Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional

by Paul David Tripp

It’s good to mourn, it’s healthy to be sad, and it’s appropriate to groan.

I had been given an unexpected and undeserved gift, the knowledge of my sin.

a self-appointed king, the universe shrunk to the size of my desires,

Under the shadow of the cross, sin doesn’t surprise us anymore, doesn’t depress us anymore, and doesn’t move us to deny or defend. Under the shadow of the cross, we remember who we are and what it is that we are dealing with.

The shadow of the cross teaches us who we are.

Sitting under the shadow of the cross shatters the delusion that we are free of the need of what originally brought us to Jesus: divine grace.

The shadow of the cross teaches what we need.

The cross preaches that sin is our problem and that rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace is the only medicine that will provide the cure we all need.

The shadow of the cross teaches us who God is.

The cross allows unholy people to look in the face of a holy God and have hope.

The shadow of the cross teaches us what God offers us.

The shadow of the cross teaches us how we should live.

6. The shadow of the cross gives us hope and courage.

I can face my sin without depression or panic because he battled for me and won and continues to do so.

prayer is spiritual warfare.

When Isaiah in his vision stood before the holiness of the Lord, his first words weren’t, “Wow, this is amazing!” No, his first words were, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5).

Prayer is so much more than asking; at the center is submitting.

Weak, faltering prayers are received by him and warmly answered. But he invites us into something deeper and better. He invites us into something that we could never earn or deserve on our own. He invites us into willing, adoring, restful communion with him. Why wouldn’t you accept that invitation?

We are called to die to sin. We are called to die to that life where we did what we wanted to do, when we wanted to do it, and how we wanted to do it. We are called to die to setting our own rules and living however we please. We are called to die to our rulership of our own lives. We are called to let go of our self-appointed sovereignty, living as if we’re the only master that we need, and to surrender ourselves and all we have to another master. We are called to die to our desires for our own comfort, pleasure, and glory and give ourselves to seek the glory of the King and the success of his kingdom. We are called to die to our own righteousness and find our hope, help, and comfort in the righteousness of Jesus given over to our account.

We hop from church to church, hoping we’ll find it there.

You can give yourself to a constant chorus of situational and relational complaints, making sure you let God and the people around you know that you are not happy at all with the way things are. You can be critical, judgmental, and demanding, making your relationships toxic and yourself unbearable to be around. Or you can stay committed to the delusion that somehow you will find or create paradise. You will try to control what you cannot control and require what will never be delivered. You can be on the constant move, regularly leaving situations, locations, and relationships because they did not measure up, and investing in the new place, with new people, in the hope that it will deliver. You’ll end up lonely, disappointed, and alienated, but you’ll probably keep looking.

Mourning is healthy because it forces you to consider the full weight of the tragedy of sin. Mourning is healthy because it forces you to let go of the delusion that you can turn the rubble into paradise. Mourning is healthy because it makes you cry out for a restorer. Mourning is healthy because it causes you to hold tightly to God’s promise of paradise to come. Mourning is healthy because it teaches you how to be content between the “already” and the “not yet.” Mourning is healthy because when you mourn in this way, the God of all comfort hears your cry and comes near with comfort that is profoundly more healing than a new situation, relationship, or location could ever be.

remember to mourn with hope, because your Lord has promised that what now is will end, and what is to come is worthy to be called paradise.

As Christians, we tend to esteem the spiritually rich as well.

Jesus knows that no one is independently rich in spirit. No one independently has his act together. No one is righteous on his own. No one loves as he should in his own strength. No one naturally has all the right motives. No one’s mind is independently pure. Independent spiritual riches are a delusion. People who think they are righteous are doomed. People who have successfully convinced themselves that they are okay are in trouble.

God opens the well-guarded vault of our righteousness to show us that, contrary to what we thought, it is absolutely empty. We then must face the shocking realization of our complete poverty, that rather than being righteous, we are, in fact, unrighteous in every way, and this drives us to cry out for forgiveness and help.

Or you can point the finger of blame at the other person, denying your own responsibility and convincing yourself that he not only wronged you but that he is the cause of any wrong that you did. As you do this, your sense of offense grows, and because it does, your anger grows, as does your belief that this person simply needs to change.

One of the ways that we tend to trouble our own trouble is our ability to convince ourselves that our sin is not so sinful after all. When you convince yourself that your sin is not so sinful after all, you also convince yourself that you don’t need God’s amazing, rescuing, forgiving, and transforming grace.

No one has lied to me more often than I have. No one has twisted events for his advantage more than I have for myself. No one has worked harder to make me feel good about what is not good than I have. Sadly, I have often participated in my own deceit. When I do this, I feel righteous in situations where what I did was not righteous, and because I feel right, I don’t seek God’s forgiveness or his help.

The more you see your sin, the more you will respond tenderly to other sinners and want for them the same grace you have received. And as you taste new life, you will begin to celebrate, in fresh new ways, the grace that is yours in Christ Jesus.

The cross is a powerful interruption to our “easy way out” thinking. It catches us up short. It confronts our vain wishes.

left to ourselves we have no hope.

The cross screams to us, “Stop looking elsewhere. This is the only way!”

The world offers endless promises of self-atonement, but each is a lie. The world offers endless excuses for sin, personal and corporate, but each is built on falsehood. The world offers philosophies built on proving that there is no God, so there is no moral responsibility, and therefore, no such thing as death. The world offers scientific denials of divine origins and the afterlife. Most of us work to make ourselves think we’re better off than we are and we don’t desperately need what the cross tells us is essential.

The answer to every one of these questions is a resounding yes! Every detail of the history of redemption was necessary. Every moment in the life of Christ was necessary. Every aspect of his suffering, death, and resurrection was necessary. It was all essential, because there was no other way to reverse the damage that sin had done or to rescue those who were held in its death grip.

may this season of remembrance free you from ever again minimizing your sin and buying into the vain hope that there may be an easy way out.

your alarm that is your conscience only sounds based on the standard that your heart has surrendered to.

The cross doesn’t just purchase God’s forgiveness for us, but it also changes us. And at the heart of that change is a conscience that has been cleansed by the transforming grace of the blood of Jesus.

There is no more dangerous aspect of sin’s deceitfulness than this one. It will close you off from the insight-giving ministry of God’s word, it will cause you to resist divine conviction, and it will shut you off from the essential sanctifying ministry of the body of Christ. There is no more destructive delusion than this one.

The remaining deceitfulness creates pockets of personal spiritual blindness that will result in functional inaccuracies in the way I see, examine, and assess myself.

Now, if I think that no one knows me better than I know myself, and you come to me confronting me with something that I haven’t seen, I feel no guilt in rejecting what you have to say about me. In fact, I will feel hurt that you have misjudged me in this way. Rather than feeling loved by you and by God and helped by you and God to grow in insight and maturity, I will feel wrongly condemned. Your ministry to me, rather than being hope-giving, will be seen as an affront, and if this happens repeatedly, well, there won’t be much relationship left between us. I will walk away thinking that wrongful accusations ended our relationship, when really, you were attempting to do for me exactly what I and everyone else need.

Spiritual war makes it easy for us to blow three hours binge-watching a series on Netflix, while the same amount of time spent studying God’s word seems so hard.

In the Bible a stumbling block is anything or anyone that leads you to desire to do something that is wrong in the eyes of God (sin).

an idol is any person, place, or thing that exercises control over the thoughts and desires of your heart that only God should have.

God is saying that whatever rules your heart will exercise inescapable control over your behavior. Whatever captures your thoughts and desires will then direct the things that you do and say.

it could be the need to be right,

This is where the spiritual war rages. It always rages at the level of the thoughts and desires of your heart. It is always deeper than behavior.

Confession requires you to admit that your biggest problems live inside you, in your heart. It smashes any delusion of comfortable independence. It yanks you away from spiritual self-reliance. Confession drives you to the feet of God as your sovereign Lord and Savior, to honor him for who he is, and to cry for help because of who you are. Confession is pleasing to God because it puts you right in the middle of the position you were created to be in: humble, honest dependence on him.

It is good to silence complaint in your life by sitting down and taking the time to count your blessings.

Our tendency to complain is one of the results of the selfishness of sin. Complaint reminds us that we keep sticking ourselves in the center of our worlds and making life all about us.