Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Well, welcome back to the Daily Blade. I'm Dr. Mark Hitchcock. I'm the pastor of Faith Bible Church in Edmund, Oklahoma. And I'm filling in this week for Kyle and Joby, and I appreciate so much the opportunity they've given me to be with you. You know, everybody has in life kind of a grid or a lens that they look at life through. And it really determines all of life. It colors all of life. And I would say for the believer in Jesus Christ, the most important thing for us to look at life through, our lens, is the cross of Jesus Christ. So look at all of life through the cross. Really, when you think about it, as far as Christian discipleship is concerned, half the battle, I think, is simply keeping the message of the cross front and center in our minds. The Apostle Paul did that. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 18, he says, the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God. The very next chapter, Paul says, when he came to Corinth, he says, When I came, he says, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. At the end of the book of Galatians, in Galatians 6, 14, the Apostle Paul says to us in that beautiful passage, God forbid that I should boast or glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which I am crucified to the world, and the world is crucified to me. The cross needs to be our grid for all of life. There's a good book I have in my library by a pastor in Scotland named Andrew Randall, simply titled Following Jesus. But he tells this story in the book. He says, I live for years in Dundee, talking about in Scotland, which is home to the RRS Discovery, the ship which Captain Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton took to the Antarctic in 1901. One of the artifacts on display is a pair of snow goggles, which Scott used. Essential for the prevention of snow blindness, these are clumsy wooden goggles which have his initials carved on the top, and a cross carved out at each eye for visibility. Throughout his expedition, Scott would have looked at the Arctic through the lens of a cross. So he has these wooden goggles, and to prevent snow blindness, he just had a little cross at each over each eye where he could look out on the frozen land that he was in. But he looked at all of life through the cross. And Andrew Randall goes on and he says this that is what we must learn to do, understanding both the meaning of history and the purpose of our lives through the lens of the cross of Jesus Christ. That's what you and I have to do. It'll change the way we view everything. When we meet a person who doesn't know the Lord, if we're looking at them through the cross, we're going to have a compassion for them and see them as a sinner. I'm in need of a savior. When we see our fellow Christians, those that we we go to church with and that are our families, when we see them through the lens of the cross on which Jesus died for us, we'll see them as precious souls that have been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, and we'll treat them with kindness and with grace and compassion. You and I need to see our past through the lens of the cross as well. We need to see that there's no place in pride for our lives because salvation is all of God. We need to also recognize that there's no place for shame and guilt in our lives either, because God has forgiven all of our sins. You know, sometimes pride's a big problem for us. We think much more highly of ourselves than we should. The cross comes and slays our pride. The cross slays our pride. It tells us that God saved us and the salvation's all of Him. But it also comes and helps get rid of the guilt and the shame that we may feel for some sin that we've committed in the past that maybe we can't forget or we can't get over. If we put on those uh cross goggles every day, we'll look at the past so much differently. And also we can look at the future through the lens of the cross as well. We look at it as an opportunity to serve the crucified Savior. And we also look at our future in heaven through the cross because we'll realize the only reason we have a future with God is because of the cross of Jesus Christ and what he did for us there through his sacrifice. You know, the Apostle Paul was a man whose entire grid, whose entire perspective on life was governed and seen through the cross of Jesus Christ. So I want to encourage you every day, every morning, as you pray, as you get up to face today, put on those cross goggles. Put on those goggles with those crosses and look at your world through the cross. It'll change how you view the people around you. It'll change how you view your past. It'll change how you view the future. Make sure you put those on every day. It'll change your life.

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