Can I return to leadership after experiencing church discipline? That's just one of the questions

we'll be answering on today's edition of Core Christianity. Hi, it's Bill Meyer, along with

Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about the Bible and the Christian life every day.

We'd love to hear from you. Here's our phone number. It's 833-the-core.

That's 1-833-843-243-2673.

You can also post your question on our social media sites, and of course you can always email us your question at questions at core Christianity.com.

And first up, here is an email we received from one of our listeners.

This is from Kevin in Michigan.

He says, thank you so much for your radio broadcast.

I've been a new listener for about five months now, and I love hearing your broadcast and messages.

I'm growing in Christ

when I listen to your show. You have such a gentle approach when answering questions in a non-threatening

way. Thank you. Here's my question. I have a friend in whom I sense a level of hostility

toward the church. We had a conversation this past week where he was saying how stupid and backwards it is that Christians chose the cross to be the symbol of Christianity. I couldn't remember how the cross was chosen to be our symbol. Can you inform me on how this came about?

Kevin, thanks for the encouragement. First of all, I'm grateful to hear that, you know, after several months of listening, you're continuing to be blessed by the broadcast. I hope that we can continue to be a blessing for you. And this is an excellent question, especially with Good Friday coming up, meditating upon the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and the centrality of the cross for the Christian faith.

By the way, this is just an opportunity for me to plug, I think, a really good book on the cross.

It's a classic, a Christian classic, really.

John R. Stott's, the cross of Christ.

John Stott was a theologian, a Christian thinker.

And this book in particular was really helpful for me in terms of understanding the centrality

of the cross in the Christian faith.

And he really goes through the history of, one, just the brutality of crucifixion, but

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