By the end of a week spent asking hard questions about what counts as real, a person could be forgiven for feeling a little unsettled rather than clarified. Test the spirits. Measure the fruit. Watch out for what merely feels powerful. Taken together, that sounds like a call toward permanent suspicion, as if nothing can be trusted until it has survived an exhausting interrogation. But there is actually a single center holding all of that together, and once you see it, the whole picture simplifies rather than complicates.
Every question this week has really been one question asked from different angles. Not, was that unusual? Not, was that intense? But, does this point toward the cross, and does it produce in me what the cross was meant to produce? That is the thread running underneath testing the spirits, underneath examining whether a feeling left fruit behind, underneath asking whether a sign or a plain explanation actually changed a heart. The cross is not one more topic competing for attention alongside spiritual gifts, emotional experience, and evangelistic strategy. It is the measuring line all three of those things get held against.
Paul understood this well enough to build his entire ministry around a single, almost defiant refusal. “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14, NKJV). Notice the scope of that claim. Not the cross as one valuable doctrine among several. The cross as the only thing worth boasting in, the single reference point against which everything else, including his own considerable religious credentials, was measured and found wanting by comparison. If that was the standard for evaluating Paul’s own impressive résumé, it is certainly the standard for evaluating a spiritual experience that cannot even explain itself in words anyone understands.
This is what makes the cross such an unusual kind of test. It does not ask whether something was remarkable. It asks whether something was Christ. A manifestation that produces confusion instead of the peace Scripture attributes to God’s presence has failed that test, not because confusion is inherently evil, but because it is not what the cross produces. A peak experience that leaves nothing behind but the memory of feeling something has failed the same test, not because feeling is wrong, but because the cross was never meant to be merely felt once and then set aside; it was meant to be carried, daily, as an ongoing shape to a life. And a sign offered in place of the plain explanation of what happened at Calvary has failed the test in the most direct way of all, because it has substituted spectacle for the one message Scripture actually credits with the power to save.
Here is what makes this good news rather than one more standard to feel anxious about meeting. The test is not complicated once you know where to look. You do not need a theology degree to ask whether something left you more attached to Christ crucified or less. You do not need years of discernment training to notice whether an experience produced a searched heart or simply a memorable Tuesday. The center holds the whole thing together in a way that makes the discernment far simpler than it initially appeared. Everything either draws a person toward the cross and the transformation it accomplishes, or it does not, and that single line does the sorting work that a dozen separate rules never could.
This also explains why preaching Christ crucified was never a limited or old-fashioned strategy, even in a culture obsessed with the impressive and the unmistakable. It was never competing on the same field as spectacle to begin with. Spectacle asks to be noticed. The cross asks to be understood, carried, and lived from, and understanding produces a durability that noticing never can. A person who has actually reckoned with what happened on that hill outside Jerusalem, and why it was necessary, has been given something that does not need a bigger encounter next week to remain convincing.
That durability is worth naming plainly, because it is the whole reason this test matters beyond the realm of careful theological reflection. A life built on chasing the next remarkable thing eventually runs out of remarkable things to chase, or grows numb to them, or starts manufacturing them out of desperation when the real ones stop coming. A life built on the cross does not face that ceiling, because the cross does not depreciate the way a spectacle does with repetition. It can be returned to on the thousandth ordinary morning with exactly the same weight it carried on the first, which is more than can be said for almost anything else a person might build a faith on.
So here, at the end of a week spent testing and measuring and asking hard questions, is where all of it was quietly heading the entire time. Whatever else your spiritual life has felt like recently, whatever has moved you or left you cold, whatever has seemed powerful or seemed dry, there is one question worth asking about every bit of it. Did it bring you closer to the cross, or did it simply ask to be noticed? That question was there from the beginning, underneath every other question this week has raised, and it will still be there long after this week is finished.
Focus Verse: "But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world." — Galatians 6:14 (NKJV)
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