Crucified by Christians (Part 1)

I want to talk to you about being crucified by Christians. I don’t think I learned only a few days ago. There’s a difference between the cross and being crucified. There’s the cross in the Christian life. What is a crucifixion, then? Well, the cross is probably something you have an option for. I bear the cross of a broken leg; I’m not sure that’s a cross—nothing you can do about it. Cross is an option, probably. That may not stand up to sound theology, but a cross is something we are willing to take up: “your cross and follow me.” And it’s part of the Christian life, yet we hear very little about it. I’d like you to always remember, if you would, that the first message you ever heard me bring in Denver, Colorado, was on the cross and more. For I’ve come here tonight to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

The cross doesn’t get preached on, spoken of, talked about, or prayed for, or even mentioned very much at all. Probably never has. In fact, I don’t like hearing us say in our day that things are really bad. I’ve been reading church history my whole life, and I’m still looking for that good period when things were better than they are now. After 300 AD, I can’t find it. It’s a long, dark story. We have lost, of course, the cross, but even more, who among us has ever heard about what to do with the crucifixion? Saints, there are people in this room who have been crucified by other Christians. Maybe you have not, but I will tell you there’s a good chance. There’s a chance you live long enough. You may be.

Now what’s a crucifixion? A crucifixion is gory. It’s dramatic. It’s done amid a great deal of hate, pain, tragedy, and everything else imaginable. And it is unforgettable. That is, for most Christians, it is unforgettable. Almost without exception, when you are crucified by a Christian or by Christians, it destroys your Christian life. I want to give you a definition of what it means to have your Christian life destroyed. It doesn’t mean you stop being a believer. It means someone threw a rock at the clock, and nothing has moved since the day you were crucified. There’s been no progress, and you have chewed on that thing and eaten it again and again. You don’t trust anyone, and you sure don’t trust me, because I’m a Christian worker. A large number of the nails that are nailed and the mallets come from the hands of Christian workers. Not always.

I want to talk to you if you have been crucified by Christians. I want to talk to you about that. I want to present to you the possibility of getting it behind you utterly, totally, absolutely, finally, and forever – and that’s rare. Alright, here’s the first thing you’re going to have to deal with. First, you have to accept that you need to figure out who did it. Who did it? Who was so callous as to allow you to be so grimly, pitilessly, viciously, painfully crucified?

There’s only one person who did. I want you to know that He planned it. He chose it. He wrote the script. He was the casting director. He’s the one who chose the people who would be present. He and He alone picked the landscape. He and He alone picked the place. He was the one who determined how bad it was going to get. He was the one who determined the amount of pain. He choreographed the entire event. He even picked the ones who’d be standing in the background, who just mutely watched. He chose the one who would drive the spear. Well, one person, and you’ve got to come to grips with that, and you’ve got to know it. You’ve got to understand it, and you’ve got to deal with it. And you know who it was. Why, certainly, I know who it was. It was the devil. If it were the devil, it was not a crucifixion. Crucifixions are authored by only one person, and that’s God, your Father, and now you’ve got to deal with that.

Now you have to deal with that. Oh, you don’t have to, but that clock’s never going to run again. I don’t know how many Christians have the privilege of being crucified, but I can tell you that it was your Lord and your God who decided that it was going to happen to you. And by the way, it was an honor. But wait a minute, Gene, you have no idea how ugly it was. You don’t know what was said. You don’t know what was done. You don’t know how utterly it destroyed so many people, and me. You don’t know how much I have given and how much I lost. I don’t care, brother, what happened. One, I can tell you about other people and introduce them to you. It’s been worse than what happened to you. Two, it still came from the hand of your God.

Christians crucified John Hus. They brought him up on charges, brought him to trial, and refused to read his writings or his defense. When the trial came, they did not allow him to speak and presented no evidence. They would not read his books because they said they might corrupt their minds. Now, that’s unjust, but it didn’t keep them from taking him outside the city of Constance, Germany, and tying him to a pole, and burning him, and then ordering men to come with shovels and rake up the dirt until they had dug a hole in the ground, so that not one ash of his could be found. And they threw the dirt in the water. Did the same thing to Joan of Arc.

Two years ago, I sat down with a dear brother from Nepal, and there’s this much of his arm that is nothing, his wrist is nothing but scars, and his legs, the same way. That was inflicted on him by the Nepalese government. The men who saw it were very impressed, but I would like to tell you something that happened in the privacy of my living room, which did not happen that day when those other people were present. That was a day when only that brother and I sat alone in a living room. He had spent about half of his Christian life at that time in prison. I consider him the greatest Christian of the 20th century. Probably the only man in the world that would make Paul of Tarsus nervous when it came to suffering for suffering, pain for pain, lash for lash, and church for church.

I asked him: all those years that you’ve been beaten, whipped, put in a cholera-infested room without any air, hoping you’d get cholera and die. Put you in a mad house, the government hoping that a madman would kill you. Starved, left in the snow, chained to a post, left to freeze to death. Which hurts you most, what the government of Nepal has done to you or what Christians have done to you? Threw up his hands like this. Brother Gene, no comparison, brother. No comparison. What Christians have done to me is far, far worse.

Every time he came out of prison, he found all of his churches bought off by Western money, Western Christians, Western missionaries. People used to go over there. He’d go back to prison, come out again. They not only bought off his workers and his churches with the American dollar, but they also turned the people of Nepal, Christians in Nepal, all of them had been won by him, turned them all against him. He started over and over and over and over. You don’t have as much right to say you were unjustly treated as he does. And he’s still on his feet. He’s still a tiger. On one of the darkest days of my life, I said to him, I’ve made a decision. I mean, I was down, way down. I told him, “Prem, I have decided to leave the ministry, but I will wait until the day after you leave.” He said, “Oh, Brother Gene, you never leave the ministry.” I’m going to resign the day after; the day after that brother quits, I quit. That’s when I’m going to quit. Not until then. But Gene, it was so unjust and so ugly and so gory and so unfair and so brutal. Excuse me. That’s what a crucifixion is. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a crucifixion. The setting is lies, rumors, innuendos, war lies, hate, anger, and a determination to destroy, no matter how brutal it gets. I tell you two little stories that nonetheless struck me when I heard them.

A lawyer who was trying to bring together a pastor and the deacons. The deacons hated the pastor so much that, when he left, they refused to pay him for last week’s salary. The lawyers asked why, and they said because we want him to hurt. We Christians are beautiful ones. This happened just a few months ago. A brother told me he was in Eastern Europe with one of the parachurch organizations, and he said something he shouldn’t have. Now, this is Eastern Europe, folks, and they were in a couple of buses or wagons or something, and the leader of the group made him get out of the van and left him on the side of the road; left him there, and they drove back to the Netherlands, Holland, and left him on the side of the road.