Is the Cross and the Church relevant? A pastor at Chicago's Jesus People USA and the frontman with the Resurrection Band, Glenn Kaiser responds.

If we could simply rebuke self as easy as Satan, perhaps it would not be so, but deliverance from demons is far easier and far less costly than deliverance from our own agendas and bad attitudes. Character is the issue and the cross is the cure.

Quoting a recent Tear Fund article, "Christ identified the task. It is the supreme, priority task of making disciples. What is a disciple? According to Jesus, a disciple is one who...spends the rest of his/her life learning the commands of God and obeying them."

This is true regardless of the cultural climate. Regardless of institutional Church politics, power struggles, lazy congregations, inept leadership, sterile artistic offerings and basically self centred individuals trying to either find or maintain "the good life' of upper middle class white suburban culture. The fact remains that we must love the Church as Jesus did and does. We must work within her to encourage, challenge, correct, strengthen and teach her because she is US!!! A Christian becomes part of the Church at conversion and so the Church will never reach total maturity or perfection because she contains people like you and me who still sin in a multitude of ways.

"Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her..." (Eph 5:25) Do we? Sometimes we expect the Church to give up its mission so that it can serve US, our desire, our plans...

Think of what Jesus suffered on that cross. YOU are why! The person next to you is why! The love of God is WHY enough for me and if it isn't I have some repenting to do. I've lost focus; I've gotten my eyes off the cross and its implications.

The cross means so much to the" world! It offers identification with suffering, identification with rejection, with poverty, with separation from family and loved ones, identification with the common people, with the poor, with the disenfranchised, the marginal, the outcasts. Identification with the cross of Jesus means losing one's life, personal agendas, the world's standards of success and fulfilment. It identifies one with loss beyond all else.

My cross - whatever that may mean in my own life -just as Jesus' cross identifies me with all of this... and the cross also identifies me with the only life that IS life - it identifies me with Jesus Christ. I am not ashamed of the cross for it has destroyed and continues to destroy the person I was before I followed the one who died on it for me!

I am convinced that we would rather study worship, faith, prosperity, the "anointing", this or that blessing, small groups, the Father-heart of God, baptism, deliverance, fresh missions strategies, ANYTHING but the cross! We have been inoculated to its meaning, its relevance. We think we know enough about it and so rarely consider it. And so when the cross and its implications of dying to self and surrendering to God show up in our daily schedule we do anything but "count it all joy". Do I sound like a madman or might it be that I know WHY few follow Jesus in serving the poor, working in ghettos, serving in prisons and hospitals, by CHOICE and CALLING, living simply and ministering in marginal society?

When you understand what truly went on that day as Jesus from the cross said. "Father forgive them, they know not what they do!", you begin to grasp that YOUR NAME was in his mind at the time. So... is the cross relevant? Is the Church relevant? The Church is only as relevant to the world as the cross is relevant to the Church.

Question: When is LOVE relevant? It's what we need most. It's what we can't really have LIFE without. Our bodies can be alive, but if our hearts are cold we are dead while we physically live. If and when love becomes irrelevant, then and only then is the Church and her true mission irrelevant.

Out of love for the Father, love for the Church, love for you and me and love for those still without hope and without God in this world, Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame. I plead with you to never lose sight of the cross!

As always, the Lord has the last word. "For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (1 Cor 1:18)