Matthew 27:22
Pilate asked them, “What am I to do with Jesus, who is called the Messiah?”
They all yelled, “Nail him to a cross!”
Scripture taken from the Contemporary English Version © 1991,1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.
Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am something of a packrat. And if you know my penchant for repurposing, you know that no scrap is too small to be reused for SOMETHING! So it’s very hard for me to clean closets and drawers and truly get rid of anything. But I’ve done better recently. And though it bothered me on several levels to do this, there have been a few items that I have not tried to salvage. I’ve simply tossed them into the trash and said, “Just get rid of it!”
This is pretty much what the Romans said to Pontius Pilate when he asked them, “What am I to do with Jesus?” Surely many of them felt uneasy about this on some level. Some must have thought, “There has to be some way He could be useful to us.” But in the end, they chose to ruthlessly toss Jesus out like yesterday’s trash. Even worse, they wanted Him brutalized in the process!
How often do we do this? How many times do our words and actions essentially say, “Jesus isn’t worth anything to me…He’s not even as ‘good’ as garbage”… and treat Him as such? Have you considered that a lot of your actions and words… the way you have treated others and conducted your life… your attitudes and general indifference… have all been the equivalent of lashes across Jesus’ back – or nails through His hands and feet? Pretty humbling thoughts, huh?!
“Oh, I would NEVER do this to Jesus!” you may be protesting. But you have… my friend… you have – and so have I. And we’ve made the choice to do so. Maybe we didn’t say, “Today I think I will nail Jesus to the cross”… but we chose thoughts, words and actions that did essentially the same thing. We are in control of these things far more than we often care to admit!
Here’s your wake-up call. What you say, think, and do matters! You make choices every minute of the day… whether to serve Jesus – or to nail Him to the cross. Remember Matthew 25:40 (NLT) …“And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’” Where are you choosing to treat Jesus like garbage? Where have you battered and beaten Him… or nailed Him to the cross? When you think about your life in these terms, doesn’t it make you want to choose differently? Shouldn’t it?
©2013 Debbie Robus
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