April 28

April 28

Scorning Shame

And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.  ––Hebrews 12:1-2

Jesus saw a few moves ahead, while Satan only saw what was right in front of his face. Jesus was playing chess while the devil was playing checkers. To quote Sean Connery’s hard-boiled Irish cop character in the Untouchables: that day on Golgotha, Satan brought a knife to a gun fight.

But the game plan for victory had been written years before. Seven hundred-plus years earlier, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). It’s pretty amazing to think that Jesus, as the Logos (or Word) existed with God from the very beginning:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.  –John 1:1-2

The “He” John refers to, of course, is Jesus. His sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection wasn’t some last-gasp heave into Satan’s end zone with no time left on the clock. It was foretold; destined.

But it gets better. In today’s verse, it says that Jesus scorned the shame of the cross. Man of God, that’s huge: What it means is that not only did Jesus defeat the devil, but he scorned—rejected, refused—the shame that Satan intended for Him to carry. In other words, Jesus defeated shame, Satan’s number one tool to keep you bound up in sin, so you wouldn’t have to carry it. 

Brother, we have a Savior who completely punked the enemy. You don’t need to live as if He didn’t. You do NOT have to keep cycling down into shame. It’s about knowing who He is, and what He did. When you do, you will understand that your identity is hidden in Christ; you are seated with Christ in the heavenly realm. Scorn shame. Walk in the power of your identity in Jesus.

Father, thank You for defeating the devil so I do not need to live in sin and shame. I put on my identity in Jesus, and scorn the devil and his tricks to keep me bound up in shame.