Kissing Away Hurts

“...for I will show him how much he must suffer for My name’s sake.” Acts 9:16

Awhile back at the Cherry Log Christian Church in northern Georgia, minister Fred B. Craddock used this illustration in a sermon on “Why the Cross?”:

“Sometimes a child falls down and skins a knee or an elbow, then runs crying to his mother. The mother picks up the child and says - in what is the oldest myth in the world - ‘Let me kiss it and make it well,’ as if a mother has magic salvia or something. She picks up the child, kisses the skinned place, holds the child in her lap, and all is well.

Did her kiss make it well? No, it was that ten minutes in her lap.

Just sit in the lap of love and see the mother crying. ‘ Mother, why are you crying? I’m the one who hurt my elbow.’ ‘Because you hurt,’ the mother says, ‘I hurt.’ That does more for the child than all the bandages and all the medicine in the world, just sitting on the lap.

What is the cross?

Can I say it this way? It is to sit for a few minutes on the lap of God, who hurts because you hurt.

Paul said, ‘I have to preach that.’ So do I.” How about you?