Christ-centered Christianity - a guest post

As simply as I can state it, my question is: Is Gospel-centered Christianity a subtle deviation from Christ-centered Christianity, making Christ preeminent in everything?

Now, I know that it is impossible and probably undesirable to seek to draw a clear distinction between Christ and His cross-work, but there is a difference. One is who He is—Himself—and the other is what He does/has done—His ways/work. Obviously, His work flows from who He is and is a perfect expression of Who He is. The major point of the work, then, is to reveal Him to us. That means we have to accept and embrace what He has done for us, and due to the nature of salvation and how the cross changes everything, we are rightly overwhelmed and fascinated by the Gospel. What is the Gospel? It is the story of Jesus, the Good News of His redemption and His provision for reconciliation between holy Creator God and rebellious, damned created humans. As the song says, “This is the best news that we could ever hear. More than amazing, it drives out every fear. By trusting in Jesus Christ, in His saving sacrifice, we can be made new.” If we are focused supremely on His work, however, we may never actually follow through to the end that His work intended us to reach: knowing Him, seeing Him, being fascinated with Him, gazing on His face, fellowshiping with Him personally, understanding and glorying in Him. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does.


What does that look like? Well, look around. In a growing, healthy church these days, a growing number people have grasped/are beginning to grasp the earth-shaking significance of the Gospel for everyday life. You hear them. They talk about it. They discuss it theologically and even spin out some of its implications. In fact, they talk about it a lot—especially in specific settings like church… or Bible study… or even with a fellow-believer on occasion. “Spreading the Gospel.” “Preaching the Gospel to myself.” “Living out the Gospel.” Nice phrases (not being sarcastic here!) that we hear a good bit these days, and I am glad of that. I use those phrases, or very similar ones, myself. But then check out the rest of the conversation and look at some of the life choices—not even the “sinful” ones necessarily. Look at the way leisure time is spent, the entertainment choices, the financial commitments, the casual/careless speech, and the personal preferences and delights. Is there a disconnect? (I realize no one is perfect and/or completely consistent.) Usually, the answer is “Yes.” Do they mean to be inconsistent? Usually the answer is “No.” After all, these are people that are striving to be Gospel-centered. When they say they love the Gospel and are committed to living it out, they truly mean it. So why don’t their lives look like little suburbs of Heaven? (Again, not envisioning perfection, but seeking something that matches Scripture’s portrait of how God’s people should live.) There is a disconnect. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does. 

Why? “Gospel” is inherently a “thing” word. The Gospel is a story, a set of facts—a story about a Person, a set of facts about a Person—but not the Person. Gospel and Christ/God are inextricably linked, but they are not interchangeable. (It is the "power of God"...) “God is the Gospel” is not the same as “the Gospel is God.” The Gospel is not the Person, and Christianity is about a Person, not about a story about a Person. (I really hope this does not sound like I am engaging in purposeless, endless semantics.) If the Gospel does not lead you to the Person, you have missed the whole point of the Gospel. When I say “lead you to the Person,” I do not mean that in your examining the Gospel, you occasionally (or even frequently) express your gratitude to God for all that He has done for you through the Gospel. I do not mean that you do not acknowledge the mercy, grace, and love of God so brilliantly displayed at the cross, or that you completely ignore the blazing power of the resurrection. But, you can process all those as part of the “story” without ever allowing them to impact your functional view of God. You can gaze at the Gospel and never quite get around to gazing at Christ and being transformed by the Spirit into the image of Christ. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does.


How does this happen? I suggest that Gospel-centered Christianity is a subtle misuse of the Gospel. Let me illustrate with two word pictures:

1.  The Gospel is a bridge. It is the bridge that Christ built to provide access to Himself and to His Father. You cannot get to God without the Gospel. (Right now, I am not speaking of the salvific sense either. I am speaking of the Gospel as it relates to the believer’s life.) Perhaps it would be slightly more accurate to say that, even as a believer, you will not get to God without the Gospel. You will not get to God without the Gospel because you will be so overwhelmed by your sin, by your slowness to grow, by your lacking performance, by your fears, etc., that guilt and discouragement will cripple you, and you will be, for all intents and purposes, estranged from God. You will lapse back into being afraid of Him, trying to hide from Him, striving to manipulate Him, attempting to appease Him and weasel your way into His favor somehow. Unless you go to the Gospel, you will not get back to God. The Gospel reminds you of what Christ did for you and how what He did gives you perpetual and immediate access to God without fear. It reminds you that your performance has never been the grounds of God’s acceptance of you. It bids you run to God now, just as you did when you first turned from your sin to worship and serve the true and living God. And so you run across the Gospel bridge and throw yourself in the arms of God and stay there, talking with Him, learning from Him, looking at His face, worshiping Him, obeying Him….until you either intentionally or carelessly wander off and find yourself isolated by your sin, having chosen to allow sin to be your master again, though Christ broke sin’s tyranny over you. You long for fellowship with God again, and the Spirit reminds you of the Gospel. In His strength, you run across the Gospel bridge (we might call this preaching the Gospel to ourselves) and back into our dwelling place in God through Christ. The Gospel is the bridge. It is indispensable. It is glorious. It is beautiful. It is an incomprehensible display of the wisdom of God, the love of God, the wrath of God, the righteousness of God, the mercy of God, and much much more. But do not build your house on the bridge. The bridge manifests the character of God in order to point you to God Himself. If you settle down on the bridge instead of actually crossing all the way over and finding your home in God, I think you are misusing the bridge. The Gospel is not the center of the Kingdom; the One sitting on the throne is the center of the Kingdom, the center of life and Life.


2. The Gospel is a beautiful glass window in an otherwise wretched dungeon, a dark, filthy, stench-filled torture-chamber (again, not in the salvific sense, but in the believer’s experience). You can be fascinated by the glass window itself—its beauty, clarity, light-giving properties and so on, or you can look through it and see the sun and the trees and throw it open and climb out of your prison cell back into freedom.


Analogy: From cover to cover, the Bible tells us of God’s relationship with people, and, barring the first two chapters of Genesis and last two chapters of Revelation, His relationship with a sinful, rebellious people in need of redemption. The only reason there is a need for redemption is because God loved sinful man. No sin = no redemption story. So, in a sense, the Bible is about us and our being redeemed. But we know that in a much greater sense, the Bible is about God. It is about Who He is and what He is doing and how everything from eternity past through eternity future is working together to bring Him glory, the glory due to His Name. We can read the Bible as a revelation about us and find some really large, really relevant truth in that. Or we can read the Bible as a revelation of God and practically explode our minds by the little glimpses that we see into the Infinite One and eternity. So we can read the Bible from two different perspectives—both acceptable, though not equally weighty—and get two different results from our reading—both profitable, though not equally magnificent.


The Gospel is kind of like that. You can view the Gospel as the truth about Jesus and His work on your behalf that saves you and enables you to live by grace instead of trying to keep the law and living under guilt and fear, and you can truly and legitimately derive profit and joy from seeing the Gospel like that. You can also view the Gospel as the truth about Jesus, the Savior who saves you  and gives access to God both now and forever, and you can go on to take full advantage of that access to God by living in His presence day and night and knowing Him and admiring Him and growing in your understanding of Him and being transformed by His Spirit into His likeness.


I think that our common application of “Gospel-centered Christianity” leaves us sitting on the bridge, admiring the magnificent window, and content to escape living a guilt-laden life because we have tapped into grace. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does. That is why I think we are missing something… something really essential. Hence the question: Is Gospel-centered Christianity a subtle deviation from Christ-centered Christianity: making Christ preeminent in everything, being His disciple, knowing Him and making Him known?

**This is a guest post by Miriam K. Champlin, slightly edited with her permission.