Living the Cross Centered Life

'Kay Karis, so I'm neither "Noomie Jeanette" nor "Xoomie Claudia", but I'm still gonna post :).

Hello everyone, I've been reading a book (reallly slowly - gosh, reading during the summer is so deceptively hard!) called Living the Cross Centered Life by C.J. Mahaney, and I came across a certain passage that really nailed me. I would really like to share it with you all, so even though it's a little long, please bear with me:

In World War II, Ernest Gordon was a British captive in a Japanese prison camp by the River Kwai in Burma, where the POWs were forced to build a "railroad of death" for transporting Japanese troops to the battlefront. They were tortured, starved, and worked to the point of exhaustion. Nearlly 16,000 died.
Gordon survived the horrors of that experience and wrote about it in a monumental work, Through the Valley of the Kwai, published in 1962. He describes one occasion when, at the end of a work-day, the tools were being counted before the prisoners returned to their quarters. A guard declared that a shovel was missing. He began to rand and rave, demanding to know which prisoner had stolen it.
Working himself into a paranoid fury, he ordered whoever was guilty to step forward and take his punishment.
No one did.
"All die!" the guard shrieked. "All die!" He cocked his rifle and aimed it at the prisoners.
At that moment, one man stepped forward. Standing at attention he calmly declared, "I did it."
The Japanese guard at once clubbed the prisoner to death.
As his friends carried away his lifeless body, the shovels in the tool shed were recounted - only to reveal that there was no missing shovel.
Imagine, if you can, the effect upon his fellow priswoners of this man's substitutionary sacrifice for them. It's a profound and moving story of sacrifice and heroism. Yet it falls short of being an adequate illustration of the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ - because there is no adequate illustration.
Unlike the situation of those prisoners staring into the cocked and loaded gun of a deranged guard, you and I do not face death from a fellow sinner. What we face is the righteous threat of furious wrath from a holy God. That is the threat faced by all who have gone astray, by each one who has turned to his own way. In our case, the shovel is missing; there is in fact a great deal more that's missing. We are indeed guilty of sin and deserving punishment.
But the innocent One, the holy One - God the Son - stepped forward to die for the rest of us. On that cross the Servant suffered for sinners like you and me, because of sinners like you and me - and as the substitute for sinners like you and me.
He takes the punishment that you and I richly deserve, yet in Isaiah's words we read, "We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted." That was the word on the street - that's how the local media covered the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth: They said he was being justly judged by God for the sin of blasphemy.
Well, those who have been granted new eyes perceive that He was indeed smitten by God and afflicted - not for His sin, but for ours.

While trying to live out the "Christian life", I have, admittedly, too often failed to grasp the meaning of the cross. What really is so significant about that which Jesus did on the Calvary? It may seem to be an easy question to answer (just read above!), but I feel like the answer is actually extremely difficult to understand and internalize. Do I truly embrace and value the crucifixion of Christ? No matter what happens in life, no matter how much suffering or disappointment I face, I wish I could always say a confident, resounding, and heart-felt "yes".