CASE FILES: What About the Guy on the Middle Cross?
(3:52 VIEWING) — Remember the thief on the Cross who cursed Christ as they and a third man were being crucified? The third man cursed Christ for not saving all three of them, if He was who He claimed to be.
Imagine the scene when the second man, who, while dying on the cross, asked Jesus to remember him after death, arrived at Heaven’s Gate. Alistair Begg, the great retired Scots pastor of the “Truth for Life” ministry, gives us a vividly entertaining way of thinking about that scene:
One of my favorite clips!
Perhaps there is hope for me yet.
Not perhaps. You have been saved already. Receive it by faith and stop disqualifying yourself 🙂
The work is already done. Let go, believe that He has already finished it, and let Him save you now.
In the few minutes remaining to him before he expired, The Good Thief performed the greatest “work” of evangelization in human history. If you and I and every living Christian today collectively spent every second remaining to us tending to the sick, ministering to the poor, and preaching the Gospel of Jesus to the unbelieving, we could not – individually or collectively – even come close.
Amen!
Excellent sermon – funny, profound and true!
I was just reading ‘Not Faith, But Christ’ by Horatius Bonar, where he makes that same point. And he quotes a lovely hymn I’d never heard before 🙂