I highly recommend listening to the audio and following along in your Bibles.

This message is based on 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.

If you grew up in a Christian environment you are probably very familiar with the message of the cross. But the message of the cross has not always been popular, and in many ways, it still isn't. I grew up Christian and live in a very Christian town making it easy for me to take the message of the cross for granted.

But when I compare Jesus to comic book heroes or even to popular beliefs about what power and leadership ought to look like it is easy to see a great contrast between that and the cross. Jesus won by losing, He saved by dying, He changed the world in incredible ways by methods that seemed doomed to fail, even backward of what we would expect.

So the final question is how do we relate to the cross?

Do we recognize it as the power of God to save us or do we think of it a foolishness?

Are you comfortable with being completely unable to save yourself? Are you okay with God having to rescue you at great cost to Himself?

I really did not have the time to fully develop this in this message so I have one more coming up that will go more deeply into why Jesus died on the cross and what it accomplished.

This message is really to wet your appetite for the next post.

For now, just know that God loves you. And it doesn't make sense. But Jesus died that you might live! That's the good news. You could say the bad news is that you can never save yourself, but I would rather say that the good news is that you don't need to, Jesus paid it all!