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What we VALUE - CHRIST CENTRED
John 15:1-8, Col 1:15-20, Is 53:3-6
6 February 2022
Today we begin a new series on the Values in our Vision 26.
We have four values Christ-centred,
Bible-based, Spirit-led, Mission-shaped.
The value we are looking at today – Christ-centred.
But I am going to dip into Bible-based as well
because it is hard to talk about Jesus without talking about the Bible.
And we will look at how we
interpret the Bible to get the best possible understanding of Jesus.
One question some of you may have on your mind is why do we have to state that we are Christcentred; surely that is obvious.
Surely all churches who call themselves Christian have a focus on
Jesus Christ, so how does this say anything distinctive about us?
If that is your question let me give you some findings from a little research I have done this week.
I
looked up the websites of at least a dozen churches, some of them were Anglican churches in
Brisbane Diocese and some were other denominations.
It is surprising to find there are many
churches which say little or nothing about Jesus on their websites.
The impression I got from a lot of
these websites was that the message of the church was the church itself.
The message seemed to be
we have all of these wonderful activities happening which we enjoy so why not come and join us and
you can enjoy them too.
The message was the church is a great place to be, so come and try us out.
There were other churches where the message was about spirituality.
They talked about the style of
spirituality that they promoted, obviously to contrast it with other spiritualities so that people could
see what made them distinctive.
But once again there was little or no mention of Jesus Christ.
Maybe
it was assumed that he would be at the heart of the spirituality and for some I'm sure he is.
Or it may
be they were deliberately downplaying Jesus because they prefer to simply talk about God and be
open to a wider range of ideas than just the teaching of Jesus.
So from this I hope you will see that just because a church says it is a Christian Church, it doesn't
necessarily mean it is Christ-centred.
What we want to say to the world is that a distinctive of Noosa Anglican is that we are Christ-centred.
Our vision is that we are living to love and proclaim Jesus.
Our message is very clear,
-we are not just promoting God in general terms,
-we are not promoting spirituality per se, or just trying to make people more spiritual.
-We are not saying the church and its activities are the message.
We certainly hope the church
activities are attractive and back up the message, but the essence of the message is outside
ourselves, it is found in the person of Jesus Christ.
So we want to promote our value of being Christcentred.
The next question to ask is who is the Jesus Christ we are centred on?
Once again the answer may
seem obvious, the Jesus we find in the Bible,
Is there any other Jesus?
Well yes, in fact there is.
There is the Jesus of the Bible plus tradition.
This is the Catholic understanding of Christianity which
believes God has given the church authority to develop doctrines which go beyond what we find in
1
the Bible.
So the Jesus of the church with all its traditions is the Jesus people follow.
I love my
brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church so as far as the traditions have a good biblical grounding I
would say Amen, go for it, but where they vary I respectfully take a different path.
We believe the
Bible alone is sufficient.
Another Jesus which is out there is the Jesus of the Bible plus reason.
This is the liberal understanding
of Christianity which believes that modern reason means we have to do what the scholars call,
deconstruct the New Testament and then put it back together again in a way that is consistent with
the contemporary reasoning.
A simple example is the reasoning that miracles can't happen, so all of
Jesus’ miracles are given natural explanations.
So the Jesus of reason, which fits with the
philosophical framework of the day, is the Jesus to follow.
When we talk about being Christ-centred in Vision 26, we are talking about the Biblical Jesus.
We
believe that what has been recorded in the Bible by the Apostles and close associates of the Apostles
is the most accurate and through account of Jesus which is possible and we don’t need to go beyond
it.
This is the standard we must always come back to to discover the real Jesus.
This doesn't mean we are oblivious to tradition and reason.
No one can interpret the Bible without
tradition and reason.
-It is the tradition of the church in the first five centuries which gives us the well defined doctrine of
the Trinity.
-In the Middle Ages the Church discovers it has a place in society and the Bible has to be interpreted
in terms of what it says to society at large.
-It is the church in the Reformation which clearly defines the great doctrine of justification by faith.
- In the 18th Century and onwards the evangelical revival's in England and America and the modern
missionary movement, have fine tuned our understanding of the Bible's call to mission.
We cannot escape tradition and it shapes our reading of the Bible I’m sure more than we are aware.
But whatever traditions we have inherited we always take them back to the Jesus of the scriptures
and interpret them afresh for each new era.
And of course we are also going to use reason in the way we interpret the Bible.
The only way you
can put together a creed or a systematic theology is through careful reason.
Every time you sit down in your Connect Group you are using reasoned discussion to come to a full
understanding of the passage and what it means.
You will be using reason to work out the application
of the text for our world today and specifically for what it means for you in your life.
This all requires
the careful use of reason.
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