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Cross Over to the Other Side
For Christians, the word ‘cross’ symbolises the centrepiece of our faith. However, it is also a verb which denotes an action, a definite and deliberate
Sharing stories and songs across the UK and Europe, Andy Mayo’s blues-jazz-folk-influenced music inspires audiences to reflect on the biggest of themes. Whether playing in a prison or university, corner-cafe or city-theatre, solo or with his five-piece band, he shares a story of a God who reaches out to bring the ultimate rescue. He is married to sculptor Faye, with two sons, and is Coordinator for Oak Hall Expeditions.
There are many tools that God gives His church to reach our cultures with the Message of the Lord Jesus. In Acts 17, Paul quotes national poets and philosophers to show to them their own longing for the risen Jesus. Andy Mayo writes songs and uses them in prisons, universities, schools, theatres, bars…
Here is a song he has just released:https://youtu.be/_T4SuLTt1is
I’m walking by a lake and my friend is talking about ‘truth’. Is there such a thing in cultures so jaded by propaganda and fake news? Perhaps we’re just searching for whatever particular ‘truth’ makes us happy – lives separated by firewalls of incompatible belief systems. She gazes across the water to a hazy horizon.
But what if we were to drill down to the bedrock of everything, we ask as we walk again, what would be there? Or who? As finite, limited creatures, perhaps we just don’t have the conceptual tools to get there – we’re just left with a restless and unresolved longing – ‘a splinter in our souls’.
Maybe the only solution to our search, we say, would be if One from ‘the outside’ stooped to our level to reveal the heart of everything to us.
Hundreds of years earlier, a man is walking by this same lake. He’s surrounded by those who think themselves cultured, as well as common, the contemptuous as well as the curious,
“I have come down… not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.”
Jesus was presenting himself as though he had come from the outside: revealing truth to humanity. Anyone could of course make such ‘God-claims’ but Jesus backed them up with extraordinary words and actions; healings, exorcisms, an unnatural authority over nature…
Eventually Jesus was executed for blasphemy: a man who claimed to be God. His body was put into a rich man’s tomb and guarded by a crack unit of troops.
But on the third day, Jesus’ body had disappeared and the tough soldiers were left terrified. Shortly afterwards, an increasing number of witnesses claimed that they had seen him alive. His body was never recovered and those witnesses – hundreds of them – went on to risk and lay down their lives for the message that Jesus really had risen from the dead.
We walked and wondered, had Jesus been a unique messenger come to reveal the heart of truth to us?
It was after that conversation by Galilee, that I started writing this song – it began as a prayer for my walking companion. It speaks of longing for a connection with truth, the transcendent…
This is one of those songs that has been a long time in the honing: brewed for a couple of years, then completed in a flurry, ready in time for an important event.
It was after that conversation by Galilee, that I started writing this song – it began as a prayer for my walking companion. It speaks of longing for a connection with truth, the transcendent…
That event was a dear friend’s funeral where I sang this song to those gathered. Michael Green had spent his life delighted and captivated by the news that Jesus is the heart of truth, the conqueror of death and the soon-to-return king. Michael was a historian of the first century, linguist, gifted writer and public speaker. He would sometimes ask me to write songs to illustrate his talks and had asked me to write new ‘invitation songs’. This was one of them. Just a few hours before he died, we spoke. Michael seemed to have no fear of death – just an eager expectation of meeting with the risen Jesus.
Michael once explained:
“Christianity is a historical religion. It claims that God has taken the risk of involving himself in human history, and the facts are there for you to examine with the utmost rigour. They will stand any amount of critical examination.”
“Christianity does not hold the resurrection to be one among many tenants of belief. Without… the resurrection there would be no Christianity at all. The Christian church would never have begun, the Jesus-movement would have fizzled out like a damp squib with his execution… Christianity stands or falls with the truth of the resurrection.”
“I am… the truth,” Jesus once said. Could it be that an authentic seeking after truth brings a person face to face with Jesus? Could it be that he is the one we seek? Or as Jesus once called out,
“Come to me… and you will find rest for your souls!”
I hope you enjoy this song – and that it would perhaps be a catalyst for you to search out the person of Jesus. The ideal place to start is in the accounts of his life recorded in the New Testament.
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