We're going to kind of flip around to two passages to begin with, to get started. John 19, along with Isaiah 52 and 53, because you might say those chapters in the Bible really go hand in hand. You might say, well, how does Isaiah the prophet, who wrote something thousands of years ago, and way before John ever wrote his

gospel, how do they go together? Well, it's a shocker. If you're new to the Bible, this is one of the

things that makes the Bible amazing. It's not just some book of literature. It truly has the

fingerprints of God, and some of those fingerprints are that God

knows the end from the beginning. He knows the future of things and even speaks them out in his

word. One of those most detailed events would be the crucifixion of our Savior Jesus. So

keep your finger both in John 19 and Isaiah 52 and 53 will go to those places.

You know, it's interesting to me how today we've sadly, I think, trivialized the cross.

I don't think the cross means what it once did to so many, but it's become something that's sort of a trinket. And just because

someone wears a cross doesn't really mean anything to me. You know, it might mean something to you,

which is wonderful. If you wear a cross as a necklace, but, you know, when I see, you know,

these famous celebrities who are doing demonic things, you know, on the stage,

but they're also wearing a cross. It makes me kind of think, what does that cross mean to them?

I don't think it means to them what it means to me. But I think we tend to trivialize it.

And could that be one of Satan's tactics to sort of minimalize and sort of, you know, trivialize the cross and the meaning

of the cross. Put it everywhere. Put it on everybody's necklaces. Have, you know, people using it for

different things. You know, it was A.W. Tozer in his book, The Pursuit of Man, he wrote this about the cross. He said,

The cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is rather a new

bright ornament upon the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christian whose hands are indeed

the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of

Cain. The old cross slew men, the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned. The new cross

amuses. The old cross destroyed, pardon me, the old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh,

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