The Only Boast of a Christian

The Olympic Games in Atlanta ended just one week ago, and I’m sure that you come away with some enduring memories of the athletes and their amazing performances. One image in particular is etched into my memory banks. It is the performance of Kerri Strug, the U.S. woman gymnast.

Kerri is just 18 and weighs only 87 lbs., but on her final vault of the team competition, she showed the determination and guts of a prizefighter. She had landed awkwardly on her previous vault and had sprained her ankle in the process. Not knowing whether the team would need her last vault in order to beat the Russians, Kerri set off down the runway for her final attempt.

She hit the springboard, launched into a 1 and 1/2 Yurchenko, and stuck the landing. As she stood there before the judges, who awarded her a solid 9.712, in a split second the look of triumph on her face was quickly replaced by a grimace of pain, and she crumpled to the mat with a badly injured ankle.

You have to marvel at the dedication, the discipline, and the sheer tenacity of a Kerri Strug. Yet she is just one of the thousands of girls and boys, young men and young women who are willing to put in 8…9…10 hours a day in the gym, or in the pool, or on the track, to achieve Olympic-level greatness.

There is a sense in which their lives reflect a single-minded devotion to excellence in their sport. Their schedule is built around that goal; their priorities reflect it; their lives are defined by it.

And that is the kind of magnificent obsession that Paul talks about in the last few verses of the book of Galatians. He talks, in spiritual terms, of that which ought to occupy the center of our lives as Christians. Let’s see what he has to say in Gal. 6:11…

See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!

He’s come to the end of his letter now, and he takes the pen from his secretary and writes the last few verses in his own hand. Many Bible scholars believe that Paul had a disease of the eyes that made it hard for him to see; hence, the large letters.

Or perhaps he was using large letters to emphasize what he was going to say next. Whatever—it would have been hard for the Galatian Christians to the last few sentences of this letter. Continuing in verse 12…

Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. Not even those who are circumcised obey the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your flesh.

Paul is referring here to the Judaizers, those strict Christian legalists who had come from Jerusalem and were trying to get the Galatians to adopt the Jewish Law. They taught that any Gentile—even though he had become a follower of Jesus Christ—couldn’t possibly be accepted in God’s sight unless he became like a Jew and observed the Law of Moses.

So they wanted the Galatians to be circumcised. They wanted them to observe the special feast days of Judaism. They wanted them to keep the dietary regulations of the Law, and so on.

And Paul said, in no uncertain terms in this letter: “If you do that, you will be falling away from grace. You’ll be turning your back on the Lord Jesus Christ and his salvation, which is the gift of God, and you’ll be going back to a system which is inferior and inadequate, and was never meant by God to make you acceptable in His sight in the first place. The purpose of the Law was to lead you to Christ; now that Christ has come, you don’t need the Law anymore.”

“Furthermore, not only is their theology wrong, but their motives are wrong too. They want you to be circumcised in order to make themselves look good. They want to gain a reputation—they want to gain followers for their point of view. They want to be able to boast about your flesh.

“And on top of all that, they are inconsistent.” as Paul says in verse 13. “They make a big to do about the Law, but they don’t even observe it consistently themselves.”

“But above all, the real reason they are doing this is that they do NOT want to be associated with the cross of Christ. They do not want to be identified with a crucified Messiah.” Look again at the latter part of verse 12…

The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ.

You see, if you buy into a message that claims that God allowed himself to be beaten and bruised and hung on a cross and executed, you are regarded by the world to be a absolute fool.

A crucified God is a scandal to a religious man, and it is sheer lunacy to a secular man. The cross is “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1.

And that’s why these Judaizers didn’t want to be identified with the cross. They wanted to present a more palatable, more tasteful, more respectable, more sophisticated kind of gospel to people—a gospel that says “You’re not so bad… you can work your way into God’s favor.”

But Paul says: “Not only do I want to be identified with the cross of Christ—I want it to be at the center of my life. I want it to be my obsession—the idea that my whole life is built around.” Look at verse 14…

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

The word “boast” ( or “glory” as in the KJV) in v. 14 can actually have this connotation—it means whatever I trust in, rejoice in, revel in, and live for—this is my magnificent obsession.

Now people build their lives around many things. Some people build their lives around intellectual achievement; scholarship, academics, learning. That is their boast.

Others build their lives around athletics—sports, competition, physical fitness. That is their boast; the thing they glory in. Others are captivated by money, or political power, or fame.

Yet here is Paul saying that the only thing he boasts in is the cross of Jesus Christ. Most people would turn up their nose at such a choice. After all, the cross was an instrument of torture and death—the ancient equivalent of our electric chair or hangman’s noose.

We, who are used to seeing crosses around people’s necks or on church steeples, need to put ourselves back into the first century.

The cross was the standard Roman instrument for executing slaves and prisoners. If you were a Roman citizen, one of your rights was that you could not be crucified. In fact, the Romans themselves regarded the cross to be so gruesome, so vile, so fearful a means of death, that they would not even mention the word in polite company.

When a Roman judge pronounced the death sentence on a prisoner, he wouldn’t even utter the Latin word “crux”—he would say “Arbori infelici suspendito”—”Hang him from the unlucky tree”.

And yet in that environment, in that culture—in a society which understood only too well what crucifixion entailed—the cross became the symbol of Christianity. Is that not odd? You would think that the early Christians would have chosen a different symbol if they wanted other people to become Christians.

Why not choose the empty tomb? Or the stone that was rolled away? Or perhaps some symbol relating to one of Jesus’ miracles—five loaves or two fish maybe? But no—the early Christians deliberately chose the most objectionable symbol in the whole Roman Empire. And they gloried in it.

Why? Because it was on that cross that Jesus, the Son of God, died to take away our sins. The cross tells us just how much God loved us, that he was willing to come here and die like that. And it tells us also just how lost we were in our sins that it would take the death of God to purchase our redemption.

That’s why the cross was at the center of Christian preaching from the very beginning. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter preached a sermon about the cross. When the apostle Paul went on his missionary journeys, he preached the cross. Listen to what he says in 1 Corinthians…

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

In the years after Jesus’ ministry when his followers wanted to leave a permanent record of his life and deeds, what did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John choose to focus upon? They focused upon Jesus’ death on the cross.

Would you not think it strange to read a biography of a person’s life which devotes hardly any space at all to his birth, and practically none at all to his childhood? Compared with what they could have written about Jesus’ teachings and miracles, the Gospel writers are very selective and concise.

Yet they devote a great deal space to the events of the final week of his life, leading up to his crucifixion. The Gospel of John has just 21 chapters. Nine of them are devoted to the last week of Jesus’ life. It’s obvious that the Gospel writers regarded his death on the cross as the paramount event of his life.

So if you would be a follower of Jesus, you have to come to the cross. You can’t get around it. His death is the climactic, defining event of his life. I don’t know of anyone else you can say that about.

And Paul says “For a Christian, there’s only one thing worth boasting in—the cross of Christ.” Look again at what he says in verse 14…

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

What does he mean by that latter statement? Simply this: When you make a crucified Savior the center of your life, you die to the world and the world dies to you. Your whole orientation to living changes. You no longer live for the world’s approval. You no longer need the accolades of man, or the accomplishments that the world regards as important.

As far as the world’s values and the world’s priorities are concerned, you’re dead. It’s as though you have been crucified. Jesus is now the one for whom you are living your life. He’s your magnificent obsession.

I wonder this morning who, or what, is at the center of your life? Paul said in verse 17 that he bore on his body the marks of Jesus. He actually had scars on his body from the beatings and the stonings that he endured because he was a follower of Jesus.

There’s a standing joke in baseball circles about Tommy Lasorda, the manager of the LA Dodgers. They say if you cut Tommy, he’ll bleed Dodger blue. I wonder if God were to cut into our lives this morning, what would we bleed? Some of us might bleed sports. Some of us might bleed career or reputation or success. Some of us might bleed family. We bleed what is at the center of our lives. Would any of us bleed Jesus? When Jesus hung dying on that cross, he bled you.