8-30-21 God's Rescue Mission

Daily Devotion: God's Rescue Mission – Greg Laurie – www.harvest.org “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”—1 Corinthians 1:18 Before I was a Christian, I always had an interest in Jesus Christ. He fascinated me. I knew that He existed at one time, but I never thought of Him as someone that I could enter into a relationship with. I learned some things about Jesus by looking at religious art. For example, I learned that He often walked around carrying a lamb, and sometimes He carried a staff as well. But pretty much everything I learned about Jesus came from movies. However, there was a part of His story that I didn’t like: the ending. In fact, I wondered why no one had ever made a movie about Jesus that ended differently. I didn’t like the fact that He died on the cross. I wanted to edit out that part of the story. It made no sense to me at that time. And it wasn’t until I became a Christian that I realized it was all about that part of the story. It was all about the cross. Actually, that was the Lord’s purpose and plan from the very beginning. Revelation 13:8 tells us that He was “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (NKJV). The birth of Jesus took place so there would be the death and resurrection of Jesus. His death on the cross wasn’t an afterthought on the part of God the Father. Before there was a solar system, before there was a planet called Earth and a garden called Eden, before there was a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, before sin entered the human race, a decision was made in the councils of eternity. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit decided that the Son would come to Earth on a rescue mission. That is why the cross is so important to us as Christians. There is power in the message of the cross.