Crucified by Christians (Part 1)

That brings me up to the next one. Whatever they did to you, they did it in the name of God. And if that’s not done, it’s not a crucifixion. Of course, it was done in the name of God. I read a passage out of a history book about the Albigensian crusades, when the Catholic armies, and I’m not picking on the Catholics, swept into a town of the Albigensians, and one of the one of the generals or officers wrote home and said, “And it was with great rejoicing to God our Savior and the Lord Jesus Christ that we slayed every man and woman.”

That’s what a crucifixion is. Gene, surely God did not author it. You tell me the most brutal, ugly, vicious, heinous, horrendous, diabolical, hateful, vicious thing that man ever did to another man in all the annals of human history, and I will top it. I’m talking about the story of the death of my Lord…and God offered that crucifixion. It’s supposed to be bloody. It’s supposed to be unbearable. You know what it’s supposed to do? Do you know its purpose? Do you know the purpose of the crucifixion? It’s to kill you. It’s to kill…you. That’s its purpose. Now, dear child of God, there is something to be learned about a crucifixion. I’d just like for you to all join me for a moment, at either your own or one you have seen of another child of God, and some of you in this room have been crucified.

Let me make myself crystal clear to you. I am not speaking to you tonight to justify you or to make you feel good about the way those dirty rascals treated you. To make you walk out of here feeling good about the fact that you have suffered and thereby justify yourself. You need to go back and remember how fleshly you got. And that comes to the purpose of a crucifixion. The purpose of a crucifixion is to lay naked before the world…your reaction to being crucified. How did you take it? I’m going to come back to this point: if you got angry, if you fought back, if you argued, if you went nose to nose and toe to toe, if you shouted and screamed, if you talked ugly, if you made phone calls, it was not a crucifixion. It was just two people in the flesh, and it was wasted on both. It was a total waste.

Now, let me quickly say that it doesn’t have to be, even today. We’ll come back, but up until right now, if you were as ugly as the other guy or almost, that wasn’t a crucifixion, friend. That was just the ugly flesh of man, showing how vicious and unprincipled you are. A crucifixion will show you and God and angels who you are and what you are. I tell you saints, there’s nothing more wonderful than to have an instinct, to know how to be crucified. An instinct. This is a crucifixion, and this is how I should walk.

A crucifixion has to have ugly phone calls, letters, people screaming at one another, accusing one another, truth twisted, false accusations. It has to have just one element. It has to have “ugly”. It has to have “ugly”. There was a crucifixion like that, with lies and innuendo, and the person being crucified…his reputation has never recovered, even till this day. Perhaps one of the hardest things about a crucifixion is that you lose your friends. Sometimes you lose your family. But oh, those of you who have lost everything, and your work was destroyed, and your position was taken from you, and the rumors that began on you that day or that week will follow you to your grave. There’s no escape. It has permanently damaged your reputation.

But this Man had an instinct for handling all of that. He was the only one who wasn’t talking. He was the only one who didn’t say anything ugly to anyone. He was the only one going along with the crucifixion, allowing it to take its course at its highest possible mark. He stood there with dignity. Let me tell you something. I know that your reputation was ruined. I know that you sometimes feel you’ll never get over it because the rumors will follow you the rest of your life. Whenever it comes back up, and you meet people, and the rumor comes back up, and it’s in your presence, someone says to you, “Did this really happen?” When other people are talking about you, and they’re making you the villain, then you want to regurgitate the whole thing, and talk about it, and go through it, and try to justify yourself, and defend yourself. Jesus Christ did not justify, and He did not defend. He allowed the full brunt of that whole thing to hit Him.

I will tell you a story. Just possibly among the greatest Christians who ever lived were the Moravians. They started in the early 1700s. They were the first Protestants ever to take the gospel anywhere, and they took it everywhere. They went to the worst parts of this world. They went to Greenland. They went to Africa. I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the two brothers who sold themselves into slavery because the only people allowed into a certain part of the world were slaves. They took the gospel to the Muslims. They marched into the interior of a place called America and marched and marched and marched and built a village. Nothing was near it. They preached the gospel to the American Indians, who turned around and killed them. By the way, the name of the little place they built was called Bethlehem. Today it’s Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Somebody wrote a book about them, and the book said that they were actually Roman Catholics and to stay away from them because they were papists trying to get people hooked into them and then bringing them back into the Catholic church. That followed them for 100 years. You don’t know how it ended their ministry worldwide. It followed them all over the world, doors shut. All over the world, people feared them. All over the world, people would not listen to them…all over the world. They were not allowed into countries or cities because they were Catholics under the guise of being evangelical Christian missionaries, and their work on this earth could have been this, but ended up being that. They probably did no more than 10% of what they could have done if that book had not been written. When that book ceased being printed and went out of print, and nobody even knew where it came from, the rumor lived on for a hundred years.

You know what that book made them? It was the very quality and the source of the quality of their beings, and they became “the Moravians.” I know ministers whose ministries have been cut by 90% because they were crucified, and the rumor has never died, and that’s no excuse. The memories of what they did to you are no excuse. It’s not an excuse, brother.

Please come with me. I want you to look at three men who got crucified. The first one may look a lot more like you than you’d like to admit. He is screaming, and he is cursing, and he is blaspheming, and he is railing against men and God. He’s just got one thought in this world, and that’s to get me down. If we had gone that day and rescued him, he would have gone away spitting demons, and nothing would have changed in his life. He’d been the same man. He didn’t take to being crucified.

I want to tell you about the next person who was crucified that day, who, to me, is really a remarkable brother. He had an instinct for being crucified. He had been a thief his whole life. He didn’t want to be crucified, and he thought this man who was being crucified with him was a joke. He was crucified with a nut, a religious nut. He was railing, screaming, and cursing, and he didn’t have any Bible help behind him. He didn’t have any theological education. He had never heard a message on the cross, and he had never heard a message on how to be crucified. By the way, I want you to know that the third person was essentially being crucified by Christians. Do you understand what I mean? That it was the religious people of the day.

That second man on that cross suddenly figured out how to be crucified. He uttered a word that day that nobody else in the world uttered that day. You know what that word was? You know what that word was? He’s the only human who uttered that word that night—the only one. You know what that word was? Bigger word than that. Big word. He said, “Lord…” the only human being this side of the gates of heaven, who said, “Lord.” That man learned how to be crucified right in the middle of it, and he was crucified. The first fellow wasn’t crucified. Listen, he was just killed. And as his friend said to him, “We got what we deserve,” when that man died, he died. He just got killed dead because of who he was. That second man on that cross got crucified. Do you know where he stands in Christian history? He’s the first person to ever walk through the Door. A blood-bought redeemed believer. He figured out how to get crucified, just right then, at the very last minute.