Your focus when standing at the foot of the cross

I began thinking this past week about the cross and its deep meaning in my life, for without it I have no hope either in this life or the next. It hit me however that people have a very different view of the cross based on their thinking. Allow me to explain. There is a way of thinking among Christians today that would look at the cross as a means of finding value in themselves. For example the would say things like this, "This cross reminds us how valuable we are to God. It should cause us to think about how much we are worth if Jesus would go that far to save us." This my friends is a dark and prideful way of viewing the cross of Christ and the pouring out His life on our behalf. The cross should never cause us to feel good about ourselves in the sense of raising our self esteem. If it does then when have failed to see the truth of the gospel and have not been saved. That may seem to be a strong statement but I stand behind it and wish to show from the Bible why I believe it to be true. If we seek to find value in ourselves at the cross we can not find value in Christ. We put our glory above His. In doing so we have missed the most fundamental element of the cross' necessity, namely, sin. It was for sin that Christ died. It was because of our desire to do all we could to defame His glory that He chose to give His life on our behalf. Consider this description of us before Christ redeemed us. "And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." Romans 1:28-32 Or perhaps this description "If while we were enemies of God..." Romans 5:10 Or perhaps this description in Ephesians 2:1-3 "And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind." These verses (and many more throughout the Bible) don't give us much cause to raise an alarm of our goodness and inherent value. Which is exactly the point. The point of the cross was not to show us our value but God's. It was to show His beauty and His glory. If we look to the cross and see our value then there may as well be no cross. If we are worthy of such a deed from God then why would we need it to begin with. The beauty of the cross is that it shows us the extreme love of God for those who hated Him and the extreme wrath of God on our sin, and the extreme justice of God to not wink at our sin and wipe it away but to take the punishment for our sin on our behalf while we were still sinning. The cross shows us the severity of our sin. If you look into the bloody and beaten face of Christ and say to Him "thank you for showing me my value" you have missed the glory of the cross. When we see the bloody and beaten face of Christ it should draw us to our knees in repentance and cause us to shudder at the unexplainable glory of the only begotten who gave His life not for the valuable but for the condemned, helpless enemy, me. It was my sin that He chose to give His life for and that shows His glory. Let us fix our eyes on Christ not on ourselves. When we approach the cross may we see God as supremely valuable not ourselves. We put Christ on the cross. His love for His Father stayed Him there. The justice and wrath of God was poured out on Him and now and only now are we called His friends. I urge you to go to the cross to see the glory of God not your glory, for if you seek your own glory you find that you will have all eternity to find out why you were wrong.