The Old Rugged Cross

I was thinking back the other day to my early childhood. Specifically, I was thinking about my Grandfather on my Dad’s side of the family.

We lived across the street from him and my grandmother. On Sunday afternoons, it was not uncommon for my family to have Sunday lunch with my aunts and uncles and cousins at their house. We’d have pot roast, fresh vegetables from PaPa’s garden, potato salad and homemade Ice cream for dessert.

PaPa died when I was just 10, but I have vivid memories of time spent with him on the front porch swing, him reading Sunday comics to me, and the laugh he always gave when he was picking on my little sister.

He had two favorite hymns. When the Roll is Called Up Yonder and The Old Rugged Cross.

I started thinking about The Old Rugged Cross the other day, so I looked it up. George Bernard, a Methodist Minister, wrote it in 1912. As the story goes, he was leading a revival in Michigan and was being mercilessly heckled by a group of young men. Their disregard for the gospel troubled him deeply, so he turned to the scriptures to reflect on the work of Jesus on the cross. That’s when the inspiration struck. "I seemed to have a vision... I saw the Christ and the cross inseparable," he wrote later.

From that inspiration came the words my PaPa loved so much.

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross
The emblem of suffering and shame
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.”

George Bernard understood that the work of the cross was for all of us, a world full of lost sinners… even the youth that were heckling him during the Revival.

Without the Old Rugged Cross, we would be lost sinners without hope.

But because, as the second verse of the hymn states,

“The dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary”

Then all who cling to that Old Rugged Cross are no longer lost sinners, but redeemed children of God.

In Ephesians Chapter 2, Paul put it this way,

“You were dead in your offenses and sins … But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the boundless riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

I’ll wrap this up with the chorus of PaPa’s old favorite. If you know it, sing along…

“So I'll cherish the old rugged cross
Till my trophies at last I lay down
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it some day for a crown.”

Thank God for The Old Rugged Cross,

Dave Cruse