Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

Today is Good Friday.

The day when Christians across the world and across world history, remember the death of Jesus on a Roman

cross. On Good Friday, we remember that the cross is not like some museum piece that we examine

in a long line of interesting but currently irrelevant artifacts. No, far from being an artifact,

the cross of Jesus is active. His death is a historical event with ongoing,

personal, and cosmic implications. Good Friday is about a real person, in a real place,

in a very real moment that creates the substance of our salvation. And yet, it's possible to believe all of that,

to intellectually believe that Good Friday happened, yet functionally deny its significance today.

It's revealing that we use the Latin word for cross, crux, to describe the most significant

or central part of an issue. We talk about the crux of a certain problem or the crux, to describe the most significant or central part of an issue. We talk about the crux

of a certain problem or the crux of the matter. Ironically, we often bypass the crux of the cross

of Jesus, the central point of his death that lands in our experience today. We bypass the crux of the cross when we live with

paranoid guilt that we're somehow not forgiven by God, always looking over our shoulders to see if

he still loves us in the midst of our sin. We bypass the crux of the cross when we feel numb to

sacrificial love toward other people, when we're desensitized

to a life of self-giving, because God's grace somehow hasn't really settled into our real selves.

Our passage today in Luke chapter 7 takes us back to the crux of the cross. It does not let us

bypass it. This passage shows us the crucial crux of the cross. It does not let us bypass it. This passage shows us the

crucial centrality of the forgiveness that is only found in Jesus, a forgiveness that serves as the

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