Sermon Tone Analysis

! Christ The Center

by James Earl Massey

/Text:/ Colossians 1:15–20

/Topic:/ Why Christ must be the center of all things

/Big Idea:/ When Christ is central we gain the perspective we need for life.

/Keywords: /Christ; Christ, authority of; Christ, greatness of; Church; Example, Christ's; Faith; Meaning of Life; Perspective; Priorities; Unity

 

 

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Introduction:

* Colossians 1:17

* Believing Christ is central makes an immense difference in our experience.

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When Christ is central history finds its fulfillment.

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·        Everything would fly apart if Christ were not holding it all together.

* /Illustration: /George Buttrick called Christ the one who split history into before and after.

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When Christ is central our faith finds its focus.

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·        The Old Testament point to Christ as a promise and the New Testament points to him as fulfillment.

* /Illustration: /Tertullian and Luther affirmed the tradition that Jesus was the center.

* The sermon in which Christ finds no part is one which Christ gives no power.

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When Christ is central the church finds its unity.

* /Illustration:/ Dr.

Howard Thermann testified that race would not keep him from believing in the fellowship of the church.

* /Illustration:/ John Wesley did not let denomination divide him from others of God's people.

* Jesus is the central figure in our togetherness.

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When Christ is central our personality finds its wholeness.

* /Illustration: /Augustine described the tension of holy awe of Christ and longing to be like him.

* /Illustration: /In Plato’s /Apology/, Socrates tells of his desire to find the proper guide for his two sons.

* All growing people need someone over them and Jesus is that one.

*Conclusion:*

·        /Illustration: /In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Kent recognizes the authority of the king and desires to serve him.

·        All authority on heaven and earth is given to Jesus.

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! Christ The Center

by James Earl Massey

 

“He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”

This passage, a hymn to Christ, has drawn to itself a considerable body of studies and is one of the richest portions of the New Testament statement concerning Jesus Christ.

I would say that what this text holds to our view is central to a proper theology and is very necessary for any faith that saves.

Paul repeats this hymn or adapts this hymn or perhaps penned this hymn himself.

And he did so because he believed quite fully that the crucial and central figure in God’s will for creation is Jesus Christ.

This was the faith that kept him steady under all kinds of darkening skies.

This was the faith that gave him strength to endure horrendous problems.

This was the faith that made him wise and resourceful for sustained work under the heaviest pressures.

This text can give us needed perspective as we look again at our Lord, as we look again at ourselves, and as we look again at our given work in such a world.

It can make an immense difference in our experience and in our expectation if we believe that Christ is the center.

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When Christ is central history finds its fulfillment

The New Testament tells us that Christ is the center of history and that in him history will find its fulfillment.

Now our faith is that Christ pulled history together even though this does not appear as observable fact in the eyes of the world at large.

When Paul said that Christ holds things together, he used the term /sunistekain,/ which is the perfect form of a word which means /to bring together in relationship./

And his use of the perfect was to underscore the centrality of Christ in determining the continuance of the cosmos and our human existence in it.

Like Paul, I believe that everything would fly apart were it not for Christ at the center holding it all together.

I believe with him that Jesus Christ stands behind and within and at the beyondness of life and in the midst of the history we seek to shape as dwellers on this planet.

Some think of us as doomed.

I do not, because history will be fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Every time you and I take a pen in hand to date a letter we’re acknowledging anew the unique place Christ holds in history.

It’s a place that very ambitious rulers and militaries have long coveted, but only he gained that spot and he holds it by divine right.

I like the way the late George Buttrick put it in his book /Christ in History/.

“He is the one Man who has split history into before and after.”

Our western method of reckoning time dates from the first half of the sixth century of this present era, and it is the work of one Dionysius Exegius, a monk, an astronomer, and a mathematician, who wanted to compute present time as belonging within the period dominated by or controlled by our Lord.

He was right.

He was seeking to make public recognition of the place of Christ within and over history.

Now many before the coming of Christ had tried to make and enforce use of a new calendar, and they would try to date it on their own birth and enforce it by their position of power, but they all failed in the long run.

No calendar succeeded in remaining as long as the one we now use.

The entire world recognizes our calendar now.

But how did Christ get that spot of honor in a world that does not recognize him as the Christ?

I tell you he gained it by divine right, and yet he never sought it.

He only sought the will of God, and he gained centrality in history.

Every time the dilemmas posed by sorry events in history threaten to confuse you, every time sorry happenings in your own life threaten to confound you and every time life itself tends to undo you, remember and reaffirm as the early church did when they gathered for worship “He, Christ, is before all things.

And in him all things hold together,” including history.

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When Christ is central our faith finds its focus

The New Testament tells us that Christ is the center of Scripture and that in him biblical faith finds its focus.

Most of us here have spent considerable years in seminary and graduate school studying various facets and figures of biblical history, examining the literature found there and exploring the theological themes that are so evident there.

We’ve all been taught the importance of viewing our Bible responsibly as a whole with two parts, and we have all been cautioned to regard how those two parts relate whenever we seek to interpret anything from one or the other of the parts.

But even lay persons know that the new section implies an old and we’re all in full agreement, laymen and leaders alike, that both sections demand each other in order to be understood in relationship.

The New Testament again and again claims to present what is the focused fulfillment of Old Testament promises and hope.

And the lines and thoughts of the New Testament are in fact what F. F Bruce terms “a real development of Old Testament theme.”

And at the center of it all is an understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ.

So that the Old Testament points to him by promise, and the New Testament points to him by realization of his having come and even points back to him as the One being remembered, and forward to him as the One who is to return.

He is the center of Scripture.

God’s promises for history and eternity will be fulfilled in and through this One called Christ.

The late G. Ernest Wright put it like this, “The whole literature was read prophetically for the manner in which God has prepared the soil for history’s normative event, which is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.”

The New Testament writers picture him as the living figure around which all religious concerns fall into meaningful place.

The culmination of the faith informed thoughts was a theology and a literature in which Christ holds the central place.

Now this must control our theology as well, for only thus can we have a theology that holds together with clarity, with authority and with biblical consistency.

Christ is the center of history.

Christ is the center of Scripture.

Tertullian, referring to the Scriptures, asserted “This property belongs to me.

I am heir to the apostles.

As they provided in their will as they bequeathed it in trust and confirmed it under oath, so on their terms I hold it.”

And Martin Luther comes along a little later and confesses, “We teach no new thing, but we repeat and establish old things, which the apostles and all godly teachers have taught before us.”

Now that is the spirit of the faithful.

That is the spirit of those who are true to the biblical tradition, that tradition which affirms the centrality of Christ in the midst of a literature which leads to knowledge about him as the Savior and the Lord.

The New Testament shows us the centrality of Christ in Christian preaching, because it is only in him that sermons find their right reason and the guaranteed power.

We must never forget that preaching as God intended it is always done with an end in view, and end in which Christ is honored.

We preach to alert.

We preach to inform.

We preach to stir heroes to life on God’s terms as seen in Jesus Christ.

We preach to shape an experience with truth, and as Paul put it, truth as it is in Jesus.

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You and I as Christian preachers were not sent to deal with religious themes but with Christian themes in which Christ is at the focus.

The sermon in which Christ finds no part is a sermon to which Christ gives no power.

Christian preachers do more than speak merely about Christ.

There is something more in their witness.

While it is true that we do preach about Jesus, it is also true that Jesus Christ speaks for himself through us when he is central in our message and in our motives.

That, I believe, is a startling thrust of Ephesians 4:21 where Paul reminds the Ephesian believers that their Christian learning began when they heard him and were taught by him.

But how was that?