Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt - "The Cross and Self"

Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt – The Cross and Self -

A. W. Tozer wrote: “If I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is rather a new bright ornament upon the bosom of self-assured and carnal Christianity….The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it…the flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross; before that cross it bows and toward that cross it points with carefully staged histrionics – but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of the cross it stubbornly refuses to bear.”

Here is the crux of the issue. The gospel is designed to do to self what the cross did to those who hung upon it: put it utterly to death. This is the good news in which Paul exulted: “I am crucified with Christ!” The cross is not a fire escape from hell to heaven but a place where we die in Christ. Only then can we experience “the power of His resurrection” (Philippians:3:10That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
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