“SALVATION: THE OLD RUGGED CROSS / MIGHTY TO SAVE”
The Songs That Stir Our Souls
May 19, 2013
Cornerstone Community Church
It was an old song even by the time I first sang it in the Baptist church I grew up in back in Minnesota – “The Old Rugged Cross.” It was written in 1912 by a Methodist evangelist named George Bennard. But it really became popular when it became a sort of theme song used in evangelistic meetings held by Billy Sunday, who was something of a predecessor to Billy Graham. If you ever attended a Billy Graham Crusade, or watched one on TV, you will remember that at the end of Dr. Graham’s message he would invite people to come forward to publicly commit themselves to Jesus. And the song that played while people came forward was the old hymn “Just As I Am.” “The Old Rugged Cross” played something of that role during the Billy Sunday evangelistic meetings in the first half of the 20th century, and became one of the most popular hymns of Christians all across the country. It’s been recorded by numerous well-known performers including Al Green, Andy Griffith, Anne Murray, Brad Paisley, Elvis Presley, Roy Rogers, Ronnie Milsap and Vince Gill. Here are some of the words:
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame.
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it someday for a crown.
Now here’s something we need to remember – when we sing this song, it’s got to be sung with feeling. In fact, there are some very specific feelings you need to embrace to sing this song the way it’s typically been sung over the last 100 years – sadness and guilt. At least that’s the way I remember it being sung the vast majority of times I heard it sung when I was still a kid. It almost felt like singing this hymn with a bit of a catch in your throat was the Baptist version of doing penance for your sin. If my Catholic friends in elementary school got caught doing something wrong, they had to go to confession and say ten “Hail Marys.” Our punishment was to sing this hymn and while singing it to think about the fact that it was our sin that caused Jesus to suffer and die on the old rugged cross.
But as I got a little older and a bit more in tune with what the people around me were feeling as we sang this hymn, I realized that most people didn’t sing “The Old Rugged Cross” with sadness and guilt at all. What most people felt, I discovered, were two very different emotions – gratitude and love. It was many peoples’ way of expressing their thanks to God for saving them from sin. And most of all it was the best way some of us knew to tell God just how much we loved him. For people of my Mom’s generation, “The Old Rugged Cross” was the ultimate love song. In fact, I have a hunch my Mom might say that if you don’t love this hymn, you don’t really love Jesus.
In recent years there’s a new song that has helped us to express our gratitude and our love to God in a bit more triumphant fashion – it’s called “Mighty To Save.” Released in July of 2006, “Mighty To Save” was written by Ben Fielding and Reuben Morgan of the Hillsong Australia worship team. Here are some of its now familiar lyrics:
Everyone needs compassion
A love that’s never failing
Let mercy fall on me
Everyone needs forgiveness
The kindness of a Savior
The hope of nations
Savior, He can move the mountains
My God is mighty to save
He is mighty to save
Forever, Author of salvation
He rose and conquered the grave
Jesus conquered the grave
Now like “The Old Rugged Cross,” this song is clearly a song about Jesus. He’s the one who conquered the grave, the one who moves the mountains; he’s the one who saves us. But you might not realize that “Mighty To Save” is based on an Old Testament verse, written over 600 years before Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem. It comes from one of the prophets, Zephaniah, who wrote a short book of just three chapters. Here’s the verse that inspired this song: “The Lord your God is with you; he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)
Now I’m sure you’re all dying to know the context of this verse and the background of the book of Zephaniah, so I won’t keep you in suspense. Here’s a little bit of an overview of Old Testament history; if you hang in there with me for just a minute or two, this should help us appreciate this verse a little more. The nation of Israel was a united kingdom for only 120 years and only under three kings – King Saul, King David and King Solomon, each of whom reigned for 40 years. After Solomon died in about the year 930 B.C., the nation of Israel divided into two kingdoms – the northern kingdom of Israel, made up of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the southern kingdom of Judah, made up of two tribes. The northern kingdom was ruled by a series of kings, all of whom were evil, and because of their wickedness God sent the Assyrians to destroy Israel in the year 722 B.C. Judah, the southern kingdom, lasted a bit longer, because while they also had their share of evil kings they also had a number of godly kings, kings who were devoted to following the law of the Lord. One of those godly kings was named Josiah, who was the king while Zephaniah was a prophet.
But here was the problem – while Josiah was a godly leader, few people in Judah followed his example. Most of them, in fact, had turned to the worship of idols. So Zephaniah comes along and warns them that if they don’t repent, judgment is coming. Here’s the message of the first two chapters of Zephaniah – God is coming, and it’s not going to be pretty when he gets here. Here’s a sample: “The great day of the Lord is near – near and coming quickly. Listen! The cry on the day of the Lord will be bitter, the shouting of the warrior there. That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom …” (Zephaniah 1:14-15) Not a particularly happy message, is it? Let’s see the Hillsong gang try putting those words into a perky worship song.
But then as Zephaniah closes his prophecy, the tone changes. It is true that judgment is coming. And as a matter of fact, Zephaniah was right about that. Less than ten years after his prophecy the Babylonians attacked the people of Judah, and in the year 586 B.C. they completely destroyed Jerusalem and burned down the Temple Solomon had once built. But Zephaniah wanted the people to know that their pain and misery and darkness would not last forever, that there was also coming a day when God would return not to judge his people but to save his people. And so he writes, “Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, O Daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The Lord, the King of Israel, is with you.” (Zephaniah 3:14-15) And then, just a couple of stanzas later, Zephaniah pens the best known verse of his short book: “The Lord your God is with you; he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)
The common theme of both of these songs – “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Mighty To Save” – is salvation. And to help us get a grip on what the Bible means when it talks about salvation, I want to quote my favorite Christian songwriter, Steven Curtis Chapman. His music has inspired and encouraged me now for the last twenty years. A while ago I stumbled across something he said that doesn’t come from one of his many popular songs but that I thought was a wonderful summary of the Gospel message, which is a message of salvation. Here’s what he wrote: “In the Gospel, we discover that we are far worse off than we ever thought, and far more loved than we ever dreamed.” The reason the people of my Mom’s generation could sing a song like “The Old Rugged Cross” with such gratitude and love and passion is because they understood what salvation is all about. They had come to appreciate that we are far worse off than we ever thought, and far more loved than we ever dreamed. And for us to be able to do justice to a great song like “Mighty To Save,” we need to develop that same understanding. We need to appreciate just why we need to be saved and what we need to be saved from. We need to understand what the Bible means when it talks about our need for salvation. So let’s use Steven Curtis Chapman’s summary of the Gospel as our outline for the rest of the morning to help us explore what salvation means: (1) We are far worse off than we ever thought; and (2) We are far more loved than we ever dreamed.
We Are Far Worse Off Than We Ever Thought
So here’s the first question – what do we need to be saved from? Zephaniah answers that for us with a word he uses in Zephaniah 3:15 – punishment. We need someone to save us from punishment. Listen to how the Apostle Paul talks about this in the New Testament:
This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power … (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9)
It’s not fun to talk about this, but unless we understand and appreciate the fact that God is going to punish mankind for our sin we will never get what we need to be saved from. Do you remember when you were a kid and your parents would make a threat about what they would do to you if they ever caught you lying or stealing or doing something wrong? Most of us as kids for some reason thought it was smart to test our parents a little bit, to see whether or not our parents really meant it. Sometimes we discovered that they didn’t, that their threat was what we call an “idle threat,” that they had no intention of putting bamboo shoots under our fingernails, but they were just trying to get our attention. But you might have had an experience something like mine. I was the youngest of three boys. My oldest brother was in trouble all the time. And I knew from watching him be punished time and again that when my Dad, the ex-Marine, made a threat, it was no idle threat. Oh, I got whacked a few times myself; I had my moments of rebellion as well. But the point is that when Dad said we would be punished, we knew we would be punished.
Sometimes, I think, we think of the Bible’s warnings of the punishment to come as God’s idle threats. It’s like we think that God just doesn’t have it in him to follow through. It’s like when you have a puppy and you want to yell at the puppy for doing something wrong, like chewing up your universal remote control, but the puppy is just so cute that you can’t bring yourself to do anything except say “bad dog” and then rub its tummy. When the time comes, we think, God might give us a bit of a lecture, but then we’ll smile that smile of ours and he’ll scratch us behind the ears and give us ice cream. Wrong, the Bible assures us. God’s threats are not idle threats. He will punish sin, and he will do so severely.
But here’s part of the problem for us. We just don’t think we’re that bad off. I know, Steven Curtis Chapman says that we’re far worse off than we ever thought, but we don’t believe it. Even if we accept that God is really going to punish sinners, we don’t really think of ourselves as being sinful enough to warrant punishment. In the late 1990s U.S. News & World Report asked people to answer this question: “Who do you think is most likely to get into heaven?” Michael Jordan got a 65% rating, while Oprah Winfrey got a 66% rating. The second highest rating went to Mother Teresa – 79% of respondents thought she would make it into heaven. But do you know who got the highest rating? The person taking the survey. Eighty-seven percent of people taking the survey said, “I don’t know about Mother Teresa, but I know I’m good enough to get into heaven.”
But according to the Bible, no one is good enough to get into heaven. We are all sinners – “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” is how Paul says it in Romans 3:23. The fact of the matter is that those 21% of people who didn’t think Mother Teresa was good enough to get into heaven were right, and if you’ve read any of her writings you know that Mother Teresa was the first to admit that. She was very much aware that she was far worse off than we think, that she was a sinner who needed someone to save her. She understood that God doesn’t grade on a curve, that all of us are in the same boat and the boat is sinking.
Now there are a number of ways I could try to convince you that you and I are far worse off than we think. For example, let’s use a little math. Let’s say that you’re really a pretty good person, especially compared to the Dodger fan who works in the next office. But even as a pretty good person you’d have to admit that you sin three times a day. They’re not big sins, mind you, but if you’re completely honest with yourself, they’re still sin. You curse, you exaggerate the truth to make yourself look good, you lust, you give in to bitterness, you hold a grudge, you fail to help someone you know you should help – you get the idea. So if you sin three times a day and live to 80, how many sins is that? Let’s chop off the first five years and give ourselves the old “I didn’t know any better” break. That’s 3 sins a day times 365 days a year times 75 years – that’s over 82,000 sins. We’re far worse off than we think.
But here’s what convinces me that I’m far worse off than I think – the old rugged cross. Think about this – if sin wasn’t such a big deal, then why did God send his only Son to suffer and die on a cross? The old rugged cross stands as a testament to how serious our problem is. When we look at the cross, we are reminded that our God is a just God who demands that sin be punished. And we wouldn’t want any other kind of God, would we? We wouldn’t want a God who looked the other way when we sin. Think about it like this. Think about the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, who set down a bomb right next to an eight year old boy and his seven year old sister, knowing full well what would happen to them when he detonated it. The boy died, as we all remember, and the girl lost her leg. What does that bomber deserve? He deserves justice; he deserves to be punished. We would be outraged if he wasn’t; it wouldn’t be fair. And it wouldn’t be fair for God to let the sin of mankind go unpunished; justice demands it. That’s what happened on the old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. Jesus, who was the only innocent person who has ever walked this planet, died on the cross to take the punishment for our sin. His death satisfied the demands of justice.
The song “Mighty To Save” puts it as straightforward as you can – “everyone needs forgiveness.” We need it; we need it desperately. We are doomed without it, destined for eternal punishment. We are far worse off than we ever thought.
We Are Far More Loved Than We Ever Dreamed
And we are far more loved than we ever dreamed. Look at the words to “Mighty To Save” again: “Everyone needs compassion, a love that’s never failing, let mercy fall on me; Everyone needs forgiveness, the kindness of a Savior, the hope of nations.” I remember the first time I sang this song there were a couple of words in that verse that really didn’t resonate with me, the words “compassion” and “kindness.” After all, I’m a guy. Guys are tough. Compassion and kindness are words for girls.
But I have come to cherish compassion and kindness. In the last two years I have been treated by a bunch of doctors. They’re probably all good at what they do, but there are a number of them I would never go back to no matter how badly I needed a doctor. I had two different surgeons operate on my hip. The first one operated on me three times and frankly did a lousy job. The second one got my new hip into the right position, but the procedure made me sicker than I’ve ever been in my life. But do you know who I go back to when I have questions, when I need help? I go back to the first surgeon, the one who messed my hip up. And do you know why? Because he cares, and the second surgeon doesn’t. I went back to the second surgeon to tell him I was sick, I’d lost 20 pounds, I was in pain, I was miserable, and he told me, “Come back in nine months.” He made it very clear to me he could not be bothered with my problems. But my first surgeon all along the way has shown me compassion and kindness. Now I’m not stupid – I’ll never let him touch me again. But I still go back to him, because he will go out of his way to make sure I get whatever help I need.