I’m doing more public speaking right now than I have ever done.
And usually, before I step on stage to share an idea with a crowd, I have a conversation with God in my head.
It goes something like this:
Me: God, are you sure you want me up there on that stage?
God: I do.
Me: Are you sure? I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Do you know what I’ve done?
God: I do.
Me: It was pretty big.
God: Was it? Everything looks small in the shadow of the cross.
And then I walk on stage.
But at the heart of that conversation is a problem. A trick the devil loves to play on us. A trick so devious that I had to draw it out to show you what I mean.
The devil loves for us to step up to a telescope and look at our sin like this:
We stare at our sin up close through a telescope and it appears massive. It fills our vision, its size overwhelming, its magnitude breathtaking, its weight colossal. The detail is so intricate we could draw it from memory. The regret so clearly replayed in our mind we could recite it perfectly, decades after we’ve fallen.
And then, the devil flips the telescope around and asks us to look at the cross like this:
We look through the wrong end, and the cross seems so tiny. It’s too small for our sins. Our sins outweigh it. They loom larger than the death of Christ. There’s no way grace could be enough for what we’ve done. Surely there’s something else we need to do to be forgiven. To be held. To be loved.
And so we search. We run from a small cross into a big world and look for something that will fix us.
The truth is, the cross is massive. Its shadow covers failure like an ocean covers sandcastles.
I’m ready to stop looking through the telescope the wrong way.
Are you?
