Lesson 9 Fighting in the Shadow of the Cross
Question 1
“Divine Love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter” --Beldon Lane
Relentless Love
Friend, I want to tell you something today: you’ve done wrong things, bad things, mean and hurtful things, and downright sinful things. So have I. But divine love is incessantly relentless. It’s coming after you! It’s pursuing you! It won’t stop until it gets you! Subdues you! Crushes you! Rebuilds you!
And what is divine love? It’s a cross on a hill! It’s the Lamb of God who became sin to take away your sin. It’s a perpetually restless love that suffered pain and death for you and sent the Spirit to love you! And it’s a risen Messiah who conquered sin and death for you!
And why is divine cross-love incessantly relentless? Because it wants to turn your woundedness into health. Yes, your horrible past, those long years of pain, that sin nobody knows about, that thing you did that’s unspeakable, those times you defiled your conscience and pierced yourself through with so many griefs. That’s what the divine love of the cross wants to heal and bring to health in you.
This divine cross-love wants to turn your deformity into beauty. Your deformed past, broken relationships, and impure mind, all made beautiful because God “makes all things beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
And this incessant red-hot, on-fire, cross-love is going to turn your embarrassment into laughter! The cross is going to make you smile again! Why? Because the cross took your guilt, shame, sin, past, and disappointing mistakes and killed them all and buried them in a tomb!
And now the Lord is going to break you out of your Egypt, the house of slavery where you suffered so much, and you’re going to walk with your head held high again, with true joy in your soul! “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high” (Leviticus 26:13).
Question 1. What does it mean to you personally that the Lord is going to bring you out of Egypt, set you free, lift your head up, and make you smile again?
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Sharon writes, "A week ago, I was not so sure. Now, I can look forward to living out these life-changing truths with conviction. No more haunting thoughts of wasted drunken evenings only to run back to the bottle a few days later. My ninth day with no alcohol. Admittedly, brief flash points of temptation. However, genuine reflection of what Jesus did for me at the cross and His resurrection have empowered me to redeem the time in productive pursuits and not brood over the past."