Focus: Christ Died for Me

Text: Gal.2:20

"Who LOVED ME, and GAVE HIMSELF FOR ME."

This is the Easter Week or the Week of the Cross. The journey to Calvary has begun in earnest. But while for so many the Cross is nothing but an event of history, for Paul, it is an event of personal spiritual significance.

Paul sees the Cross as divine love in action - Christ "loved me."

For Paul, Christ loving him meant Christ dying for him as well - He "gave himself for me."

What about you? Has the Cross become a revelation in your soul? Are you walking in the reality of Calvary? Has the death of Christ on the Cross become in effect a personal inward encounter to you, spiritually speaking?

Paul was speaking with so much awareness and deep conviction in his soul - "who loved me, and gave himself for me."

My soul sings, "O, blessed assurance! Jesus is mine!" I testify that the cross is a reality in my personal life, and pray that is also true of you. The cross has brought heaven into my life and I am forever basking in the glory of it. My life has been radically and forever altered. A new me is showing up everyday. God is having His way in me. I assuredly reecho the words of Nancy White Kelly, "My life's horizontal started when Jesus Christ introduced me to vertical fine-tuning," and also the words of the late Donald R. Brown: "When I nominated Jesus as my supreme ecologist, in that moment, my years of inner pollution became instantly bio-degradable." Hallelujah!

The cross is the cemetery of the old life and the resurrection ground of a brand new life.

Yes, Christ loved and died for us. In every believer God transforms the cross of history into a personal spiritual reality. The cross of Christ is our spiritual asset, and something to be eternally grateful for. Amen.

by Bishop Moses E. Peter