A Crown without a Cross?

Despite the so-called ‘credit crunch’ we still live in an age of relatively easy credit. If you want something but you can’t afford it - it’s no problem – you just borrow the money. You can have anything you want now and pay for it later. I regularly see adverts which say ‘buy now…nothing to pay for 6 months’ or ‘take it home today…nothing to pay until April 2009’ The message is have the good things now and pay later.

But when you read the bible you find that generally the suffering comes before the glory - the Cross has to come before the resurrection. In Acts 14:22 Paul and Barnabas encouraged believers and said ‘we must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.’ Very often we find that we endure the Cross before we gain the Crown. William Barclay said: ‘A man must spend his life, not hoard it…The questions are not, “How much can I get?” but “How much can I give?”


In the Western world we have been peddled an easy-going Christianity. D. A. Carson said this about easygoing Christianity ‘…much modern evangelicalism borders on the frivolous. We are so often taught to think that the Christian way brings blessings without buffetings, triumphs without trials, witness without weariness. We are encouraged to believe that Christians exude overcoming joy, and rarely face discouraging defeat; that they live in a realm of constant excitement, and never wrestle with boredom; that they love and are loved, and need not confront persecution, ostracism, hate, rejection; that they are self-confident and ebullient, and never taste terror, loneliness, doubt; they are fulfilled and satisfied, but not as a result of self-denial and daily death. It is not so much that the promises are false, that they have no substance, as that they distort truth by promising a crown without a cross.’