Some years ago I was with a Christian co-worker in Singapore. In the course of the conversation he remarked, "The Church has so many items in her shop window that the cross is no longer noticed."
I realized my friend had put his finger on a major defect in the contemporary Church. Today you can go into a Christian bookstore and find a book on almost any subject - how to have a better marriage, how to raise godly children, how to understand your own personality, how to keep a better house. There is almost no limit! Many of these books have merit, but none would be effective without the cross. The cross is the only source of grace and power to make all the other good advice work. It is time the Church put the cross back in the center of her shop window.
God told the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land that when they built an altar, they were to put no other objects around it.
In Exodus 20:24-25 God gave the Israelites specific instructions about the kind of altar on which they were to offer their sacrificies.
"An altar of earth you shall make for Me....And if you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build on it of hewn stone; for if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it."
Their altar was to be made only of materials in their natural condition, not modified in any way by man - earth or unhewn stone. Anything added by human hands would defile it.
Further on, in Deuteronomy 16:21, the Lord warned His people:
"You shall not plant for yourself any tree, as a wooden image, near the altar which you build for yourself to the Lord your God."
There was to be nothing that would distract the attention of the Israelites from the altar on which they were to offer their sacrifices. There was no place for human art or ingenuity that would divert the attention from the crude, stark simplicity of the altar. That is a lesson for us, too. We are not to surround the cross with anything. We are to put nothing on the cross or in front of the cross that in any way would obscure it. The cross is stark, just as the crucifixion of Christ was a stark and horrible scene.
If we do not give the cross its rightful place at the center of our lives, our faith loses its meaning and power. We end up with an innocuous list of moral generalities or else a standard of conduct that we cannot attain to. No one will ever live out the Sermon on the Mount without the power of the cross in his or her life.
I have been praying for some years that God would enable the Church to restore the cross to its rightful place.
(Derek Prince - from "The Atonement")