The cross as an ethic …

We don’t talk about ethics very much, possibly because they’re so absent in our society.

One place that is renowned for lacking in ethics is Wall Street. Byron Sherwin, in his book, “Why Be Good,” sarcastically recalls, “Once I was browsing in a bookstore when I saw a huge volume with an intriguing title: Wall Street Ethics. I opened it eagerly only to find that each of its hundreds of pages was blank.”

The book of blank pages, “authored” by Jay Walker, actually exists and was published by William Morrow & Co. in 1987. One reviewer of the book noted, “If you are not familiar with this book, it is a joke, and a pretty good one. The pages are all blank … Today, after so many new Wall Street scandals, it probably needs to be updated with a new edition with more blank pages.”

It can be easy to point to a lack of ethics in our society, but if you read the headlines, you might think ethics are lacking in the church as well. You would think Christians would be committed to biblical ethics, but given that a majority of Christians don’t (or rarely) read their Bibles outside of a church service, believers are sorely lacking in their primary source from which to develop and practice reliable ethics.

Here’s something you may have missed in scripture as being an ethic …

While recently listening to a series of lectures by Shane J. Wood, a professor at Ozark Christian College, I was stopped short when he said that the cross is more than a place where Jesus paid for our sins, it is also an ethic for Christians.

That idea intrigued me.

The more I heard him refer to the cross as an ethic, the more profoundly it made sense to me. What came to mind was a passage of scripture you’ll be familiar with, but before you read it again here, keep in mind that Jesus made this statement before He went to the cross:

“Then he said to the crowd, ‘If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me,” Luke 9:23.

Most people assume in their thinking that in this passage of scripture, Jesus is referring to His action taken on our behalf when He suffered on a cross for us. BUT, before Jesus ever offered Himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins, He was teaching those who would be His followers to make their own cross an ethic from which to live their lives. Daily taking up our crosses is an ethic to guide us in our daily living.

To practice taking up our own crosses as an ethic means we learn to live a life of sacrifice. It teaches us how to respond to unfairness and injustice. It gives us direction for how to respond to a world hostile to our faith. It teaches us to do the things Jesus did.

How might your life change if you practiced the daily taking up of your own cross as an ethic?

Scotty