The center of everything we believe, preach, sing, and live at Grace Fellowship Church in Sarasota. Not one subject among many. The subject beneath every subject.
“For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” — 1 Corinthians 2:2
The apostle Paul walked into one of the most educated, most morally confused cities of his world — Corinth — and decided to simplify his preaching down to one theme. Not because he had nothing else to say. Because nothing else could do what this one thing does.
The cross of Jesus Christ is not a topic. It is the interpretive center of the Christian faith. It is where God’s justice and God’s mercy meet in a single act of love. It is the moment the Old Testament was pointing toward and the New Testament remembers as the turning point of history. Take it out of the middle and the whole Bible collapses.
At Grace we have been careful, over many years, to keep this message at the middle of everything. Every sermon, every song, every home gathering, every baptism — we trace back to this one point. It is the reason we are here.
When Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross outside Jerusalem around AD 30, four things happened at once. Every one of them is essential. Pull any one out and the gospel becomes something less than what the Bible actually preaches.
The Bible is honest about the problem. Every one of us has sinned, and the just wage of sin is death (Romans 3:23; Romans 6:23). No amount of good behavior catches us up. On the cross, Jesus — the sinless Son of God — took the sentence that our sin deserved. “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). He died, so that we would not have to.
This is a word most people have never heard. It means the cross absorbed God’s righteous anger at sin, so that anger no longer rests on those who trust in Christ. “God set Him forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith” (Romans 3:25). What Jesus suffered on the cross, we will never suffer. That is the heart of good news.
Sin does not just make us guilty. It makes us strangers. The cross removes the barrier. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). The veil of the temple tore top to bottom the moment Jesus died. The Father is not far off. Through the cross, He is near.
The cross looked like defeat. It was the greatest victory ever won. “Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). Sin, the law’s condemnation, and the enemy’s accusation were all broken at Calvary. The grave could not hold Him. He rose on the third day, and the victory is final.
And these four works are not just a finished transaction we remember. They are the foundation of everything that now unfolds in a believer’s life — forgiveness that reaches deeper than memory, sanctification that slowly reshapes the heart, a life being formed toward full maturity in Christ. The cross is a finished work that keeps working.
A lot of churches talk around the cross without ever preaching it. We want to say plainly what the cross is not, so that what it is comes into focus.
It is not simply a moral example. Yes, Jesus’ love is the pattern for ours. But if the cross is only an example, we are still in our sins. We need more than a better teacher. We need a Savior.
It is not a transaction you manage with good behavior. The cross is not God grading our lives on a curve. It is God paying a debt we could not pay — and offering the forgiveness as a gift, received by faith (Ephesians 2:8–9).
It is not a ticket to a prosperous life now. The New Testament never promises that following Jesus will make you rich or comfortable. It promises something better: that the love of God, the forgiveness of sins, and the hope of resurrection are yours in Christ — even through suffering (Romans 8:17–18).
It is not old news. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 2:2 decades into his ministry, as a mature apostle, to a church that had moved on from the basics. He came back to preach the cross. So do we. Every week.
To understand the cross, you have to see where it sits in the Bible’s story. It is the hinge between two covenants — the old and the new — and everything before it was pointing at it, while everything after it flows out of it.
For over a thousand years, the Old Covenant taught Israel how serious sin was. Every day, in the tabernacle and later the temple, priests slaughtered animals so that the people could draw near to a holy God. The blood covered sin, but it never truly cleansed the conscience (Hebrews 10:1–4). The sacrifices had to be repeated, year after year, because no animal could finally take a sinner’s place.
Then Jesus came — the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). He did not add another sacrifice to the system. He ended it. “By one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). The old covenant prepared the ground. The cross plowed it. The new covenant is the harvest.
Under the new covenant, sins are not merely covered; they are remembered no more (Hebrews 8:12). The law is not erased; it is written on the heart by the Holy Spirit (Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 3:3). The Christian does not approach God through a priest and an animal; we come boldly to the throne of grace through the crucified and risen Jesus Himself (Hebrews 4:16).
This is why, at Grace, we preach the cross as the great dividing line. It is not a nice Christian picture. It is the turn of the ages.
The cross saves us — and it also shapes us. It is not just the door into the Christian life. It is the pattern of the whole Christian life.
Those forgiven at the cross become the most forgiving people in the room. “Forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). Unforgiveness has no place where the cross is preached.
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The same cross that forgives us is the cross that reshapes us. Grace does not leave us where it found us — the Spirit is at work forming us, a little more each year, into the likeness of Christ.
The Christian does not escape suffering. We meet it differently. The cross tells us that the God we serve knows what it is to bleed — and that the Father’s love toward us never wavers, even in the dark (Romans 8:32).
Paul tells husbands to love their wives “as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Cross-shaped love is the only kind that holds a marriage together across decades.
“Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Corinthians 9:16). The Christian who has tasted the cross cannot help but point others to it — in Sarasota, and with CTMI across the nations.
“God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14). We do not boast in our church, our growth, our gifts, or ourselves. We boast in Him, crucified for us.
A church that really preaches the cross will look different from one that does not. The preaching is plain and Scripture-saturated. The songs are unafraid of blood and wounds and mercy. The prayers are honest about sin. The Communion table is at the center of our life together, not an add-on. The baptism pool is where new believers go under the water in the likeness of His death, and come up in the likeness of His resurrection (Romans 6:3–5).
When you come to Grace, that is what you will find. Not a show. Not a sales pitch. A family of Christians learning, slowly and across years, what it means to know nothing among one another except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
— Sundays at 10:00 AM · 4350 17th Street, Sarasota, FL.
The cross preached plainly, week after week, from a pastor who means it. Walk in as a guest, walk out as family.