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Nailed to the Cross

Colossians 2:13-15

Have you ever heard of T-rex worship?

This particular expression of praise occurs when the church-goer opts for a “medium/low” intensity level characterised by raising your hands to about chest height in an unconscious imitation of everyone’s favourite, tiny armed, apex predator. 

Not high overhead in carefree abandonment.

Not lowered in reverence.

But rather half-mast out of shame.

Do you ever find yourself standing in a Sunday morning service feeling unworthy and timid because of some struggle with sin? Your internet search history, or your expletive littered argument with your husband, or whatever THAT sin is that keeps popping up like Whack-a-Mole in your life, stands obnoxiously between you and God, blocking your view of him like a tall person at a concert.

You may even have prayed for forgiveness and repented of the behaviour. You know you’re technically forgiven because you know your Bible. But you don’t FEEL forgiven. At least not fully. You reckon you can just about stand before God, but only by a technicality, only by the skin of your teeth - you certainly aren’t ready to get too close to him yet. And so you find yourself in the no-man’s-land limbo of T-rex worship, waiting until a sufficient time-period has passed for your holiness level to reset. It’s as though sin and forgiveness operate on the same principle as an incorrectly entered passcode - “Your access has been blocked for 5 Sundays”.

This kind of thinking is un-theological, unbiblical, unhealthy nonsense.

“It is finished!”

These three victorious words, declared amid the agony of the cross, let us know that our sin is dealt with once and for all.

That sense of condemnation you feel has no place in your present or your future. Thousands of years ago, on a bleak hill in the middle-East, all of your sin, and all of the shame that goes with it, was placed on the shoulders of your Messiah and nailed to the cross.

In fact, you could go as far as to say that our refusal to let go of sin and shame is an insult to the work of Jesus on the cross - 

“I know you said that it’s all paid for but I’m just going to hang onto this guilt for a while and make sure.”

Repeat after me, “It is finished”- or to put it another way, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

So if all of this is true, why do we feel so condemned? 

If it’s not Jesus pointing the finger and telling us to we aren’t welcome to worship him fully, who is it?

If you feel accused, isn’t there a good chance it’s Satan, whose name literally means “accuser”?

He’s the one who wants to put the emphasis back on our failures, on his victories.

He’s the one who wants to keep us at a distance from God.

Now that we’ve identified the voice of the enemy speaking lies into our lives we need to somehow drown him out - we’ve got to turn up the voice of scriptural truth in our lives.

The gospel is not just something we need to preach to non-believers - it’s something we need to preach to ourselves everyday.

Let’s immerse ourselves in the truth that “it is finished”.

And let’s make T-Rex worship extinct.