The Center of Faith

By Woodrow Phillips

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     Jesus Christ, Son of God, Only Saviour, is the unique centerpiece of the Christian faith. In Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. In Him we live and move and have our being. In Him is our hope of heaven, our way of life, our dogma for doctrine, our gospel of the Kingdom. In Him we are born of the water and the Spirit, and in Him we eat of the Bread of Heaven and drink of the Water of life.

     Jesus is the center of the wheel around which all Christianity revolves. He is our faith, our creed. We do not preach a systematic theology, but a person who revealed to us God, the Father of us all.

     We ask men to believe in HIM. Our cry to the world is, "Lift up your eyes and see Jesus." He alone offers, in His person, salvation to all the earth.

     It is not our appeal that all men see the Bible alike, but that all be in Jesus, Who is truth. We do not possess a creedal definition of the faith, but faith in His being all that He claimed to be. As the religions of men, the philosophies of our time, turn once again toward the central figure on the center cross, we are irresistibly drawn toward the sacrificial lamb offered for the transgression of us all. As we come into Him, we find fellowship with God, and at the same time accomplish fellowship with each other.

     It is an error of the greatest magnitude for any of us to substitute a teaching for the teacher, a plan for the planner, a method for the messenger, or an organization for the organism. As we preach, not a creed, but the Christ, we are constantly beset by human doubts of the adequacy of this procedure. We reason mistakenly that men must at least come up to our standard of morality, our ethics, our intelligent perception of the revelation of God, or our organizational procedure for promoting the kingdom. We suppose that democratic process must be essential to the autonomous church. We

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feel material accouterments certainly signal successful application of the gospel for the local congregation. We argue that political adventures in social need become requirements for the church to be heard in the world--but such gospel is not the preaching of Christ but our substitutions that we feel men be received to know HIM. In these ways we attempt to make the application of Jesus to the crisis of our time. It is not wrong to make Him meet the problems with which we struggle but it is gravely injurious to provide these solutions to the seekings of men before they have met Christ.

     Our good news is that Jesus, heaven's choice, came among men to reveal the ways of God for the straying children of their Maker. In the gospels are recorded details concerning His person. It is such a meagre record so little of His personal appearance--yet in this record of a few days of His life among us, all the wisdom of God came down and dwelt before the wondering eyes of sinful men.

     The miracles merely substantiated what eyewitnesses already had grasped, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." The sacrifice at Calvary completed the mortal sojourn of Jesus.--He was gone; into the tomb they thrust the flesh and bones; for He had already commended His eternal spirit to the Father above.--And then it happened!!!--The expectation of all the ages found expression in the grandeur of an empty tomb. Soldiers became as dead men in the face of the miracle. Two angels said, "He is not here. He is risen even as He said." Forty days of personal appearance then confirmed the wild longing of humanity. Death is conquered, not in a philosophy, not in a utopian dream of man's boot-strap struggles for overcoming time, but in a PERSON. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. God raised him up, and He is now seated at the right hand of the Father.

     Go tell all the nations this glad news. Let every man know the story of this triumph over death and sin. Preach Jesus. Let the gospel fly to the ends of the earth. Turn to Him, love Him, be in Him, obey Him, listen to Him, be baptized into Him, confess Him, trust Him. He is the Hub of the Wheel. He is the way the truth and the life.

     Our gospel is JESUS. It is CHRIST in whom we ask you to believe.

     (Woodrow Phillips is a Professor in Ozark Bible College, 1111 North Main Street, Joplin, Missouri 64801, and may be addressed there.)