Cornerstone Curriculum, Official Certification Edition - Mentor's Guide

M E N T O R N O T E S / 1 2 1

This kind of reflection immediately reveals the real purpose of Christological understanding: the worship and love of our great God and Father, through Jesus Christ. God’s unsought, eternal, remarkable love was demonstrated through the cruel beatings, scourgings, humiliations, and ultimately the horrific death of our Lord on the cross. The wonder of God’s love ought not merely produce shiny essays on bright white paper, but broken souls, humbled before God and ready to be used in the same way that our dear Lord humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Seek to make the deep feeling and heart language plain here, and not only in the devotion, but throughout the entire lesson. Enable your students to see and sense the horrifying spectacle it was when our dear Lord put himself in our place to bear the inequity and rebellion that we have so heartlessly and foolishly manifested from childhood. Truly, our Lord died because the Father laid on him the iniquity of us all. The contacts in this lesson are designed to help prime the pump of our understanding about both the fact of and the meaning and implications of the death of Christ. This is one of the most important and yet difficult tasks for us as leader developers. How and in what ways do we help emerging Christian leaders to rediscover the meaning of the death of Jesus, when in so many contexts that death has been underestimated, over-abstracted, and virtually ignored as the heart and soul of Christian faith and life, both in terms of its objective work, resulting in our salvation and redemption, and its subjective work, i.e., our duty to take up our cross and to follow him, being conformed to his death ? As you proceed through this lesson, be especially cognizant of the present-day tragedy of a kind of mind-less (over against mindful) comprehension of the death of Jesus. Our aim must be to help reintroduce this momentous truth with both clarity and freshness, in order that our students can discover before them the Lord displayed as crucified before them. Paul suggests this is possible in his critique of the Galatian malady to ignore the far-reaching implications of the death of Christ for salvation and for discipleship. (Gal. 3.1 – O foolish Galatians!

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