God's Solution Is Execution

Late in his life, Derek Prince described a kind of waking vision he could not shake.

He was meditating on the hill of Calvary — the three crosses, the two thieves, and the one in the middle. And a question came to him, quiet and exact. For whom was the middle cross built?

He answered the way most of us would. It was built for Barabbas. The murderer who went free that morning. The cross in the center was his, and Jesus took his place on it.

Then came the deeper question. If Jesus took Barabbas's place — and took yours — then who are you in this story?

He saw it. He was Barabbas. The guilty man who walks away free while another dies on the wood that had his name carved into it.

Out of that came a sentence Prince spent the rest of his life refusing to soften.

God's solution is execution.

Not improvement. Not education. Not a better environment or a cleaner barn. The self, he understood, is not renovated. It is crucified. Grace does not tidy up the old man and send him on his way in nicer clothes. It puts him to death, and raises a new one in his place.

That is the hardest doctrine in Christianity, and the one we have worked hardest to forget. We would much rather be improved than executed. We will accept almost any amount of self-help, and almost no amount of self-death.

And yet — this is the part that keeps the hard word from turning into cruelty — the execution is not something you perform on yourself to earn your way to God. Grace goes first. It always has. Prince loved to point out that the great passage on this matter opens with grace and only then arrives at works, in that order and no other. You do not climb onto the cross to win God's favor. You are brought there because He has already given it, and because the old self is the one thing standing between you and the life He means to hand you.

There are, in the end, only two gospels on offer. One promises to improve you. It will tidy your habits, lift your mood, optimize your days, and leave the self enthroned at the center of it all, only better dressed. The other promises to kill you, and to raise someone new in your place. The first is everywhere now. The second is the one Jesus actually preached.

This is where everything in these essays has been heading.

The Farm Is Not the Cross

So let me be plain, because everything I have written about the farm could be misheard.

The farm is not the cross.

It simply keeps handing you one.

A man cannot crucify himself by buying land. No one was ever sanctified by his chores. You can own six hundred acres and a hundred animals and remain exactly as selfish as the day you signed the deed — I have watched it happen, at the fence line, in the easement, in the man who threatens his neighbor over an inch of dirt.

The farm saves no one. I have said this before, and I will not keep saying it.

But here is what the farm does, and why I keep returning to it.

Every morning it sets something in front of you that does not care about your comfort, your mood, your plans, or your opinion of yourself. A cold barn. A hungry animal. A fence down in the rain. A creature that will suffer if you roll over and go back to sleep.

And every morning, the oldest question is asked again. Will you deny yourself, or won't you?

The cross is the place of execution. The farm is not that place. But it is a place that asks you, daily, whether you are willing to go there. It rehearses the dying. It will not perform it.

That distinction is nearly the whole of the Christian life. Grace does the killing. The circumstances only keep presenting the knife. And a man who has arranged his life so that the knife is never presented should not be surprised when he never learns to die.

What the Dependent Reveals

Let me tell you about a night.

A doe died giving birth in the cold, and left a kid that could not have weighed three pounds. I found it stiff and barely breathing. There is no version of that night where you save the animal and also get your sleep, and there is no version where you save it without holding it against your own body for hours and feeding it by hand and getting up again and again to check that the small chest is still moving.

I will be honest. Part of me did not want to. Part of me did the arithmetic — the cost of the bottle feeding, the long odds, the morning that was coming whether I slept or not — and part of me wanted to let nature take what nature had already half taken.

That part of me is the thing my father spent his life warning me about. That is the self, doing its quiet sum, asking what this will cost and whether the creature is worth it.

The goat did not sanctify me. Let me be clear about that. I have warmed animals through the night and felt nothing holy, only tired.

What the goat did was show me. It put the question where I could not avoid it. It held a mirror up to the exact distance between the cross I talk about and the cross I am actually willing to carry.

That is what every dependent does.

The horse. The dogs. The accidental litter that arrived by no plan of yours — the one certain voices wanted you to be quietly rid of, because it is a nuisance to keep alive something that cannot pay its own way.

The widow. The orphan. The poor man who smells. The neighbor whose trouble is messy and inconvenient and somehow yours now, whether you wanted it or not.

None of them will make you good. But put any one of them in front of a man — something that needs him, costs him, and can never repay him — and you will learn, and so will he, what he actually is.

My father knew this. The verse he gave me was not sentiment. It was a test. Care for the orphan and the widow. Go to the one who cannot pay you back — and find out what you really are.

An Age Built Against the Cross

Now set all of this beside the world we have actually built.

We have spent a century, and a fortune, removing every occasion for self-denial from ordinary life. This was not a conspiracy. It was a kindness, mostly — the same good impulse that drains a swamp or sets a broken bone. We saw difficulty, and we abolished it.

The result is a life in which almost nothing depends on us, and we depend, knowingly, on almost no one.

The food arrives at the door. The car drives part of itself. The house warms and cools without a thought. A subscription replaces the skill. An app replaces the neighbor. A screen replaces the long, dull, sanctifying hours of being needed by something that cannot thank you.

We do not gather wood, or carry water, or sit up through the night with a sick animal. Most of us no longer sit up through the night with a sick person, either, because there is a facility for that now, staffed by strangers, and it is cleaner that way.

Each of these is a mercy in itself. I use every one of them. The point is not that convenience is a sin.

The point is that comfort is not neutral.

Every arrangement that removes a hardship also removes the occasion that hardship provided — the daily, grinding, unglamorous summons to put yourself second. We did not merely delete the inconvenience. We deleted the cross that was hidden inside it.

And we did it so gradually, and with such good intentions, that no one ever stood up to oppose it. Who argues against warmth? Who campaigns for the sleepless night, the cold walk to the barn, the burden of a neighbor who needs you at the wrong hour?

So the occasions vanished one by one, each removal sensible, each one applauded — until we woke in a world engineered, almost perfectly, against the very thing the gospel says will save us.

Then, a generation later, we look around at a church full of people who cannot deny themselves anything, and we wonder where the power went.

Prince told us where it went. The power of godliness, he said, is not miracles, or tongues, or any of the gifts we prize. It is the one power that turns a self-centered man into a self-giving one.

We did not lose it in a theological argument. We renovated it out of our houses.

What Comes After the Knife

I have made all of this sound grim, and I should not leave it there, because the cross was never the end of the story.

Execution is not the point. Resurrection is the point. The self is put to death so that something can be raised that could never have lived while the old man held the throne — a person who can love without first counting the cost, who can give without needing it back, who can sit up through the cold night with the dying thing and feel, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, an unreasonable joy.

That person is not a better version of the old one. He is a new creation. God was never in the business of improving the peach. He grows new fruit on a new tree.

This is the mercy hidden inside the hard word. We are not asked to die for the sake of dying. We are asked to die because there is no other door into the kind of life we were actually made for — and because the One who asks it went first, and stands even now on the far side of it, holding that door open.

The Last Conversation

I keep coming back to that room.

The notebook. The thin light. My father, clearer than he had been in years, with the estate and its quarrels pressing at the door, and a son beside the bed asking what to do about the land.

I wanted a plan. He gave me a way of seeing.

The land was never the inheritance.

The inheritance was this. To look first for the one who cannot repay you. To make yourself responsible for someone who depends on you. To find — in the mess, and the cost, and the dung in the lane — the exact place where the self is asked to die, and to go there on purpose, every day, for the rest of your life.

That was the faith my father handed me. It is older than he was. It runs back through Prince to Paul, through James to the prophets, through the parables to the manna to the garden — all the way down to a God who made a man a keeper before He made him anything else.

I am still learning how to live it. Most mornings I do the arithmetic before I do the duty. The old man is not dead in me yet. He only knows now that he is supposed to be.

But I have stopped looking for an easier inheritance. There isn't one.

There is only the cross, and the daily chance to carry it, and the strange mercy of a life arranged so that you cannot quite forget where it is.