FTCC
Posted on 2006--0-5- 6: 0:1:
Psalm 22:1-8
Isaiah 53:6-7
Matthew 5:11-12
The Lord did not complete His suffering. It has been given to the church to complete the sufferings of Christ. Suffering not yet filled up waits out there for you. You see, the body is also Christ. The body, which is the church, is part of that Christ. There is suffering out there yet to be endured, yet to be known, yet to be embraced by that part of Christ which is called the body. We all thank god that no one member of that body will ever have to know and endure all the sufferings that Jesus Christ experienced while living on the earth. But each one of us – because we are in some mysterious way one with Him – will taste some part of His experience of suffering.
One within your fellowship may know ridicule. Another will partake of physical pain, another will know rejection, perhaps someone else may taste what it means to be vilified and verbally, socially crucified. And perhaps, just perhaps, there will be one within your fellowship who will touch that awful thing which Christ touched in that last moment on the cross: the dark night of the soul.
There is one aspect of the cross that none of us will ever know – praise God! We will never know what it means to be the sin bearer. That is one thing which I will never experience, nor will you. He and He alone has experienced that. He experienced the one thing that none of us should have escaped, and the one thing which He need never have known. He became the sin-bearer and thereby took suffering that was truly mine.