited on
the opposite side to reel in the line.
Do you know how much heavier a Styrofoam cross is once you stick 60
candles in it? It floated, but heavier now, it stuck on roots below the water line. Bob reeled, the line stretched, the cross
didn’t move. Bob reeled harder, the pole
bent, the line stretched tighter and tighter, but the cross was still stuck.
Bob reeled with all his might—and something finally gave. The cross unstuck itself and shot across the
lake like a speed boat on fire, leaving a wake behind it that could have
supported a whole team of water-skiers.
Even with all that
trouble, if our sins were that easy to get rid of, wouldn’t it be
wonderful? But it seems that we can’t
get past what we have been or what we have been through so that we can really
begin to live. Our pasts haunt us.
Ashamed of our
pasts, our weaknesses, our poor record, we are afraid to face God. We read about God’s forgiveness through
Christ but we think, “Well, that was a nice thing for Jesus to do, but it was a
long time ago and it probably doesn’t apply to me.” We believe that we are recent sinners
while God’s salvation was an ancient event. But God’s forgiveness is contemporaneous,
modern, present-day, every day, any day.
It wasn’t just an ancient event but it sure is a finished one.
Paul writes: “God made you alive together with (Christ),
when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against
us...nailing it to the cross.” Keeping
a log of all your mistakes, your errors, your sins, are you? Well, God isn’t into that kind of reading. Guess where that logbook is? Nailed shut right up there on the cross! There is a story of a physician whose account
books were examined after he died. It
was discovered that a number of the accounts due were crossed out and the
doctor had written across the page: “Forgiven—too poor to pay.” The doctor’s wife decided that many of those
people could pay and so she took some
of them to court. The judge asked only
one question: “Is this your husband’s handwriting?” When she replied that it was, the judge said:
“Then there is no court in the land that can obtain this money when he has
written the word ‘Forgiven.’” Christ has
written the word “forgiven” across your page in the book.
More than forgiven,
our past sins are gone, untraceable, as if they never happened. It is not like being forgiven by someone only
to have them remind us of our sin, trying to use past errors against us. “Remember when you did that to me? Well, that really hurt. I forgave you anyway. But be sure that never happens again.” How do you feel in those moments of
reminding? Guilty and burdened all over
again? Certainly not relieved, not freed
from your sin. People will use your sins
against you like a club. But not
God! Through Christ your sins are
gone. When someday we speak face to face
with Christ, we can say, “Lord, remember when I committed that terrible
sin?” And Jesus will sincerely answer,
“What sin?”
You see, things
didn’t work out the way that Evil thought they would when Jesus was
killed. When that hammer hit those nails,
it was Evil’s dominance that was killed!
Evil didn’t nail Jesus; he nailed it!
Something died on that cross and is dead forever. But it wasn’t our Savior; it was the power of
sin that died. Sin—my sin, your sin—was
nailed to the cross. The old hymn says,
“My sin, O the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part but the
whole, was nailed to the cross and I bear it no more! Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
As I walked away
from the Vespers area, I looked out at the cross that was now floating with its
cargo of candles in the very middle of the lake. Then I realized that I couldn’t really see
individual candles anymore—just a glow from the flames which were slowly
burning out one at a time. My sin was
out there with the others—too far away to be seen, too far away to affect me
anymore, a few moments from extinction.
As I marveled at the Lord’s ability to bring truth out of our fumbling
efforts, I recalled reading Psalm 103: “As
far as the east is from the west, so far does the Lord remove our sins from
us.”