The Cross

Gentlemen, welcome to the Cross.

The Cross is two beams of wood - one horizontal, one vertical. It’s three nails - one through the feet and the other two through the hands. For Jesus, it was six hours of agony that ended in his death. Jesus spent most of his earthly ministry looking forward to the cross. He told his disciples where he was going and yet they couldn’t fathom it. And he didn’t just tell them about it, he invited them to come, follow him. Follow him where? To the cross. Follow him to a new life which culminates in losing all you have.

In other words, Jesus invites all of his followers to the cross.

Luke 9:23 ESV

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

Jesus invites us all to come. His invitation to his disciples was to deny yourself, in other words, deny my wants, my will and my desires. Deny them all. Take up my cross - aka lay down my life.

The invitation tonight is to come. Come to the cross. Come and die.

Galatians 2:20 ESV

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

In other words, Jesus invites me to come and and be crucified. Come to the cross. Come and die so that you can live. This is his message to you and to me. He’s inviting us tonight to come and die. And this message isn’t just for a once in a lifetime, it’s an invitation to die daily. To give up everything for the sake of the cross. Our lives are meant to be poured out, not stored up. Jesus says come and die.

And that’s been his call to me over and over again in my life - come and die.

I don’t know how many of you that are like me, but I was born in church (almost anyways) as I was born on December 10th and I played the part of baby Jesus in the Christmas play that year. So I grew up in church from the time of my birth, but that didn’t mean my life was easy. Whether you are born in church or don’t attend until later in life, the message of Jesus is always come and die. And for me, that meant I had to come to grips with the fact that I was going to have to die. My problem with the invitation with Jesus has not be in the invitation to come, but in the invitation to die. I have no problem coming to him, it’s the giving up of everything I hold dear that I’ve struggled with the most.

At 14 years old, my parents divorced and that wrecked me. My family was my whole world and when my mom decided to leave my dad, I felt lost, helpless and abandoned. I lived with my mom and saw my dad every other weekend, but I felt alone. My mom had a boyfriend and my dad was physically absent. So I spiraled into a life of seeking the approval of others and at 14, that was my friends. My friends were into drinking and smoking marijuana, so that’s what I did.

My life spiraled out of control until I met a young lady at 16, who invited me to a Christian concert with her. Truth be told, I had no interest in the concert, I was interested in her. So I went, but only to try and get closer to her. At the concert, though God had other plans for my life. The singer of the rock band gets up and in the middle of the concert, he asks this question - who can tell me the meaning of the word grace? Now I had grown up in church, and grace to me is a church word. It’s something that gets said and sung about a lot, but I had no idea of how to define it.

The singer waited for a while, and then answered his own question this way, he said grace is unmerited favor. It’s getting what you don’t deserve. And that’s when it hit me. I was getting what I didn’t deserve. I was living my life, the way I wanted to and basically laughing in God’s face, while His love for me was pure and true. I was abusing his grace. So that night, Jesus’s call to me was simple - Come and die. Die to the life that I wanted to live. Die to my ways.

Almost two years later, I received a call to go into the ministry when I was 17 almost 18 years old. I never wanted to be a preacher. That wasn’t my life goal. I actually wanted to be an art teacher. I loved art and loved teaching others, so art was a passion of my throughout high school and that’s what I wanted to do. I had applied for teaching scholarships and was working on my art as often as I could.

But, God had an invitation to me. Come and die. I looked at my dreams and I had to lay them at the foot of the cross. People like teachers. They don’t like preachers much. People love art, but they don’t care much for pastors. I had to let that plan for my life and my own desire to be liked by others, die. So that’s what I did. I died to myself. But there was still more of me left, so I still had a long way to go.

I answered the call to ministry and went to Bible college in New York, where I met a young lady named Hanna and got married the following year. I had to drop out of bible college because my mom lost her job, so I came home and got a job at a newspaper and Hanna moved down after we got married in August of 2000. We were a mess straight from the start. I fell madly in lust, I mean love with her, and we should have ended the marriage before it ever got started, but we were young and dumb. I thought because we met in bible college and we both loved Jesus, that meant everything would be ok. It wasn’t.

So we got married, moved in together and started our lives in the ministry. I worked in various part-time roles from youth pastor to an associate pastor, while working full-time in the plumbing industry. About three years into our marriage and things really came to a head. I was working as a freelance writer for a couple of newspapers and she was working at Staples. I had been looking for a full-time position and so I found one, on the other side of the state, near Raleigh. We needed a change and I thought this would help. How many of you know that you can’t outrun your issues? That’s what I was trying to do.

On Valentines Day, the wheels came off. We were preparing to move to eastern NC and it was moving day. The issues started the night before. We had picked up a Uhaul and were packing boxes, when Hanna came to me and said she wanted to go visit one of her girlfriends that night since we’d be leaving the next day. I had no issues with that and she left while I kept packing boxes.

Several hours pass and she doesn’t come home. I begin to worry. Midnight rolls around and I’m calling her friend and her friend says, she hasn’t seen her. Now I’m really beginning to worry. I start looking through her things and find a piece of paper with another man’s name and phone number on it and I find a rolled up one dollar bill full of cocaine.

I reverse indexed the phone number and found out where this guy lived and at 3 am, I show up at his trailer and her car is parked out front. I banged on the door and no one answered. And thankfully so, I’m a little guy and this guy would likely have killed me. But when I say I was a wreck, I mean I was a wreck. Between the uncontrollable outbursts of anger and the hysterical crying, I was broken.

She finally comes home around 6 am Valentines morning and by this point I’m just numb. My parents are supposed to arrive shortly and help us load up the Uhaul. So I confront her. Where have you been? She tells me that she fell asleep at her friends house. I give her another opportunity to come clean, but she doesn’t. So I pull out the cocaine and the evil just comes out. She lunges for it and I lunge towards the bathroom. I’m going to flush it. She’s climbing on my back fighting for it until I finally get it down the drain. Rage is an understatement.

After a little while she calms down. She confesses some of what I know already, but is quick to blame me. My parents show up and I’m in a daze. We load the truck and don’t say another word. We get moved down to Johnston County and we last one more week before she decides to leave. I tried to get her to do counseling. We go to one meeting. She doesn’t care anymore - about me, about the marriage, about anything. She leaves. She moves in with her guy, who also happens to be her dealer.

I’m dead. Jesus invited me to come and die, but I never thought it would be like this. Everything inside of me was dead. I was numb. I walked through the next few weeks in a haze. I thought about suicide. I thought about running away from everything and anyone I knew, but truth was, I was already in a new city, with no one I knew. She emptied our bank account, so I was broke. I was 23 years old the day I died that time.

I had to decide whether I could continue to follow Jesus after this. I didn’t have anything to offer him at this point. I was a bible school dropout. I was divorced. And I was broken. What could I offer him? And I felt like he was saying to me, I finally have you where I want you. Your whole life, you have been trying to prove yourself to me while I’ve been asking you to come and die.

So I let the old me die. The one that I thought had great promise. The one who had dreams of pastoring and leading. The one who had messed up. The one with a terrible past. The one who was broken. The one who had tried to make it on his own. He died.

But God isn’t done with me. A few years later, I met a young lady named Autumn. We fell in love and in 2008, we married and over the course of about 5 years, we have four children - Elijah, 11, Lizzie, 10, Abe, 8, Adora who is 7. We bought a house, and I never looked back. That old me was gone and a new me was reborn. My old life was passed away. I had no desire to be in the ministry. I served my local church. I played on the worship team. I was happy and content with that. In fact, if I’m honest, the times I did allow myself to think about my past, all I felt was shame.

The power of the Cross is not found in the pain of the cross, but in the shame of it.

Jesus felt all of the pain of the cross. He took my sins on himself in the form of lashings, nails and a crown of thorns. The pain of the cross was bad, but I think the thing that was worse than the pain of the cross, was the shame of the cross. Kings don’t die deaths like this. Kings are meant to be honored. Jesus was mocked. Kings are meant to be celebrated. Jesus was tortured. The cross was a death reserved for the lowest of the low. Those that were despised and rejected. Worse than the pain of the cross, was the shame of it.

Hebrews 12:2 ESV

looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Jesus despised the shame of the cross, but endured it. Jesus could see the future, he knew the shame that he would experience going through the cross, yet he went through with it anyway. He despised the shame of it, but he embraced it at the same time because of the joy that was before him. Where we see shame, Jesus looks through the shame to see joy on the other side. In other words, when I look at my sins, past, present and future, sometimes all I can see is shame. But Jesus doesn’t. He looks forward through the shame to see a joyful future. The enemy uses shame to paralyze us, Jesus calls us to press through that shame and enter the joy that he has prepared for us.

That’s what forgiveness is and that’s what the cross offers. It offers a death, but it also offers a new life. It offers shame, but it also offers joy. The promise of God is not that I would avoid shame in my life, Jesus didn’t avoid it either, but the promise is that I would be able to persevere through it.

So the shame of my past had a hold on me and I really had no clue on how to deal with it. Almost six years ago, I attended my first Souly Business and during my quiet time, the Lord spoke to me on the path out on the backside of the property out there. After spending most of my adult life feeling shame and unqualified to ever pastor again, I was walking on that dirt path back there when I heard him clearly say, “You are a pastor.” I broke down again. I started bawling out there in the dirt.

This wasn’t something I was expecting. This wasn’t something I was praying about. This was him looking through me shame and seeing a joyful future. Where I saw death, he saw new life. Where I saw the end of a road, he saw the beginning of another. Jesus is the lord over death and new life.

And he had breathed new life in me, but there was another invitation to... come and die.

I need you to understand this, I didn’t want to go back into the ministry. Over the next year and a half after he spoke to me, I wrestled with this. I didn’t want to die anymore. Lord, isn’t there another way. I knew if I went back into the ministry, it would mean facing my shame. It meant that I couldn’t just ignore my past anymore, but that I was going to have to face it. It also would mean dying daily as I sacrificed my life for others.

In the fall of 2019, I was hired as the pastor of Cornerstone Church in Clayton, NC. And when I took that role, the invitation from Jesus was come and die. And that’s what I feel like I’ve been doing over the past few years. Following Jesus isn’t for the faint of heart. I’ve lost friends and had family members essentially disown me. I’ve had people come to the church and leave the church and say all types of false things about me. I’ve had people spreading lies about our church and others begging people not to go there. And the word of the Lord to me has been simple. Don’t defend yourself. Come and die.

I’ve spent 15 years as a manufacturer rep in the plumbing industry until earlier this year when God asked me to give up my lucrative sales job to go full-time into the ministry. I didn’t want to do it. I had been a bi-vocational pastor for over 3 years and enjoyed doing both. I made good money and my wife was able to stay home with our kids. But God’s call to me was to come and die. So I quit my sales job and started working full time for the church in May of this year. For some reason, I still haven’t learned my lesson, because I thought things would be different. Once I quit my job and devoted myself fully to the ministry, things would get better. I wouldn’t have to die anymore. Wrong.

Every day, I’m having to die a little more. My wife is having to work a couple of days a week. I’m having to learn how to take care of my children. A task I had successfully avoided for many years thanks to working two jobs. I had a built in excuse. Sorry honey, can’t help around the house, I’m too busy. Gotta run. See you late tonight. Now I’ve got no excuse. I’m having to die to myself every day.

And in the midst of all of this, the church isn’t growing. It’s actually shrinking some. I was so sure it would grow once I had more time to devote to it, but it’s not. It’s become stagnant at best and declining at worst. And I have realized how little control I have over anything that happens in my life. And I think this is why I have had to come to embrace another word that I believe defines the Christian life and that word is Surrender. That past few months for me has been a time of surrender. What little is left of me, is being surrendered to Jesus. And I’m having to daily answer his bidding to come and die.

So if you thought this talk was going to end with a beautiful story of how God has made my life so much better, I apologize. That’s not what the cross teaches us. It really is an invitation. And the new life that it promises us comes at a cost and that cost is our life. So my invitation to you tonight, is the same invitation given to me, which is this…Gentlemen welcome to the cross…this is the place where you come and die.

Thank you.