There are certain days that I don’t like to remember. The morning I found out my grandfather died. The day I had to tell my friends at school that my parents were getting divorced. The spring break morning that we all found out about Shane Ruiz. The night we heard about my uncle’s murder on the news. September 11^th, 2001. Mostly, I do what I can to avoid thinking about those days because they produce painful memories and create emotional swells that often lead to tears and heartache.

Every Sunday, though, I am required to remember not only a hard day, but the darkest day in human history: the day that our perfect Savior was brutally tortured and crucified.

Yesterday, I found myself thinking about the events surrounding this dark day as I do every Lord’s Day morning. I couldn’t help but cry as I thought about how awful the crowds were being: screaming out ‘Crucify Him!’ and yelling with such ignorant pride that His blood would be on their heads and their children’s heads. It was a dark day. A painful day. The worst day, really. And that is the day we relive every single week.

Why? Why torture ourselves thinking about the graphic murder scene of Jesus? Why does God want us to remember such a terrible, emotional day? Because the only reason that day happened is because we made it happen – and we need to constantly keep that before our minds.

Jesus wouldn’t have had to die on the cross if sin hadn’t entered the world. If I wasn’t a sinner, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die. If you weren’t a sinner, the cross wouldn’t have been occupied by our Lord. The world would have never had to see Him, because He would have never needed to leave heaven.

Unfortunately, that’s not the story.

We did sin. We still sin. We allow ourselves to get caught up in the world and the culture around us, floating from faithfulness to God out into the tumultuous sea of self-pleasing. We leave the safety of our Father’s fold, choosing to embark on our journey that includes nothing more than pleasing others and ourselves, deciding what’s right and wrong based on our own standards instead of God’s.

It’s easy to do, which is why we must constantly remember that dark day. Every week (every day, really), we bring that emotional, hard, awful day to the forefront of our minds, and it guards our hearts from sin. It puts within us the desire to quell the pain of Jesus, and the only way to do that is to keep from sin. To stop choosing the world, our culture, and our own feelings, and instead choose to be obedient to the God who sent His Only Begotten to the cross for us. And not just for us, but in our place. I should have been on the cross. You should have been on the cross. We should have been hanging there, after being whipped and slashed and mocked and spat upon. But we weren’t, because Jesus saved us from that day and He saves us from the last great and terrible Day, too. He took the pain of the cross from deserving humanity who boastfully cried that we wanted His blood on our hands. He bore that pain, and with it, He bore our eternal damnation. He created a way of escape for us so that we could be reconciled to our God and live forever in heaven with Him and with the One who saved us.

It is a dark and terrible day. Thinking about the murder of Jesus and His mutilated body brings me to tears nearly every week. But I am so thankful for the reminder. There is so much good in the reminder. At least, there can be. If we’ll let the reminder serve its purpose, and keep us from sin.

I pray you’ll let this reminder keep you from sin today. And then tomorrow, I hope you’ll think about His death again, and will determine to keep yourself from sin. Then I hope you’ll repeat that process every day for the rest of your life, each day growing more thankful for Jesus’ sacrifice and growing closer to Him as a result.