Daily Reflections From Higher Things®

Today's Reading: John 12:20-33 Daily Lectionary: 2 Chronicles 33:1-25; Colossians 1:24-2:7 Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (John 12:24) In the Name + of Jesus. Amen. We take the cross for granted, as if it's not an awful symbol of death. What if the main symbol of Christianity were an electric chair or hangman's noose, or a guillotine, or a lethal injection needle? Would that be weird? The cross is exactly that: a means of execution—and a painful and awful execution at that! It's a symbol of death. Perhaps the reason we cherish the cross as the symbol of the Christian faith is that no matter how awful, evil, painful, and terrible that death of Jesus was on that Cross, its purpose and what it accomplished was to save us from our sins, to rescue us from eternal judgment and to give us everlasting life. In other words, what was an instrument of torture and death, God Himself turned into the symbol