“He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,

how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?”

(Romans 8:32)

A business executive began to have trouble with his eyes. Dimmer and dimmer grew his vision. Complete blindness threatened. But the puzzled specialists who were treating him could find nothing organically wrong. Indeed, the man’s eyes under test were proven to be abnormally keen and quick to see clearly at great distances, but sight at close hand was almost gone. At last the doctors reached the conclusion that their patient had sound, strong eyes, indeed they were the eyes of a hunter or a forest ranger, “designed for use in a far-stretching country of wide spaces and remote horizons. Yet, compelled to change their natural focus, and concentrate day after day on the rapid scanning of many reams of newspaper print, the tired and outraged optic nerves at last flatly rebelled.” And a complete cure was worked when to the regular routine of the hurried hub-bub of office affairs — doing many things with eyes focused at close range and all under tremendous pressure — there was added also some time for a “country life, with ample garden, and vistas, and long views that have no end at all but melt into the distances — all of which, far from straining, rested eyes made for them.” (Gossip — The Secret Place of the Most High)

Is not this businessman’s terrifying experience and happy outcome a parable of our times; an accurate diagnosis of what is happening to many of us and a prescription of the only cure? “We, too, were fashioned for life on a great scale, and in a land of far distances, for the unseen and the eternal, for the big spiritual realities, for fellowship with God. But the seen and the temporal is so fussy and noisy, so blatant and self-assertive, so aggressively there, that it catches our attention, entangles and holds our minds. And, since we have shut ourselves into a world far narrower than that for which we are meant and fitted, our eyes, unnaturally focused on these little matters, are growing blind.” (Ibid)

Our cure from the anxieties, worries, and tensions of life is to be found in taking the far look, to God in Christ. Especially must we focus our gaze on that cross set up on the earth at the center of human history. Why the cross? Because it is the clearest and wide-open window we have on eternity. Because the cross and it alone can show us two things we must keep ever before us in proper perspective or we cannot see life steadily and see it whole.

First, the cross shows us how deadly and damning sin is. Look at Christ upon His cross. See Him there. Perfect man, the gentle Galilean, the lover of all men, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. There on the cross He hangs, blood trickling from the wounds in His hands and feet, with the spittle of a drunken soldier streaming down His face, a crown of thorns set sideways on His head, as His life ebbs away. There hangs Christ, God’s own holy Son. That’s what sin, human sin, rebellion against God did to Him. That is what sin eternally does to the best and most beautiful and blessed in all life.

When the Bishop of Osma wrote Santa Teresa in distress, asking why he did not make the progress in the development of his spiritual life that she did, that extraordinary woman in blunt frankness wrote the Bishop in reply: “You want prayer, you want believing, persevering courageous prayer.” Then she advised him to recollect and accuse himself of all his sins since last he prayed. And then this last — “to think of the cross with absorbed concentration till it loomed up in all its dreadful actuality, visible, evident there; until he was face to face with Christ, who is dying for him. All this in order that the cost to God for the sins he confessed might come home with vividness to his mind.”

How much of our anxiety and distress and genuine woe is due to sin, and if by a long look at the cross with its clear picture of just how damning and deadly sin is, we could be brought to confession and repentance and forgiveness and absolution of our sins and put them away entirely, how that would banish our clouds of worry, regret and shame!

But there is something else the cross shows us which we must keep ever before us in proper perspective or we cannot see life steadily and see it whole: that is, how good God is. What! The cross, at one and the same time the exemplar of the horrible cruelty of sin and the amazing goodness of God? Yes, that’s how St. Paul always viewed it. The great apostle was thinking of the cross — had his eye fixed upon it when he said: “If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” The words Paul uses: “spared not” and “delivered up” are the same as found in the Genesis account of Abraham taking his only well-beloved son Isaac to the top of the Mt. of Sacrifice ready, in response to what Abraham thought was the divine dictate, not to spare his son but to deliver him up, to plunge the sacrificial knife into the heart of his only son. If God wanted Abraham’s dearest and best possession of all — then in loving trust Abraham would offer it.

Once Martin Luther with Kathie, his wife, and their children gathered around the table as he read aloud this scripture story. In silence they listened as the poignant plot mounted in intensity; Abraham, climbing the mountain, preparing the altar, and making ready to offer his own flesh and blood. Suddenly Kathie broke into the reading: “I do not believe it!” she cried, “God would not command a man to do that to his own son.” And Luther, looking up from the book, gravely, tenderly answered to this indignant wife and silent solemn children: “But, Kathie, God did.”

Yes, He did. And that is what John 3:16 proclaims the wonder of — “that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” — and Calvary stands not only to proclaim how serious a business sin is and how awful is the cost of man’s redemption — but to proclaim beyond any shadow of doubt that this God — the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who spared not His only Son, but delivered Him up for us all, will with Him freely give us all things.

If God, the King of the Universe, has already given you the crown jewel in His treasury, think you He will begrudge you any lessor favor when you ask for it? What more pledge and proof of His loving disposition toward you, His generosity, His ability to provide your needs, could He possibly give?

“Whatever happens,” says John Calvin, “we ought to stand firm in this faith — that God, who once in His love embraced us, never ceases to care for us.”

Oh, the rebound from the fact of Calvary in our lives! What a balance wheel of spiritual poise it should set spinning within us to save from anxiety and worry and gloom! Why should we — redeemed at such a cost, ever worry again with such a God loving and caring for us? But we are so dumb of spirit.

Thornton Wilder says that in talking with young people about death, or loss, or passion, he never feels any incomprehension on their part — that their imaginations can extend themselves to such matters. What he feels completely at loss in trying to get across to youth is “the slow attrition of the soul by the conduct of life, of our revolt against the workaday.” But I’m afraid this is a youthful characteristic few, if any of us, ever outgrow. We are never quite ready to appraise properly the terrible attrition of the every day routine upon our souls. The anxieties and worries, the drag of the every day, get us down. And the only hope for deliverance is a great faith in the God of Calvary — walking in the belief that St. Paul came to — “that He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall we ever imagine that He would not also freely give us all things?”

See what such a faith can do with some particularly vexatious anxieties: There is for one thing that anxiety which springs from our concern for an adequate provision of the material necessities of life. This is the principal drive that sends us out in the dewy morn and keeps us struggling ‘til the sun goes down.’ Of course we ought to work, but the accompanying anxiety saps our soul and strips the glory of life. We miss the joy of living in the midst of life. So serious becomes our labor that we come soon to think the horrible thought, “It all depends on me.” That’s why Jesus tells us: “Be ye not anxious for what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor where with all ye shall be clothed.” But how not to be anxious? Only a faith in a God as good as the God revealed by the cross will turn the trick.

Martin Bucer, one of the Reformers and Luther’s contemporary, said: “Our nature is so attached and subservient to worldly goods, and is always so anxious to get enough of them, that it has no free will to help others unless it has first helped itself with what it imagines to be indispensable. But our nature will never rest from helping itself and never believe it has gained enough. Only the certainty of being children and heirs of God can give the security of already possessing what is necessary for both present and future. Only true faith can put the heart at peace. Then the heart recognizes with certainty that it shall lack for nothing. Then the heart thinks with Paul: “He that spared not His own Son, but offered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?”

Wherefore, the ultimate silencer of our anxious hearts desire for a competency of material things is not more material things, but more faith in God who, by His gracious gift of a crucified Savior, has certified His willingness and ability to provide us all necessary things.

Then there are those anxieties which grow out of a consciousness of our failures and limitations in our human relationships. Are not these some of our chief anxieties and worries — our inability to be in every relationship what we know we ought to be and want to be to those who love us and trust us? Mother and father away, growing older, we think about what it would mean if we could look in each day to see that all is well with them, but we can’t. Children grow up, go far away off to school, to work, to war — embark on marriage and begin to raise a family, needing help we aren’t there to give. Friends in distant places on whom we lovingly think, whom we know we have neglected, because of the more demanding duties close at hand. What’s to deliver us from all these nagging anxieties that well up within us due to the unresolved conflict of our holiest loves and our limited resources? Nothing, nothing, but a faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has proven what He will do for us and for those whom we love when we pray to Him for them. He that spared not His own Son — will He not also freely give? After all, God loved them before we did. He shall love them after we have to give them up.

Leaving their critically ill children in the isolation ward of the hospital, a broken-hearted father and mother drove homeward. That little boy and girl were all they had, and now both might die before morning, and yet mother and father were not permitted to stay with them because of the highly contagious nature of the children’s disease. They thought their hearts would break. If only they could stay with their children whom they had never before been separated from for a single day! But in the strongholds of their faith they did find comfort, even in that extremity. Were not their little ones in God’s hands, where they always had been? As attentive parents they had done their best to look after their children day by day — but who took care over the long watches of the night when both parents and children slept? Only God, and now, even now, as they sped away, God was standing watch over His own. And so were their souls quieted and given peace. “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not with Him also freely give us all things?”

Arthur John Gossip tells of a quaint old Scottish saint named Halyburton, who lived in the long ago, “whose mind,” he says, “for all his saintliness, was pitched in the minor key. Suddenly, out of nowhere, gloom would settle down on him like a cold and clammy fog.” But in his honest memoirs, Halyburton tells that he hit upon a remedy of unfailing efficacy for such diseases: “I have found a law that always operates, even when I am at the lowest depths, I can pull myself back into the sunshine through the duty of thankfulness.”

And he proceeds to tell how once for him the dark was so dark that he could not think of anything for which he could honestly praise God, except this — that he was not in hell yet, though it seemed certain he must soon be there. And so he began to give thanks that by God’s mercy he was still in the land of grace and hope and possibility. And, as when the dark deepens and the night closes in, one star comes out and then another and another, till the whole heaven is ablaze with twinkling lights, so numerous things he had forgotten or overlooked came stealing one by one, in troops, into his mind till his depression vanished and he was praising and blessing a wonderful God for His illimitable and unreckonable mercies toward him. Yes, and we, like Halyburton, can pull ourselves back into the sunshine by the duty of thankfulness.

When worries and anxieties assail us and the going gets tough, lift up your eyes to the cross and give thanks and grateful praise to God for your wondrous redemption in Christ, and say to yourself: “What shall I then say to all these things which worry me and vex me and threaten defeat? If God be for me, who can be against me? Why, He who spared not His own Son, but offered Him up for my sake, will He not with that beloved Savior also freely give me all things which are for my eternal salvation?”