PRAYER PROMPT ••• If you’ve read my personal testimony on my blog, you know I left the church when I was 18.
I’ve spent half my life living for myself.
Despite my distance from God, I knew the truth… God sent Jesus to take my place on the cross.
Jesus died for my sins and the sins of the world before He rose from the dead three days later.
However, I was indifferent to the sacrifice.
I lacked understanding to what it truly meant and until I finally returned to Christ years later, I failed to even try to understand it…
We don’t crucify people in our society so we don’t see the horror first hand to truly appreciate the torture Jesus experienced.
And frankly, in my opinion, our churches tend to present a very sanitized version of what Jesus experienced.
Because, lets face it… it’s not comfortable to imagine a torture that lasted for hours.
We don’t want to think of His humiliation.
Suffering like He went through makes us uncomfortable.
We might even mentally compare Jesus being flogged to a few small bruises because we don’t want to consider how the beating literally tore the flesh off His body.
Can you imagine the agony of nails being slowly driven into flesh?
Or how the hammer’s vibration must have sent shockwaves throughout His body that was already wracked with pain?
Or, how about a ring of sharp, jagged thorns being shoved on His head, sending trails of blood into His eyes?
He experienced agony beyond words.
This was no quick death.
This was a grotesque and brutal way to die.
And it should have been me.
It should have been you.
Today, as you pray, thank Jesus for what He did for you.
He is God!
He didn’t have to do any of it!
He loved us so much – every one of us – that He allowed a Himself to be slaughtered for our sake.
When you think of Jesus’ crucifixion, look past the sanitized version and see it for what it really was: a nightmarish, degrading form of torture that in the end, was the greatest gift ever offered to mankind.
