This modern day jesus that is up in heaven hoping someone will believe in him and help him in his cause is pathetic at best and blasphemise at worst. We are not to try to coax people to come to Christ, but we are to command them to come. The Lord Jesus Christ is sovereign God and He is in control of all things (Colossians 1:16-17) and He commands all men everywhere to repent. We are to preach the Deity of The Lord Jesus with boldness and this is why I believe that the Apostles in the book of Acts went everywhere preaching the resurrection. Today the supposed gospel stops at the cross, just like the Romanist, for most people Jesus is still on the cross in their gospel. When I grew up in church I must of heard "Jesus died on the cross for your sins" 5000 times and I can't even remember hearing once that He is the risen Lord. The gospel that most people preach is not lining up with the book of Acts or Paul's description of the the gospel in 1Cor.15. In 1Cor.15 Paul does of coarse mention the death and burial but he spends most of the chapter on the resurrection. Yes, we do absolutely need to talk about Christ's work on the cross where He absorbed the Father's wrath for those who would believe, but not to the exclusion of the resurrection. Most trying to preach the gospel don't understand The Lord Jesus' substitutionary work on the cross anyway because to them it is either just an example of self-sacrifice or a payment for the whole world which at that point would be detached from the believer and would have no individual sudstitionary value. So I got to thinking about why it so popular to hear about Jesus on the cross but so unpopular to hear of Him walking out of the tomb. I see two reasons and I am sure there are more. First we like, in our flesh, Jesus paying for our sins on the cross because we want to go to heaven and we want our sins forgiven, but we don't like Jesus as the risen Lord because that means we have to bow to Him as our Lord and of coarse we don't want that (especially as Americans). Secondly I think that the natural man can understand and even likes Jesus dying on the cross but it takes a supernatural revelation to know the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ. So as we preach the gospel lets go out with power of our risen Lord (Matt.28:18-20) and preach the whole gospel to the glory of our risen and ascended King.
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