Stillness at the Foot of the Cross

Photo: mine, taken at Boshack camp, Western Australia.

Running hard all our lives in our own efforts produces nothing, and yet we need to lose it all to realise that nothing starts before we sit, broken, at the foot of the cross, and contemplate what has been done for us, that we could never do for ourselves.

Do you ever sit or kneel at the foot of the cross? Do you ever sit or kneel there and let God’s grace wash over you? What I mean is, can you sit there, adding nothing to the cross, and accept this grace-gift, or even begin to comprehend it?

The grace that the Father gave combined with obedience of the Son is both unconscionable and incomprehensible.

Many people in this hurried, manic life so seriously want stillness as an elixir for the dis-ease of anxiety and stress. We will run after many different ‘antidotes’, quick fixes, snake oil recipes, work, work, more work, substances and mountains of pleasure and achievement, and we still won’t find the peace of God.

The peace of God is not found in doing things.

Just as we cannot add anything to the finished work of the cross, we cannot add anything to establish the peace of God. The peace of God was established at the cross. From there it’s all academic. From the cross life gets simple. It’s all upside.

Nothing left to earn.
Nothing left to prove.
Nothing left to do.
Nothing left to be added.

We take Christ’s finished work and we cannot make it more by our own impressiveness, which is such a shame given that we have the internal wiring to do things which we equate to God’s requirement of us.

Actually, no, I think deep down inside we know that God doesn’t require this of us. But we require it of ourselves! We are the cruel taskmasters.

Somehow, we find ourselves undeserving of grace; as if we know better. We judge ourselves far more harshly than it works out that God does. How can it be that God has let us off the hook? How can God do that, when we, mere mortals whose best interest is served in letting ourselves off the hook, can’t do that?

Well, God has done that. It is finished. And when we find ourselves in a place where we can finally accept this, we are blown away by it, which comes completely unexpectedly.

Suddenly we are awash in a flood of praise. Suddenly there is an emotional connection that never was there beforehand. Suddenly, deep down inside of us, a stream begins to flow; a stream of righteousness, of integrity, of humility; a stream that keeps flowing; a stream that wells up with power for good works.

The works we might do for God
are as filthy rags if they aren’t done for God.

Many of our works, if we were to truly analyse them, might as well be done for our own gain, because we have done them so well that we hardly needed God in the first place. But these works in our own strength are pitiful, and certainly nothing more than a waste of time.

But good works are different; from the God core, with his heart, we do them, and when we do we do them out of rest.

God desires to bring us to stillness; to the foot of the cross; where we have no answer; where all about us is a flurry of wonder.

If we can stay at the cross,
we can stay in stillness.

We’ve tried everything else and
we’ve also mastered trying too hard.

It’s time to stop trying.
It’s time to start trusting.