The true cross - Art Katz

The true cross is deadly; it is painful, but it alone can bring to death that veil and part it that we might enter boldly into the new and living way made available once and for all through His blood. It is not fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. If you presume to have come to the cross and have experienced no pain, you have not come. If that is what the cross did to Jesus, then that is what the cross will do to every man to set him free. God must do everything for us because it is rent from top to bottom. Our part is to yield and trust, to desire and welcome its work. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and reckon it crucified, but we must be careful to distinguish lazy acceptance from the real work of God. We mustn’t fail here. We mustn’t spiritualize this or think that because we can verbalize it, we have the actuality. It is a genuine experience that is required, as genuine and authentic as the splitting of the veil that was over the holiest place of all. Something very real must take place, and merely verbalizing about it does not mean that it has been actualized. It is going to require a tear, a pain, a giving up, a forsaking, a bleeding of the tissue where we really hurt and where our life is, in order to experience the rending of that veil. But until our veil is rent, how shall we receive the benefit of the veil that He has rent? He invites us to come boldly to find help in time of need-mercy and grace, which we desperately need, especially in the last days, and day by day, even now. We dare not rest with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate King Saul and spare the best of the sheep and oxen. Insist that the work be done in very truth, and it will be done. The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when the work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that there is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience into the presence of the living God.

excerpt from "The veil of self"

2 Cor 1:9 Indeed, we felt within ourselves that we had received the [very] sentence of death, but that was to keep us from trusting in and depending on ourselves instead of on God Who raises the dead. (Amplified Bible)

as Art says we have substituted the real cross for a "plastic", the cross that was an instrument of cruel death and torture has become a "jewelry" and something we hang on walls in churches.

I have in my profession noticed i become "familiar" with certain things and thus i do not notice sometimes the tremendous value of it or the error with the text/task at hand. Because i work every day with it.

And so i have also noticed it is very easy to familiarize spiritual truths that are worthy of an eternal awe and amazement at.

The cross is one of those things that have been familiarized in our churches at large.