Shalom,

I pray that by the time you read this, you have spent some time with the Lord and experienced today’s prayer and meditation time. You have been in your prayer closet, whatever that may look like, with just three of you.

I left the Fellowship Hall last night (4/5), spiritually and mentally agitated with myself. Feeling that I failed to lead the group to discuss adequately the content of the DVD we viewed.

When I worked on the crew of the movie Honky Tonk Freeway I was first employed on the Special Effects Crew that blew up the freeway bridge. I guess they liked my labor effort and then asked me to work on the Set Dressing Crew led by Danny May.

Working with set dressing, I learned the importance of the props used to make up the scene’s elements.

During our brief discussion of Ray Vander Laan’s TTWMK “The Lamb of God,” a couple of our group members commented on Jesus’s role in the drama that is revealed from Palm Sunday through to the scene of Resurrection Morning.

And rightly so, because everything we see as this event unfolds should point us to Christ. Christ from Creation to Resurrection and more.

Everything else simply reveals and validates that Jesus is the Messiah.

All the other participants and props affirm the truth and inerrancy of  Scripture.

Pardon me, but all other elements of this drama are secondary to Christ’s movement through time to fulfill His appointment with the Cross.

This Easter 2023, the World needs Christ like never before. Be much in prayer regarding your role as Christ’s appointment with the Cross impacts your movement through time.

Below is what Oswald Chambers has to say regarding that appointment.

April 6

The Collision of God and Sin

“… who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree …” (1 Peter 2:24).

The Cross of Christ is the revealed truth of God’s judgment on sin. Never associate the idea of martyrdom with the Cross of Christ. It was the supreme triumph, and it shook the very foundations of hell. There is nothing in time or eternity more absolutely certain and irrefutable than what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross—He made it possible for the entire human race to be brought back into a right-standing relationship with God. He made redemption the foundation of human life; that is, He made a way for every person to have fellowship with God.

The Cross was not something that happened to Jesus—He came to die; the Cross was His purpose in coming. He is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). The incarnation of Christ would have no meaning without the Cross. Beware of separating” God was manifested in the flesh …” from “… He made Him … to be sin for us …” (1 Timothy 3:16; 2 Corinthians 5:21). The purpose of the incarnation was redemption. God came in the flesh to take sin away, not to accomplish something for Himself. The Cross is the central event in time and eternity and the answer to all the problems of both.

The Cross is not the Cross of a man, but the Cross of God, and it can never be fully comprehended through human experience. The Cross is God exhibiting His nature. It is the gate through which any and every individual can enter into oneness with God. But it is not a gate we pass right through; it is one where we abide in the life that is found there.

The heart of salvation is the Cross of Christ. The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened. But all the cost and pain of the collision was absorbed by the heart of God.^[1]

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^[1] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: An Updated Edition in Today’s Language, ed. James Reimann (WORDsearch, 1992), 96–97.