It's the gospel of liberation, not renovation

When Jesus was 30 he went to the prison of sin, and knocked on the door. Satan opened that little window and said, “What do you want?” Jesus told him: “I have come to set the captives free!” A sermon by the late Reinhard Bonnke

- Reinhard Bonnke

I was once in a church in Germany and behind the pulpit was an empty cross. I like an empty cross because Jesus no longer hangs on it – he’s now on the throne of all thrones! But as I looked at that cross the Holy Spirit touched my eyes and I saw something I had never seen before – something so simple yet so profound!

A cross consists of two beams – a horizontal beam and a vertical beam. The whole human story is bound up there, as well as God’s glorious plan of salvation. It’s all in those two beams.

First, the horizontal beam is the same sign as we use for a ‘minus’. That’s our part of the cross of Jesus Christ. We are all born with a ‘minus’! But God sent his Son Jesus Christ and he did something absolutely glorious.

Outside of Jerusalem on the hill called Golgotha or Calvary, a miracle happened: Jesus crossed through our ‘minus’ from top to bottom – and turned it into a ‘plus’! I look on the cross as God’s ‘plus factor’. It’s the gospel power of God. Jesus turns a ‘minus’ into a ‘plus’, he turns negative into positive, he turns sin into salvation, he turns hate into love, he turns disaster into success, and hell into heaven. This is the very heart of the gospel.

In 1 Peter 1:18 we read that, “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold… but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish.”

And in 1 John 1:7, “If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin.”