This morning I was reminded by a friend the image of the cross of Christ. Then when I began seeing the image of Christ on the cross I was led to think of all He went through but more specfic I began to think of the garden. When I say the garden, I am talking about the garden that Christ knelt in the night before His execution and cried out to His Father. Christ knelt that night sweating blood. Supposedly at the highest point of stress the body can sweat blood. Christ knelt talking to His Father in Luke chapter 22 starting in verse 42, saying, “⁴²Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” ⁴³And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. ⁴⁴And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. Christ immediately comes across saying God if there is any other way please let it be so. Was Christ simply trying to get out of going to the cross? By no means, Christ said this statement, knowing full well there was NO other way! So why say it? Jesus knelt and said these words to show to those reading thousands of years later that there was NO other way to be rescued from sin and that He was the only way we could be saved. Was the cross brutal? You better believe it. This is not some candy coated story, this is a true story. When I am reminded of the story of the Cross I am also reminded John 16:33, ^“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. Christ before He went to the Cross, not having overcome anything yet, says these words knowing full well what was going to happen! He says that IN ME you will have hope and your going to Need that! Not collectively we are going to need it but individually we are going to need it. God has already walked me through places in my life where its like if I hadn’t had the Cross I would have been at a complete lose. (Whether its deaths in your life, divorce, hardships, or whatever) God promises those times will come. In this world you will have troubles, but take Heart, I have already been to the Cross for your troubles. And when the darkest night of your life comes, I want to point you somewhere, and you say well to Jesus…true. But specifically I want to point you to the same place I want to point you to go when the bottom drops out and that is to the Cross of Jesus Christ. See I think we think a lot of times we go to the Cross as a place to go for salvation and we go to the cross when we need our sins dealt with right? No, the Cross is the place you go when the hardest stuff in life comes. See at the Cross there are things that are true and when the darkest night in your life comes you have to know the bitter truth of the Cross of Jesus. Hebrews chapter six says Christ becomes our sacrifice. It says in one of the phrases about that that Christ becomes an anchor for the soul! I love that phrase! It means that the winds and the gales come and blow but Jesus is our anchor! I am telling you something I have needed that anchor in my life! I have found that anchor to be true in my life. The Cross says a couple of things to us. The First thing we see when we look at the Cross and its the thing we need to know the most is that God loves us! You have to know that when the bottom drops out. You have to think cause when your mom gets cancer or when your dad’s business goes under and life gets turned upside down, everything cracks. Or something worse happens, something terrible happens to you or someone you love and in that moment the common thing is to think God doesn’t care about us, God doesn’t love us, God must hate us! Look what He is letting happen! You can get lost in that type of free fall unless you get your gaze up to the Cross and when you get you get your gaze up to the Cross it doesn’t make the pain go away it doesn’t bring your sister back from the dead. But when you look up at the Cross, you say you know I don’t anything about whats going, I can’t make sense of anything in here but I know one thing. I know that there is a Cross standing in history. It is real, it is powerful, it is eternal, it is the place where Christ died because God cares for me and God loves me and I have to know that right now. The second thing you see, is that God paints on a canvas bigger than we can see or imagine! Its the kind of thing, like when you go to a conference or a camp and you get back and God uses you to touch the life of someone that wasn’t even there and it just dominos back on more people and maybe its someone who doesn’t believe in God and you are the example and the light that leads them to the Cross! That is God always working on a canvas bigger than you can see or understand, and thats what was happening at the Cross. What am I talking about? Let me just say it this way, if you were standing six feet from the Cross, this is what you would think and here is what I would think. God has lost control, God doesn’t know what He is doing, God may not even exist, God is cruel, all of this stuff is unreliable, I don’t know if you can trust any of it, this guy may have been deluted and deceived, you would have stood there and said this is the worst thing I have ever seen before in my life! But we are not standing six feet from the Cross, we are standing way, way, way back from the Cross. And all these years back from the Cross, when we look back up at the Cross we don’t say thats the worst thing we have ever seen, I say thats the most amazing thing I have ever seen! I don’t say there isn’t a God, I say what an amazing God there is! When I look from here from this vantage point, I don’t just see the son of God hanging on a Cross, which is all I see from the six foot vantage point. When I back up here, I see all the old, all the new, ancient past, all the future, I see the whole story, I see me in the story, I see salvation, redemption, kindness, forgiveness, mercy, grace, a way out, my future, my Hope, my life, I see it all there and I say, “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my whole life!” Thats because why? Because we have the vantage point of distance, to be able to see that God wasn’t painted in a tiny little postage size Cross window. No. God was painting on a canvas bigger than you can ever see or dream of! Be Encouraged at our great God