Tonight Stephen is preaching on the Cross at the House of Prayer’s (Good) Friday Night Encounter God Service.  You can watch or listen to the message LIVE AT THIS WEBSITE (for free).   Look for the menu that says LIVE WEBCAST WITH WORSHIP AND TEACHING and click on Watch or Listen (whichever you prefer) next to the Friday Night 6pm session.  The message starts around 7:30pm CST.

You can get the notes for the message above at this link.  Look for the menu titled Most Recent Notes and Stephen’s will be at the top or near the top.   You can also get a copy of a Harmony of the Crucifixion Accounts from the Gospels here. 

Today we celebrate the most unimaginable day in the history of all things… the day God was wounded for our transgressions and chastised for our iniquities.  God Himself bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.  He did not look away from the ocean of pain and depraved ugliness in the human heart, yet we despised Him, rejected Him and assumed Him to be smitten by God (though He was God).    Jesus was the Man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief… oppressed and afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth.  He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, yet He said nothing, did nothing to stop it.  He could have turned the world on its axis and called all of Heaven’s angels to His side.  No one actually had the power to take His life… it was Jesus who laid it down by His own accord. 

Today, on Good Friday, may our hearts come before a Love so Radical, a Passion so Holy, and a Desire so Unthinkable that even death was not too far to reach for the King of Kings and Lord or Lords. 

Take this to heart and doubt not that you are the one who killed Christ. Your sins certainly did, and when you see the nails driven through his hands, be sure that you are pounding, and when the thorns pierce his brow, know that they are your evil thoughts. Consider that if one thorn pierced Christ you deserve one hundred thousand.

The whole value of the meditation of the suffering of Christ lies in this, that man should come to the knowledge of himself and sink and tremble. If you are so hardened that you do not tremble, then you have reason to tremble. Pray to God that he may soften your heart and make fruitful your meditation upon the suffering of Christ, for we ourselves are incapable of proper reflection unless God instills it.

But if one does meditate rightly on the suffering of Christ for a day, an hour, or even a quarter of an hour, this we may confidently say is better than a whole year of fasting, days of psalm singing, yes, than even one hundred masses, because this reflection changes the whole man and makes him new…   (Martin Luther)

To those present that day the Cross was a scene unforgettable in its horror and yet somehow unthinkably beautiful. Memories of skin torn asunder, heaving sweat, dripping blood, and tear-stained eyes filled their minds. Through the testimony of Scripture and the ministry of the Holy Spirit we, no less than they, should also know the feeling of this graphic scene bearing down upon our souls until our hearts are crushed. When you join John at the foot of the Cross and behold the chest you leaned upon the night before now covered in blood and straining to be filled with breath, indifference is not plausible. If you kneel beside Mary and look up to see the One who entered your womb by the Holy Spirit, the One who grew before your eyes through the passing years, the One promised to sit upon the throne of David, now marred and reviled, your heart is flung into a torrent of emotion.  (Stephen Venable)

…That is why the saints have always taken up meditation on the sorrows of Jesus Christ:  it was by this means that Saint Francis of Assisi became a seraph.  One day a gentleman found him weeping and crying out with a loud voice.  On being asked why he did so, he answered, “I weep for the sorrows and ignominies of my Lord:  and what makes me weep the most is that we, for whom he suffered so much, live in forgetfulness of Him.”  And on saying this he redoubled his tears, so that this man too began to weep.  Whenever the saint heard the bleating of a lamb, or saw anything else that reawakened the memory of Jesus’ Passion, he immediately fell aweeping.  Another time, when he was sick, someone told him that he should have a book of devotion read to him.   “My book,” he replied, “is Jesus crucified.”  Hence he did nothing but exhort his brethren to think of the Passion of Jesus Christ at all times.   (St. Alphonsus Liguori)

Great thief of hearts, the strength of your love has broken even our hard hearts.  You inflamed the whole world with your love.  Wisest Lord, inebriate our hearts with this wine, burn them with this fire, pierce them with this arrow of your love.   This, your cross, is indeed a crossbow that pierces hearts.   Let the whole world know that my heart is stricken.   Sweetest love, what have you done?  You have come to heal me, and you have wounded me.  You have come to teach me, and you have made me like someone mad.  O wisest madness, may I never live without you.  Lord, everything that I see on the cross invites me to love:  the wood, the form, the wounds in your body; and above all, your love invites me to love you and never forget you.  (John of Avila)