HOLY WEEK -- Good Friday

Hot cross buns for breakfast. A yummy treat with a simple message -- today I will remember that Jesus died on the cross to pay for my sins.

I have been reading a great book this Lenten season, "Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross", edited by Nancy Guthrie. Some passages that I've read these past couple of days have stuck with me. Here are a couple of excerpts:

What Jesus was doing on the cross was bearing sin, carrying sin, wearing sin. Jesus was taking the sins of the world upon his shoulders. It was as if God had taken a giant bucket and scooped up all the sins of his people -- all the jealousy and the anger and the lying, all the rebellion and the stealing and the incest, all the hypocrisy and the envy and the swearing -- and dumped them all out on Jesus Christ. "The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:6). "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us..." (2 Cor. 5:21)... Once he had done that, God the Father had to forsake all that sin. When Jesus was wearing our sin on the cross, God the Father could not bear to look at the sin or at his Son. (Philip Graham Ryken)

At the moment that Christ took upon himself the sin of the world, he became the most grotesque, most obscene mass of sin in the history of the world. God is too holy to even look at iniquity. When Christ was hanging on the cross, the Father, as it were, turned his back on Christ... There was Jesus, the Son in whom the Father was well pleased. Now he hung in darkness, isolated from the Father, cut off from fellowship -- fully receiving in himself the curse of God -- not for his own sin but for the sin he willingly bore by imputation for our sake. (R.C. Sproul)

I'm forgiven because You were forsaken
I'm accepted, You were condemned
I'm alive and well, Your Spirit lives within me,
because You died and rose again

Amazing love, how can it be
that You, my King, should die for me?
Amazing love, I know it's true
It's my joy to honor You
In all I do
I honor You.
(Amazing Love, by Chris Tomlin)

That's what we talked about before we each hammered a nail into a piece of wood, remembering that it was our sin (specific and personal) that nailed Jesus to the cross.