Daily
Devotional

A few years ago, I was working in the organ loft of a church, which was entered through the ceiling in the room below. While cleaning out an accumulation of old cardboard and other miscellaneous items, I inadvertently knocked my ladder over. I was stranded in the loft, without a cell-phone (what a wonderful invention!) or anyone around to help me—no one even knew I was up there. Then I remembered that, as I was cleaning, I had seen three crosses that had been used in an Easter program. I went and found the longest one and was able to reach down and get hold of the ladder and escape my lofty prison. As I found myself once more on terra firma, the song came to me, “The Old Rugged Cross Made the Difference.” I still get a thrill today from that object lesson.

If it were not for the Cross, we would all be lost and stranded in life, waiting for deliverance. Jesus has told us that no man could take His life from Him; He had power to lay it down and to take it up again. He willingly did just that on the Cross of Calvary. The Apostle Paul, who penned the words of our focus verse, could truly say that he owed everything to the sacrificial death of our Lord and Savior. I owe my getting out of the organ loft to that old wooden cross. But of far greater importance, I can say with Paul that I glory only in the Cross of Jesus—for that day when I prayed, the Lord rescued me from a life of sin and set my feet on a firm foundation.