Living the Cross-Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing by C.J. Mahaney

I love this book!! If any of you are familiar with Sovereign Grace Ministries, you probably do too. C.J. Mahaney leads Sovereign Grace Ministries, but his passion is not his ministry as much as it is the reason for that ministry. His passion is the gospel. Living the Cross-Centered Life unpacks the death of Christ in vivid detail. Mahaney takes the reader under the shadow of Calvary and points his gaze back to our one, true love: Jesus Christ. Yet he also discusses practical ways to battle the sins that distract us from that love and how to build a cross-centered life by praticing Cross-centered days. It is a short read, but one with a life changing message.

This book is a combination of two other books by C.J., The Cross-Centered Life and Christ our Mediator. I have read both before, but as I read Living the Cross-Centered Life, Christ's finished work freshly captured my view. I realized how distracted I am by this life. I can go days without being aware of His life, the most important life in history. The most touching chapter in the book was Chapter Eight, "The Scream of the Damned." It talks about the spiritual agony Christ suffered to save me and how, though we may feel alone and rejected at times in this life, Christ truly was alone. He was utterly abandoned by his Father that we might never be forsaken.

"Before being nailed to the cross, Jesus already knew what it meant to be totally forsaken; He had become intimately acquainted with being rejected or abandoned by men. Yet whenever it happened, He could always say, 'Though forsaken by men, I am not alone, for my Father is always with me.'

But not now.

He who for all eternity has never been alone is now wholly abandoned. Such utter desolation has never even existed before in all eternity, because of the infinite love and fellowship of the Trinity, which can never be broken. But now the incarnate Son must be forsaken by the Father...because the Father is holy, and, there in the Father's sight is 'the most grotesque display of ugliness imaginable,' as R.C. Sproul termed it. It's the monstrous sight of the unbounded totality of human sin resting on one Man.

Therefore that Man must be utterly removed from the presence of the holy God, utterly separated, as far as east is from the west.

Jesus just doesn't feel forsaken; He is forsaken. In an unfathomable mystery, at that moment, as God's wrath is poured upon Him as a substitute for our sin, Jesus is rejected by God. His Father turns away from Him. It isn't a deceptive feeling; it's a reality." (pages 93-94)

I am ashamed that I forget daily what Christ did for me on that day. Jesus became the substitute for all my sin and made me acceptable in the sight of a holy God. Otherwise, I would face that aloneness, that wrath, that total abandon one day. I never want to forget Jesus’ death and this book is a tool that has helped train me to dwell on the glorious gospel more and more.