Friday, April 20, 2007
1 Corinthians 15:55 Where, O Death, is your sting?
NO MORE STINGER
How many of you fathers or mothers would take a bee sting for your son or daughter? Would you reach out with your bare hand and grab that bee off their face and let it sink its stinger into your flesh in order to spare your child that pain? Certainly you would if you knew your child was allergic to bee stings! If your child's life was at stake you would let yourself be stung in their place.
On the cross Jesus Christ stretched out His hands and took THE STING OF DEATH into Himself. We deserve death in hell! We have sinned! We have disobeyed God. We have failed to love our neighbor. We have been selfish. We have run after sinful pleasures! But on the cross, Christ -- not us -- was stung. Into His body was injected the venom of all sin -- yours, mine, everyone's. The Bible is clear. He bore our sins in His body! The Law had no choice but to condemn Christ, and to pronounce God's curse upon Him. All sin became His, and so, because the wages of sin is death, He died! The result? The stinger has been removed! Sin was so firmly embedded in us that there was no way for us to ever remove it ourselves. But Jesus could, and Jesus did! If the stinger -- if sin -- is removed, then death loses its power, too.
When Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, he left all sin -- he left the stinger of death -- in His grave! Death for the child of God is like a bee without a stinger. There's nothing it can do to hurt you! "Where, O Death, is your sting!"
