The Cross of Christ: Self-Understanding and Self-Giving

This week’s reading from John Stott’s The Cross of Christ for Reading Classics Together at Challies.com is Chapter 11, Self-Understanding and Sefl-Giving. Instead of summarizing the whole chapter, I’ll just highlight a few points from it.

The self-understanding Stott writes of is not self-absorption, but a means to self-giving. The community of the cross will be “marked by sacrifice, service and suffering’ which works itself out in the home, the church, and the world.

The Christian Home
The Christian home should be marked by the self-giving love of the cross, but, says Stott, it is husbands who are particularly singled out. “[T]hey are to love their wives with the love which Christ has for his bride the church.” If our homes were distinguished by self-giving love Christian homes would be be more fulfilling and more solid.

The Church
Those in the church are to love one another.

We have only to remember that our fellow Christian is a “brother [or sister] for whom Christ died,” and we will never disregard, but always seek to serve, their truest and highest welfare. To sin against them would be to sin against Christ.

The World
Christ sends us out into the world.

Mission arises from the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. His birth, by which he identified himself with our humanity, calls us to a similar costly identification with people. His death reminds us that suffering is the key to church growth, since it is the seed that dies which multiplies. And his resurrection gave him the universal lordship that enabled him both to claim that “all authority” was now his and to send his church to disciple the nations.

Next up is chapter 12, Loving Our Enemies.