Lessons from the Cross
John 19:25-27 These things therefore the soldiers did. But there were standing
by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife
of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw
his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his
mother, Woman, behold thy son! ……
In reading this scripture I feel as if I am
standing there listening to a conversation between Jesus and His mother. Things
couldn’t be worse, the pain and hopelessness that day was unbearable. What happened
to Jesus goes against everything that is in us because we are born survivors
and will fight for our last breath. That being the case, why did Jesus allow
this to happen to Him without a fight? After all, He did heal the sick, walk on
water and raise the dead. He could have called ten thousand angels to deliver
him … but He didn’t. The reason He didn’t was because He knew the spiritual will
of His father and we only know the natural mind of man.
Satan had been trying to take over mankind since
the Garden of Eden. It was in the Garden of Eden where God told Satan that He “will put enmity between him and the woman, and between his seed and her seed: he
shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’.
As Mary and the other three women stood
looking at Jesus that day, it didn’t seem like a lot of head bruising
was going on … but it was. Jesus used the most unlikely weapon known to mankind
to defeat Satan. He used the weapon of yielded-ness for which there is
no defense.
Jesus was not weak, He chased the money
changers out of the temple. However, He was not going to be pulled into Satan’s
type of warfare because Satan’s warfare was of the flesh. Jesus’ job was to bruise
Satan’s head as His father had said in Geneses 3:15, and this was
going to be done by the Spirit and not by the flesh.
One may think that Jesus actually surrendered
to Satan and that’s why He suffered the way He did. No, He submitted to him and there is a
big difference between submit and surrender. Even though both words are
verbs, submit means to yield to another while surrender means to give
up entirely. Jesus never gave up and as a result He was always in
charge.
Many years ago, I felt the Lord told me to
go to another country and minister. I went to the elders of the church and
shared my call and vision. They all agreed that it was not God who called me to
go, it was me. I knew I had heard from God and I wanted their blessing, but
they would not give it. I had been in the ministry a long time at that point and
I knew how to hear God’s voice and I knew they were wrong. I was actually caught
between a rock and a hard place because I felt it would be displeasing to God
to ignore them since I had asked them. I asked for God’s forgiveness and submitted
to them … but I did not surrender to them. I waited another year or
so and then I went to this other country and for the next twelve years I had
extremely powerful meetings over the whole country. I would go three or four
times each year. God honored my submission but He blessed me because I did not
surrender my vision and call.
If we are distracted by the pain of the
moment with Jesus on the cross, then we will miss the bigger picture and all of
the layers of lessons. The reason yielding is such a
powerful weapon is because there is no
known defense for it.
Father,
Teach us the difference between submitting and surrendering. We submit
to one another but we surrender our wills to You by dying daily. We want to
learn the layers of the lessons that Jesus taught us while on the cross.
Amen