Dear Friends,
In his book ‘The Passion’, Mike McKinley writes, ‘The cross of Christ is the reality that gives shape to the way Christians should think about every detail of our lives right now, from our marriages to our money, from our suffering to our success…. The cross is all we will need, and all we will have, on the last day of this life. But wonderfully, it’s also all that we need for today, tomorrow and every day up to the last one.’
As we enter this summer period we return once again to the Gospel of Matthew. We normally reserve the last chapters of the Gospels to Easter time, but this limits them to just a few Sundays each year and inevitably we only look at them piecemeal. So, as we come to the last chapters of Matthew’s Gospel account, we will spend the summer looking at Christ’s Passion in a bit more detail. We will sit with Jesus and His disciples at the Last Supper with the tension of betrayal and departure in the air. We will walk with them through Gethsemane with its physical and spiritual darkness. We will travel with Jesus as He faces the loneliness and pain of arrest and trial by those He came to save. We will be part of the crowd watching in complacency or anger as the Son of God is nailed to a cross and bears the curse for us. We will trudge with heavy feet and heavy hearts to the tomb in which His body is laid. And we will stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene, raised to life and listen intently once again to His commission to us to go and make disciples of all nations.
How strange to call these horrific and bloody events a ‘Passion’! Yet, it is appropriate, for it was because of God’s passionate love for His people that Christ Jesus went to the cross. By that cross alone may we be set free and have eternal hope. May His Passion become the passion of our lives, each and every day. God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.. Gal. 6:14KJV
Yours in His name,
Bobby Liddle
