Cross Centered Life: Ch.2

What's Your Life Centered On? That is the title of the 2nd chapter of The Cross Centered Life. It is a wonderful, heart-revealing question.C.J. Mahaney tries to show us how important it is to see what we build our lives around, what motivates us and what effects our lives, our decisions, our affections, passions, our characters.

Quite often what we center our lives on is something good, such as our families, ministry, and friends - all good gifts from God, yet so distracting. I know I tend to build my life around God's good gifts to me rather then God himself, as He has revealed Himself through the Gospel. He sent His only Son, Jesus, to bear the wrath that I deserve because of my sin. Jesus suffered, bled and died on a cross, in my place, to take the punishment I deserve, and bring me near to the Creator as a clean, forgiven, and much loved child of the Most High God! This is good news, and should be what my life is built on. The gospel is what my life should be centered on. There is much temptation to move on from the gospel, to what we may believe to be bigger and better things. We want to know the deep things of God. We want to move on to greater truths; and though that growth in the knowledge of the word of God is necessary, it is not bigger and better apart from the gospel. The christian life, beginning, middle, and end, is all about the gospel of Jesus Christ- what was accomplished through Jesus' death on the cross!

D.A. Carson said, " I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights hat take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far moved from idolatry."

This is a scary thought that it is so easy to build my life around my family rather then my family around the cross - the gospel, and that it is having an idol - something that takes my affections that rightly belong to God and sets it on that thing, such as my family. Perhaps for some of you, it is work, or friends, or a ministry , or pursuit of knowledge, that displaces the cross and becomes what you build your life, you actions, character, and affections on.

The death and resurrection of Jesus is of first importance in the life of a follower of Jesus. It is what should permeate all our thinking, family life, work, play, ministry and pursuit of knowledge.

C.J. Mahaney points out 3 ways of thinking that we slip into and draw us away from the gospel.

1. Legalism, which means basing our relationship with God on our own performance.
2. Condemnation, which means being more focused on our own sin than on God's grace.
3. Subjectivism, which means basing our view of God on our changing feelings and emotions.

I don't know about any of you, but I have all three of these tendencies at various times, and they kill my joy in the Lord.

We must battle, dear sisters, to keep the gospel at the center and not allow anything to distract us and allow us to make the gospel secondary in our lives.

What about you, what is of first importance to you?

What have you built your life on?

What do think about the most?

What do enjoy the most?

What do you your activities center around?

Let us pray together that we would never boast in anything but the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.