“These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee” (John 17:1). 

People have all kinds of notions about the Cross. When we refer to the Cross, we refer to that great, perfect, peerless sacrifice of Jesus made for you and me to cancel all our sins. There is no parallel to this propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. The greatest hater of Jesus, when he comes to the Cross, is broken by the love of the Saviour.

If you have not gone to the Cross, and unloaded all your garbage, all your hidden sin, you will continue to be a garbage truck. I am sad to see that many men and women are just garbage collectors. Their mouths spew garbage. Their eyes spew garbage. Their thoughts spew garbage. When they sit at their dinner table, they talk evil about somebody. There should be love at the table, not evil talk about somebody. Some people think that without that pickle of slander, they can’t eat. When you talk like that, you are poisoning yourself, your children and your family. Oh, how sad it makes me! So many people who ought to know better default here! They know so much religion in their heads. They warm the church pews with their presence by merely sitting there. But never does it get into their hearts.

No man can do you harm, only your evil heart and your evil thoughts—they will do you in. You are your greatest enemy. Your negative thoughts and negative mind are your worst enemies. 

My dear readers, what a deliverance we get at the Cross! The slavish mind is gone! The slavery is gone! I often say: “I am not afraid of anybody. I am only afraid of Joshua Daniel.” That which cometh out of a man, that defiles a man, not that which comes from outside. What is coming out of you?

There are too many people who are killers in their homes. Their words are sharper than daggers and spears. They are grave-diggers of their own children. But at the Cross of Jesus, there is a transformation for you and me. And you will find that there is something to glory in. So St. Paul says: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14). At the Cross, Jesus crucified my old nature and released a flow of positivity. At the Cross my old nature dies and the risen nature comes into me. Yes, the Cross is our only refuge from our old nature and from our wicked heart. What a refuge I have found in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus!

Here the Lord Jesus says: “Father, glorify thy name. This is the hour of glory.” There are hours of testing for everybody. There are hours of stress for everybody. That is a part of life. But we never call it the hour of glory. We suffer from those hours. We never think of calling them our “glory hours”.

When Mr. Moody was dying, his family was around him. He touched the lives of millions of people. When he was dying, and his heart was failing, the doctor tried to revive him. When the doctor tried to revive his heart once again, he said to the doctor, “Doctor, is it wise to do that?” And as death drew close, he said, “This is my Coronation Day.” Yes, all of us hate death from visiting us or our loved ones. But who will call it his “Coronation Day”? Because of the Cross, because of the resurrection, our dying hour becomes our coronation hour!

Whatever your doctrine may tell you, whatever some of these fanatics may tell you, you can never disprove the resurrection of Jesus. No power could keep Jesus within the grave. I knelt in that open grave. There was nothing there. But oh, how my heart was thrilled! I made my little children kneel in that open grave. Within that grave, into which we entered by a narrow opening, oh, how my heart was full of praise! My dear people, you have to experience this power within your heart.

When the disciples saw the risen Saviour, and ate with Him, they became revolutionized. From being fearful they became emboldened men. They became men full of power. All of you can enjoy this power. It is the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a purifying power. It burns out all the sin and dross. When fear is banished, and your sin is cancelled, being made free from sin, you become servants of righteousness.

My father, being a mathematics teacher, used to describe it this way, saying, “Jesus will wipe out your denominator.” When you say one, what do you mean? One by one makes one. Alright, if you remove that which is below, what happens to one? It becomes infinity. Infinity! What power should come out of your life because the Cross of Jesus and the resurrection power of Jesus wipes away the denominator in your life!

My dear readers, you must realize that when this miracle does not take place in your life, instead of being the solver of your problems, you become the creator of problems. Why? You are not at peace with yourself. So wherever you go, you will create problems. But you can only go to the Cross and say: “Lord Jesus, I want this horrible denominator to be taken away.” The resurrection power of Jesus will touch and transform your life and you will become a blessing instead of being a problem and a curse. May the Lord help you.

—Joshua Daniel

“And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32).

The Bible from the beginning to the end points to the Cross. Jesus says: “When I am lifted up, I will lift all men unto myself.” It was a great work done on the Cross. Meditation on the Cross and understanding of the Cross provide a mighty lifting power to lift one into the higher regions of spiritual life. When you are alone in prayer, suddenly one by one your thoughts appear to be wrong, and then His thoughts possess you. What may be God’s plan for you, for your son, for your family enters your mind.

Moses came into the place where God could freely put in His thoughts into him. Those that wait on the Lord find their bodies strengthened, their spirits rebuilt, their will remade, their memory sharpened, their affections purified, and their imaginations corrected. If your one aim is to wait on the Lord in prayer and get yourself remade, you will rise. Jonah outside God’s will was dead weight to himself and all around him. Only when he was thrown out, the boat became light, the wind stopped and the storm ceased. A man outside God’s will is a danger to others—especially a man of God. May God give us the grace of waiting on Him.

During a visit in 1904 to a remote part of the Transvaal, I was lodging at a small house on the veldt. 

On retiring to rest at night, I could not help noticing the extremely dirty state of the bedroom floor. It looked as if it had not been cleaned for months. I determined that the following day I would call the landlady's attention to it, and ask her to have it scrubbed.

The next morning, however, I saw what had escaped my notice the evening before. The floor was of such a nature that no scrubbing could make it any cleaner. It was made of big clods of dirt, dried and hardened in the sun, and trodden down till a solid surface was formed, as level and smooth as any ordinary floor.

Of course I gave up my idea of asking the landlady to scrub it. The more such a floor was scrubbed, the worse it would become. No amount of soap and water would do it any good. Will you be surprised, reader, if I tell you that that bedroom floor aptly sets forth your condition in the sight of God?

I wonder if you are prepared to acknowledge that in God's sight you are so bad, so unclean, so corrupt, that you can no more improve yourself, or do anything to amend your condition than the bedroom floor could be made clean by scrubbing it?

That is a truth that many are very slow to learn. They labour under the delusion that if only they try hard enough, and persevere long enough, they can make themselves more fit for God's presence. They might as well imagine that if only they could get a good scrubbing-brush, and plenty of soap and water, they would at last succeed in improving the condition of the bedroom floor. “For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord GOD” (Jeremiah 2:22).

Multitudes of men and women are engaged in a hopeless task of this sort, and many are the various kinds of scrubbing-brushes that they use.

There is, for instance, the scrubbing-brush of Self-Restraint. Have you not sometimes used this brush? You have tried to control your temper, and put a curb upon your unruly tongue. You have kept a strict watch over your actions, and have endeavoured to restrain your passions. In this way you have been scrubbing away at the dirty floor. But you have utterly failed to effect any real improvement. You are as far from God as ever. Your heart is just as bad as when you began.

Perhaps it is the scrubbing-brush of Moral Living that you are trying. You do not swear or cheat, or get drunk. No impure speech ever soils your lips. You never do anything that men would call wicked. But all this makes no difference in your condition before God. Your moral living has not changed the evil character of your heart. Who can say: “I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?”

Many fancy that where other scrubbing-brushes fail, the brush of Religion will succeed. So they read their Bibles and say their prayers. They are regular attendants at Church, and take the sacrament. Perhaps they sing in the choir. They may become Sunday-school teachers. But all this leaves their carnal nature unchanged. Their religious garb serves but to cover up the uncleanness within.

If the scrubbing-brush of Religion could make anyone clean, it should have made Saul of Tarsus so. Zealous beyond all his contemporaries, rigid in his observance of ceremonies and ordinances, devoted in his obedience to the priests, he might well have claimed to be the most religious man of his day.

But all the while there raged in his heart a bitter hatred against Christ. When at last his eyes were opened, and he found how terribly mistaken he had been, he confessed that he was the chief of sinners. In spite of all his religiousness he had to acknowledge: “In me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing” (Romans 7:18).

Do not, then, make a scrubbing-brush of religion as it can never make the sinner clean. It can never wash away his sin.

But if neither self-restraint, nor moral living, nor religion, nor any other scrubbing-brush of a similar kind can make you clean, there is One who can.

The LORD JESUS CHRIST is the only Saviour. There is power in His precious blood to wash all your foul stains away. “Ye must be born again,” are the words that confront every Christless soul. They were addressed to a most religious man. And they are as true today as ever. What you need, reader, is to be born again. Nothing short of that will do.

Own your exceeding sinfulness. Pass sentence upon yourself unsparingly. Then look away from yourself altogether to Christ: “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His blood” (Revelation 1:5). “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin” (l John 1:7). Happy is the heart that can say: “Just as I am, and waiting not, To rid my soul of one dark blot, To Thee Whose blood can cleanse each spot: O Lamb of God, I come”.

—Selected