The Cross of Christ: Self-Understanding and Self-Giving

This week’s reading from John Stott’s The Cross of Christ for Reading Classics Together at Challies.com is Chapter 11, Self-Understanding and Sefl-Giving. Instead of summarizing the whole chapter, I’ll just highlight a few points from it.

The self-understanding Stott writes of is not self-absorption, but a means to self-giving. The community of the cross will be “marked by sacrifice, service and suffering’ which works itself out in the home, the church, and the world.

The Christian Home
The Christian home should be marked by the self-giving love of the cross, but, says Stott, it is husbands who are particularly singled out. “[T]hey are to love their wives with the love which Christ has for his bride the church.” If our homes were distinguished by self-giving love Christian homes would be be more fulfilling and more solid.

The Church
Those in the church are to love one another.

We have only to remember that our fellow Christian is a “brother [or sister] for whom Christ died,” and we will never disregard, but always seek to serve, their truest and highest welfare. To sin against them would be to sin against Christ.

The World
Christ sends us out into the world.

Mission arises from the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. His birth, by which he identified himself with our humanity, calls us to a similar costly identification with people. His death reminds us that suffering is the key to church growth, since it is the seed that dies which multiplies. And his resurrection gave him the universal lordship that enabled him both to claim that “all authority” was now his and to send his church to disciple the nations.

Next up is chapter 12, Loving Our Enemies.

The Cross of Christ: The Community of Celebration

This week’s reading from John Stott’s The Cross of Christ for Reading Classics Together at Challies.com is Chapter 10, The Community of Celebration. 

Stott starts by pointing out that Jesus didn’t die simply to save individuals but to make a new community of his own people, people from every nation who “live by and under the cross.” First of all, those in the new community of people have a new relationship to God, a relationship marked by

• Boldness, “both in our witness to the world and our prayers to God.”
• Love. Once we were alienated from him, but now we adore and serve him.
• Joy. “The Christian community is a community of celebration.

The centerpoint of our community of celebration is the Lord’s Supper. Stott lists five ways that what we do at the Lord’s Supper is connected to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. 

• We remember it.
• We partake of it’s benefits.
• We proclaim it.
• We attribute our unity to it.
• We give thanks for it, and in response “offer ourselves, our souls and bodies as ‘living sacrifices’ to his service….”

The rest of the chapter discusses the nature of the sacrifice we make in response to Christ’s sacrifice to us, contrasting both the Roman Catholic view and the view of the Protestant Reformation, and then discussing other mediating views, mostly put forward by various Anglicans, I think. I have to admit that this was my least favorite part of the chapter. For one, I found it difficult to understand the nuances of the vaiou I suspect if I were Anglican, like Stott was, I might find it all more relevant.

In the end, Stott affirms the view of the Prostestant Refomormation. Christ’s sacrifice and ours 

differ from one another too widely for it ever to be seemly to associate them. Christ died for us while we were still sinners and enemies. His self-giving love evokes and inspires ours. So ours is always secondary and responsive to him. To try to unite them is to blur the primary and the secondary, the the source and the stream, initiatie and response, grace and faith. A proper jealousy for the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice for sin will lead us to avoid any formulation that could conceivably detract from it.

Next up is chapter 11, Self-Understanding and Self-giving.

The Cross of Christ: The Conquest of Evil

I’m trying to get my blogging back to normal, but it’s been a struggle. This week, instead of doing a summary of the week’s chapter from John Stott’s The Cross of Christ as part of Reading Classics Together at Challies.com, I’m simply going to quote a bit from it.  This is  from Chapter 9, The Conquest of Evil, on the relationship of Christ’s death to his resurrection in the efficacy of his work.

Of course the resurrection was essential to confirm the efficacy of his death, as his incarnation had been to prepare for its possibility. But we must insist that Christ’s work of sin-bearing was finished on the cross, that the victory over the devil, sin and death was won there, and that what the resurrection did was to vindicate the Jesus whom men had rejected, to declare with power that he is the Son of God,  and publicly to confirm that his sin-bearing death had been effective for the forgiveness of sins. If he had not been raised, our faith and our preaching would be futile, since his person and work would not have received the divine endorsement.  .  .  .

To sum up, the gospel includes both the death and the resurrection of Jesus, since nothing would have been accomplished by his death if he had not been raised from it. Yet the gospel emphasizes the cross, since it was there that the victory was accomplished. The resurrection did not achieve our deliverance from sin and death, but has brought us an assurance of both. It is because of the resurrection that our “faith and hope are in God” (1 Pet 1:3, 21).

Next up is chapter 10, The Community of Celebration.