Christ the Center

When I was a boy, my grandfather had a picture of a sailing ship on his living room wall. I used to sit and stare at that picture—at the ship, at its masts and riggings and waves. Then I discovered something interesting—If I tried, I could make the picture disappear. All I had to to was to look at the picture, but not look at it—to look at the wall around the picture. If I did not concentrate on the picture, after a while, the picture would seem to disappear. The more I stared at the wall, the less I noticed the picture, until It no longer appeared to me. It disappeared before my very eyes.

Something like that happens in church. We have a very focused faith. It centers on Jesus Christ as the Son of God—specifically on his death and resurrection. Everything centers on the Cross.

But an interesting thing happens to us who follow the cross. If our attention is moved ever so slightly to the right or left, and we only catch sight of the cross through the corner of our eye, the cross can disappear, just like that picture on the wall. The center of the faith, the Gospel becomes unimportant to us. We take it for granted and lose sight of it. When that happens, Christianity becomes distorted until it is barely recognizable.

I have noticed something among some people who have grown up in ARP churches. They doubt their salvation. They wonder if they are good enough to go to heaven. Anyone who grew up in a Presbyterian church ought to have no doubts about their salvation—after all, we believe that salvation comes by grace through the croas, and we preach the Cross.Even so, there a re great people who weekly stare at the Cross in church and do not see it.

The fault is not so much in the pew as in the pulpit. Preachers get bored with preaching the same old message. Like everyone else, we ask ourselves "yes, but what about this. . . ?" and turn away from preaching the Christ and the cross, and towards mmeritorious but peripheral issues, such as the Ten Commandments, civic responsibility, or psychological health. As we try to explain the world around the cross, we can miss the cross altogether.

I have a tendency focus on a clever novelty instead of on the eternal, central truth of the faith. That's a problem I hope to correct that this Easter season. For the next six weeks, we are going to focus our attention on Christ, who He is, what He did, and how He died for us.

John wrote his Gospelr everyone else had finished. He read the others, and I'm sure appreciated them. But he noticed something that seemed incomplete about them. Althought they all dealt with Jesus death and resurrection in detail, John felt it was possible to read all three of them and not notice that the cross was central. They included a lot of other material as well. So, John wrote a Gospel account that focused from start to finish on the diety and atonement of Christ.

Merrill Tenney wrote on the Gospel of John and called it Jesus on Trial. He (correctly, I think) sees a pattern in this Gospel. The theme verse is taken from John 20::31 "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. John had one purpose in mind, to present the cross.

In John 1, he presents His opening arguments. Then, he brings out a series of witnesses and evidences proving Jesus as God's son and our Lord and Savior. In John 13-17, Jesus himself gives a lenthy speech, telling who He is and how He relates to oursalvation, and where we go from ther. Then comet ethe capstone of the argument, the deagth and resurrection of Jesus.

John begins the Gospel with a brazen calim of diety.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

We all know that the ideas and writing of the Old Testament was influenced by the Old Testament. But what we often don't say so much is how much it was also influenced by the ideas of its time. The words and ideas of the New Testament were also heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, which was widely read and absorbed by the rabbis and thnking fo their dai. In particular, the idea of Plato. This passage contains ideas that go back directly to Plato.

Plato believed in God as a being of pure thought. Everything that exists sprang out of his mind. As God's thought went out from him, they took material form. The farther these thoughts went from God, the more corrupt they became.

But Platonists believed that it was possible for God to have a pure thought that would go out into the world and not be corrupted. This thougth would be a messenger and representative ofhte pure gGodliness, and would be a light to all around it. They called this thought Logos, the Word.

Jesus began in the mind of God as a pure expression of him. In the Phillips translation of this passage, he renders this first verse S"in the beginning, God expressed Himself."

Now, an d age old question is this—is there truth outside the Gospel? Did Buddha get anything right? Did Mohammed? Did Marx? And the answer is yes—all people have some truth, because we all began as thoughts in the mind of God. We are all expressions of Him. But we are not the Logos, the pure thought. We are corrupt and pale imitations of Him. Jesus is the pure and complete expression of God. That's why john says

"And the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.'

Whenever we try to explain God we fail. We cannot explain who He is. We can only explain what He is not. He is, as St. John nof the Cross said, the "cloud of unknowing". The only wafy we can grasp who God is is to see him modeled in human flesh. When we see God mperfectly modeled in a man, we understand better His true nature. That's what Jesus is. The trud God modeled in human form.

Jesus is also co-creator with God. \

 

He was with God in the beginning.Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Here John gets deep, very deep. John says that in heaven, when God began to express himself, the universe was made. That portion of Him that expresses himself—his "mouth" in the metaphorical sense, was what made all things. He spoke them into existence.

That's what Jesus is, her is the "mouth" of God. As Jesus expressed God in heaven, so Jesus expresses God on earth, so that every word Jesus said was an utterance of God Himself. He still has the power to create or destroy with a word.

We see this reflected in the Bible in the miracle stories. Jesus spoke and people wer healed, demons left, and on at least one occasion, a storm lifeter. This is possible, because Jesus was God. He was the mouth of God expressing Himself on earth.

 

He is the enlightener

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness,

but the darkness has not understood it.

 

 

 

What does John tell us about Him?

First, He is the expression of God

 

Third, he is the enlightenement from God.

John uses a second metaphor to explain this—light.

People who study education tell us there are three ways people learn. We learn by doing, by hearing, and by seeing it demonstrated..Jesus was the word, and we usually think of that as the spoken word, but for many people a spoken word is just not enough. We need to see an example of it. So Jesus came, not just as a prophet, speaking God's words, but as an example of what it was supposed to look like to be following God. He came to give us a way of life.

His example and his leadership is what gives us light. Without Him, we would never know our way out of the darkness and ignorance of this world. We see Jesus' way lif, and now we know how we should live.

He is our flashlight, showing us the way.

For Christmas, someone gave me a Garmin. It is a little machine that shows me when I drive my car where I need to be going. Not only does it show me, but it tells me. It is an imitation of life, though. It is easily confused if it doesn't recognize something. Jesus is even better than that. He is alive, and leads us by lifht.

So God sent a pure expression to earth—a Logos. He is the same creative power that mae heaven and earth. He is God on earth. He is the enlightener of eeyeron who will listen to him.

 

Then John said something that was very important to people of his day.

 

6 There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9 The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

 

Just as John drew on the contemporary understanding that came from the Greeks, he also drew on the contemporary understanding of the Jews. Most people believed by this time that John the Baptist was a prophet. So naturally, they compared anyone who came afterwareds to Him and his teaching. John says that John the Baptist pointed to the light, but Jesus was the lifht.

Jesus is not just interested in the Jew. He's also interested in the Greek, the Africacan, and the American. He is not interested just in the good, but the sinners John called to repentance. This ligfht that came is a universal light. Everyone responds to Him when He is lifted up.

 

Then in verses 10=14, John summarizes what he has just said.

10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

 

What do you need to do to be saved?. Somple. Believe in the light. If you can't believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the life, just trust his name. See what happens whne you belive on his name. If you do, you have the opportunity to find yourselve a child of God.