In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of truly knowing God as He is, rather than creating a distorted image of Him based on our own desires and fantasies. The speaker suggests that many Christians have avoided the true message of the cross, which is essential for separating ourselves from the seductive and sinful world. The failure to embrace the cross has led to a woeful condition in the lives of believers and in the church as a whole. The speaker calls for a radical apprehension of God and a genuine understanding of the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross as the true reflection of God's image.

You're going to have to think about what I'm saying tonight. This is thoughtful and deliberate and important. How many are hearing me now whose minds are either a battlefield or a playground? If you've graduated from Playboy and Sports Illustrated and other kinds of worldly things that our minds love to fasten upon, they will, if you'll give them no other alternative, even fasten upon things spiritual and religious so long as they can be occupied. I'm becoming conscious that far from God making us in his image, we are most of us guilty of making him in our image. There's a kind of fancy and fantasy and projection that takes place in the minds of many saints. And though we use the name Jesus, probably every one of us have another variation on the same theme. We need desperately and urgently to know him exactly as he is, radically and utterly. And I have a suspicion that he is nowhere presented as the reflection and the image of God more accurately than in his suffering and death. Without exception, if our Jesus is one other than that which was crucified, it's a self-serving Jesus which we have projected out of the fancies of our own mind. These Jesuses are manful and attractive and beguiling. However great the imagination, it falls short of these Jesus crucified. If we knew the importance of Christ and him crucified, we would clear the deck and not allow our minds to be a mishmash of all kinds of things until God has himself established an understanding that is utterly fundamental to our faith and to our walk. Christ and him crucified. I think that it's the answer to the kinds of vagaries and self-imaginings to which we are prone. To what degree are we just singing a song to a kind of a blurred image of our own making that serves our own vested self-interest? It's not the root of all of our ills, the failure to radically apprehend God as he is. If there's any false image, it can only be corrected by knowing God as he is. How many countless thousands of religionists are there occupying pews on Sunday who have yet to come to that cry and to that revelation? Singing hymns, quoting scripture, but have not had the revelation of who that hacked piece of flesh on the cross was. I think that we have suffered enormously for the avoidance of the subject because the cross itself is ruthless and absolute. It's an unswerving standard by which everything should be conformed and measured. And if it is absent, if it has been neglected, if some other hokey substitute has been put in its place, everything is going to be out of variance and out of whack. Which I believe is the case and the condition of modern Christianity tonight. The many Jesuses of today are soppy, sentimental, and self-serving, and a complete contradiction to the Christ who suffered and died. You're gonna have to think about what I'm saying tonight. We are most of us guilty of making him in our image. The real and pathetic condition of the lives of many Christians and the woeful condition of the church, the enormous fascination of the world and its powerful influence on God's people, all testify to the fact that we have tragically avoided the cross of Jesus. Only the cross can effectually crucify the world from us and we from it. The world is too much with us. Nothing less than the cross can separate us from a world that is powerfully seductive, has enmity with God, and lying in the wicked one. Are we not rather a people like those of old who desire a king who would come down from the cross and we will believe him, rather than be required or invited to join him on it? How many of us who talk about the cross, really in our hearts desire that he come down from it?