Christ Focused
Notes
Transcript
“Christ is at the center of everything that we do and are.”
We are beginning a 5 week series on our Church vision. If you’re anything like me you hear that statement and instantly start to switch your brain off and the eyes glaze over.
So why?
Why Samuel are you going to put us through something you yourself don’t like?
For starters, we’re not just here to do things we like. We should regularly be uncomfortable in Church as God challenges and shapes us. Its good to be poked and prodded in our spiritual comfort if it means being trained to be more like Jesus! In fact we should be concerned if we only ever feel comfortable.
But more to the point: We’re going to look at who we are as a church and where we’re going so that we don’t fall into a comfortable rutt of spiritual mediocrity.
We have a great habit of making our way through the Bible piece by piece, and not just cherry-picking the parts of scripture that we like. We try to preach exegetically passage by passage and let God speak from His word to his people.
But every now and again, we need to zoom out and get the big picture of what we’re doing here. What are we trying to achieve? What does God want from his people? With the many things that God calls us to do, what are the key things that summarize our shape and identity?
In some senses it’s like hitting the reboot button on your computer. The computer has been on for months, its slowed down a bit and there’s some weird glitches, first step is “have you tried turning it off and on again?”
While it’s still pretty early in the year, it’s a good opportunity for us to take stock of who we are us a church under Jesus, and where we should be going. We’re having a little reset, and little refresh on our identity and goals.
In God’s kindness there are many people here who have started coming to church with us relatively recently, and they have not had an opportunity to grasp what we’re aiming for and where we’re going. Or perhaps you’ve been here for a while and you’ve just lost sight of what makes up our DNA.
There are so many good aspects of faith and obedience to focus on, and we can “lose the forest for the trees”. So join us on this 5 week journey to reflect on what should characterize us as a church.
The first and highest element of who we are as a church is that we are “Christ Focused”
Christ is our target - in faith we get a “higher score” by being closer to the center.
Christ is our hub - he holds it all together. Spokes are important, but without the hub they are useless.
Christ is our fission core- he fuels and warms our faith and action.
Christ is the overriding reason for everything we do.
We will be covering Rapid Fire answers to three questions.
Kids, you will have to try and keep up if you’re following along on the worksheet because we will be moving pretty fast!
What are alternatives to being Christ focused?
What are alternatives to being Christ focused?
Before we look at what we are like, let me reflect briefly on what we’re not like. It may be helpful to consider what the alternatives are.
Not being Christ focused means other stuff takes the center. Like...
an undefined god. God as an idea, a force, a nameless benevolence,
Religious performance - trying to earn our way into God’s family through legalism. Essentially modern Pharisaism, which goes to the word instead of to Christ. It has “the appearance of godliness, but denying its power" 2 Ti 3:5.
Ideology focused, putting front and center whatever we are most passionate about;
Care for the poor and oppressed,
church tradition - both traditions that are thousands of years old like what we find in Eastern Orthodoxy, RC & Anglicanism, but not only there. Also more recent traditions like charismatic stuff.
Political pursuits,
Specific sins,
academic and historical analysis,
and many more!
All of these things are important to have - care for the poor, political implications from our faith, address specific sins, godly tradition and so on, but none of it can take center stage, that is a space reserved solely for the author and perfecter of our Faith, Jesus Christ.
Ok, so the alternative to being Christ focused is to hold up as most important, things that God does not make central.
This is not just about the “negotiables” and “non-negotiables”. There are core and non-core elements to Christianity - Christians can disagree on how they think the end times will unfold or the mode of baptism (negotiable), or how many kids Mary had, but stuff like the deity of Jesus Christ and salvation by faith in Christ through grace are non-negotiable. So the more core things will be non-negotiable. But being Christ focused does not mean we only talk about the core stuff. Some people may think that Christ focused just means we go-along to get along and we never want to rock the boat by potentially disagreeing on something “negotiable”. The think we should just talk about Jesus and nothing else.
Yet, Our faith “has legs” there are implications that flow out from God’s word for our lives. And so we must move beyond just talking about Jesus himself and talk about the structure that God forms around Christ. You see this in the New Testament letters very clearly where the writers focus very clearly on Jesus and what he has done and what we believe about God, then the move towards “this is how you shall live”.
God in his word has no qualms about moving from “Salvation in Jesus” to “this is how family relationships” must be structured. From the “mystery of Christ” to sexual ethics. From “the second coming of Christ” to hospitality and prayer. And so we should not be afraid of doing that either.
So being Christ focused means that we will have Christ in the center as the hub around which everything rotates, and the point where all the spokes connect. It means that Christ is the central focus, but not that therefore we can forget about everything else.
We can say that without the hub the wheel is useless, but that does not then mean we are justified in removing spokes just because they are not the center.
It means that Jesus gets prime place and other stuff fits in around him.
Why Are we Christ Focused?
Why Are we Christ Focused?
So I’ve talked a bit about what we mean ( or don’t mean) by “Christ focused”. SO lets come to ask the question “why?”. Why is Jesus the centre of our faith and our church life?
After all, we are called “CHRIST-ians,” it’s in the name! why is Christ so central?
This is an answer that is so expansive that to do it justice we essentially need to do a biblical theological overview of the whole bible from start to end! But i’m sure you would like to be able to eat lunch and dinner today, so I will not keep you that long!
Instead, I have pulled a few key verses that get across the main reasons why Christ deserves prime focus. Let’s review them together:
Jesus Christ is God
Jesus Christ is God
This is something that came as a bit of a a surprise to Jews as they first received the Gospel. there is one true God of Gods. He is one. He is not a man, he is spirit. God had been very clear about such things over the pages of the Old Testament.
Yet as Christ came into the world it became apparent that while there is one LORD God who is spirit, he is three persons. Father, Son and Spirit. This truth is so deep and complex that it takes thousands of years for God to gradually reveal it to humanity. And then we have spent the last two thousand years still trying to figure it out! Trinitarian debates still continue.
One thing that the Bible makes very clear is that Jesus Christ is the second person of the trinitarian God. He is the Son of God who has eternally existed and who took on humanity. Jesus became a man. He took on flesh and dwelt among us.
Famously John 1:1 opens up this mystery to us with these words:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Jesus is described as the word of God who is God. He is distinct is such a way that we can talk about Jesus and God, yet he still IS God.
Jesus is God become a man to reveal God to us.
And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.
If you see Jesus you see God the Father. God is spirit and cannot be seen with the human eye. God is so big, and glorious and infinite and holy that if you could somehow “look” at him, you would instantly die. Yet God made a way for us to interface with him, to “look” upon him.
Jesus has become our mediator. He is fully God and fully man and so to Go to God we must Go to Jesus. He is the way the truth and the life, no-one can come to God except through Jesus.
Jesus is God, and so if we want to see and know the trinitarian God, we need to look at Him.
God is not some impersonal ethereal force on the World, he is named and relational and revealed.
We must focus on Jesus, because to see Him is to see the Father. Or to put it another way, if Jesus is not our focus, God is not our focus!
To look to Jesus is to look to God!
Jesus Created Us
Jesus Created Us
We also focus of Christ because he is our creator.
All the persons of God were involved with the creation of the world - Father Son & Spirit.
Jesus is the avenue, or the means through which everything around us was created:
For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.
All things! Everything you see!
The building blocks for life and our own creations are taken from His creation.
We focus of Jesus because he is our creator.
Jesus Christ is Our Saviour
Jesus Christ is Our Saviour
The fall of humanity
divided from God, hostile to God.
Our consequence is wrath and death
Jesus was sent to save God’s people from that. He is our Saviour:
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
Jesus Reconciles us to God
By his death! Atonment.
Made us holy and pure.
We focus of Jesus Christ because he is our Saviour
Jesus Christ is Our Identity
Jesus Christ is Our Identity
As saved people, we have a new identity
We are now know as Christians, Children of God, the Church of Christ,
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
It is not up to us to create our own identity. And friends this is really important for you to understand in a world that is so confused about identity. Outside Jesus your identity is as a child of wrath, and you will try to cover that up, like the naked Adam and Eve you will try to cover that identity of sin and shame with all kids of stuff - with a new personality, with career, with charities and causes, whatever it may be.
When you are in Jesus, you have a new identity. If you want to “find yourself” you need to find Jesus. If he has saved you then he has an idetity to gove you. It is not up to you to make your own, or to “look inside your heart” to find our who you are. Jesus has given you an new identity as a child of God!
He shapes and affects everything about who we are, and how we should live.
We “put on” Christ. He is the one whom we are to look like and the one who give us righteousness before God.
We focus on Jesus because he is our Identity.
Jesus Christ Has All Authority
Jesus Christ Has All Authority
In Daniel we had an interesting passage where “one like a Son of Man” comes to God the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man was given god-like authority:
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
After Jesus had died he came back to his disciples and said:
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Jesus is the boss.
He claimed that vision prophecy from Daniel as his own.
He is the king, the judge, the head of the church,
He has ALL Authority. Not some, not a little, not most, ALL.
All Authroities on earth, from parents over children, to husbands in households, to pastors at church, to managers and employers, to govenrment officials, to presidents and prime-ministers and kings, all of them are under Christ’s authority and must bow the knee to him!
All must submit to his rule and reign over everything. We need to look to him to know what is the right way to live, what is right and wrong, what rights and privileges should we have, what are our freedoms, what are the boundaries, what are our obligations.
Jesus is the prevailing authority - even if you don’t recognize it yet. Non-Christians, You’re committing crimes in a country that you’re not a citizen yet. You need to get rid of your guilt!
We focus on Jesus because he is our highest authority.
How are we Christ Focused?
How are we Christ Focused?
Ok, so we’ve hopefully made it very clear WHY we are Christ Focused. But now we should ask, HOW are we Christ focused. What are SOME of the practical implications of being this way?
We put our trust in Jesus
We put our trust in Jesus
For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
We Obey Jesus
We Obey Jesus
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him,
We Worship through Jesus
We Worship through Jesus
Worship is no some sense ascribing honor and worth. And we can only do that through Jesus.
Jesus is our High Priest and the mediator
Jesus makes our efforts worthy of God
We pray through Jesus and in Jesus name:
Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.
Our Praise, our thanks and all of our prayers go through Jesus who intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father.
In some sense all worship needs to go through Jesus:
to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
In order to worship God, we need a Christ Focus.
We Preach Christ
We Preach Christ
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
More on this next week
We give our whole life to Jesus
We give our whole life to Jesus
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
In Summary...
In Summary...
As a church we must be Christ Focused because
He created us,
He is our savior
He is our Identity
He is our Authority
He is Our God - to seek God is to seek Jesus.
How does this show? How are we Christ focused in Practice?
We put our Faith in Jesus
We obey Jesus
We worship through Jesus
We preach Jesus
We give our whole life to him.
Lots more we could say, but this should hopefully start to make it clear that Christ is our focus and our aim and our center and our everything.