The Gospel and The Believer Centered Believer
(by Miles McKee)

“Christian, should your eye ever be withdrawn from the cross, you will be sure to go backwards, to grow cold, and to forget that you were purged from your old sins (2 Peter 1:9). That cross is life, health, holiness, consolation, strength, joy; let nothing come between it and you”. (Horatius Bonar from ‘Follow The Lamb’).)

“We have preached ourselves, not Christ. We have sought applause, courted honor, been avaricious of fame and jealous of our reputation. We have preached too often so as to exalt ourselves instead of magnifying Christ, so as to draw men's eyes to ourselves instead of fixing them on Him and His cross. Have we not often preached Christ for the very purpose of getting honor to ourselves? Christ, in the sufferings of His first coming and the glory of His second, has not been the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, of all our sermons.” (Horatius Bonar: Ministerial Confessions).

In the previous chapter we discovered the Gospel is about a Person…Jesus Christ. We observed, among other things, since the Gospel is about Jesus it therefore means it is not about the believer. In the Gospel, the believer is not on center stage. There is only One in the limelight, the Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s look at this more closely.

‘I’ Trouble

It is important we grasp that man is not the center of the Gospel. Ever since the fall of man, when sin entered into the human race, the focus of man’s attention has been on himself. Listen to the Father of our race as he cowers in embarrassed fear before his creator; he says,

“I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself”(Gen 3:10).

Notice how that four times in one verse the personal pronoun “I” is used. Adam, therefore, shows us that sin’s first warping of man’s character was to make him a raging subjectivist. He, not God, is now the center of his universe. No longer does his life revolve around God and His glory. His life is now about him and his condition.

And that’s exactly what it’s like in so many of our churches. Life is all about us, the believer! We are continuing with the heritage of fallen Adam. We, not The Lord Jesus, are our chief concern. The preachers preach about us and how our lives can be improved and we sing about us and how much better off we are and how great it is to be Christians. It’s all about us! Man the rebel made his experience the center of his concern, and redeemed man, for the most part, has done the same. We’ve fallen for the trap! Man not God must be the center. Satan’s prophecy, “You shall be as Gods” has, in one sense, come true in that man has exalted himself to the center of all things even in the Church! When pastors should be rescuing the flock from the wretched condition of subjectivism they, often without knowing it, despise the Gospel by placing the believer, his experience and well-being firmly at the center of the church meetings.

Eastern religions teach their devotees to look into the inner being and focus on their experience and condition. The Eastern religionist is a subjectivist of the highest order. There once was a time when there was a great distinction between Christianity and Eastern Mysticism. No longer so! Let me explain.

I once had a great friend who was a loyal devotee of an Indian Guru. He would sit for hours looking within and having all manner of wonderful experiences. When he neglected to meditate his quality of life, he said, was not nearly as good. Meditation, he claimed brought him peace and joy! He was a classic subjectivist. His experience and condition were the center of his life. He and the other devotees would congregate weekly and encourage themselves to keep growing in their experience. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Sounds like they were having church! But it wasn’t church, it wasn’t Christian. The Lamb of God was not the center. Their experience was at the center. Mark it down; all false religions have some form of subjectivism at their heart and core.
Now let’s ask a question to make sure we understand where this is going: Here we have a group of people meeting to encourage one another in their faith. They encourage one another in their experience and growth. The speaker speaks about them and how they can improve their quality of faith and life. They are the center of their meeting. Now here’s the question. Are they Christian? Well of course not! Why? Because, as already stated, the Lamb is not the center! Jesus is neither the sum nor substance of their meeting. But over here, a few blocks away, we have another group meeting. They call themselves Christians yet their meeting is, to all intents and purposes, the same as that of the first group. They are the center of their meeting. Christ and His glory are neither the goal nor the center. So let’s ask, what’s the difference? Both meetings have the common denominator of self centered subjectivism. Oh no, I think I hear some one object, the Christians are meeting in Jesus name! Are they indeed? If they are meeting in His name why leave Him outside the door? If they are meeting in His name why are they the center? If it is a Christian meeting let Him be the focus. Let the gathering of the people be unto Him (Gen. 49:10).

Sin has caused man to be a man-centered subjectivist and God’s remedy for this wretched condition is the Gospel. That is why Christians desperately need to continually be confronted by the Gospel. Mark it down, the Gospel is God’s cure for subjectivism. The gospel proclaims a salvation that has taken place outside the believer. It is a salvation grounded in concrete historical facts. Furthermore, Bible salvation is not centered in the believer’s experience but rather in Christ’s experience for us on our behalf.

One of the great tragedies in our Church today is that we take self- centered sinners and teach them how to be self-centered believers. Much modern Christian ministry philosophy reasons as follows:

The problem with the lost is, not that they are actually lost but, that they have an inferior quality of life. Their lostness consists, not in being separated from a thrice-holy God by sin, but in that something is missing in their life. A vacuum exists in their life, a God shaped void! The answer for them is to come to Jesus and ask Him into their heart. Christ as He enters the heart will replace all their deficiencies by giving them a new life with lots of peace and joy.

Furthermore, in modern ministry philosophy, we should never make people uncomfortable by diagnosing their real problem…that of being a sinner under the sentence of damnation. One large evangelical church in Las Vegas put this in their bulletin.

“Someone has said that the church exists to turn people who love to sin into people who love to worship. We object to the term “sin” because it is so loaded, it sounds too much like the dregs of iniquity.”

We can object all we like to the term sin and can re-define it till the cows come home but God will not change his assessment that all who sin are under His wrath (Rom 6:23, James 1:15, Rom 1:18, Rom 2:5, Eph 2:3, Eph 5:6).

Many of our churches are merely existing to make needy self-centered sinners into happier and more fulfilled self-centered sinners. We have developed the knack of teaching goats how to live like sheep and some of them actually do it very well!

The Decapitated Church

Having begun in the flesh with his emptiness being replaced and filled by a new life the new believer, now in the Church, continues to be the center of his life. But now he is no longer pre-occupied with his emptiness, rather he is now focused on how he can stay full! Call it whatever way you like, he, not Christ, is his point of concentration. This is common place in many of our churches. It is safe to say, Christ has been dethroned in His own Church and the believer now reigns supreme. We are witnessing the day and age of the decapitated church. Christ the head of the Church (Col 1:18, Eph 1:22-23) has been expelled. The head has been chopped off. In all things, according to the Bible, He is to have the pre-eminence but now that honor goes to the believer.

But you say, “We have a lot of activity in our church!” I’m sure you’re right! However, I remember as a small boy in Ireland standing in a farmyard and seeing a chicken getting his head cut off. Let me tell you, I’ve never seen such doings. That chicken got up and ran and ran. There was a flurry of activity but the chicken was dead. Activity is not necessarily a proof of life. The Church which refuses to be Christ centered is actually dead while it has the appearance of activity and life.

This is not to say that we Christians can not enjoy being saved or that we can not have marvelous experiences of God. Far from it! But the point is we dare not put our condition and experiences first. Christ Jesus must take center stage.

A rotten inheritance!

Just think about our experience versus the story of man’s ruin and redemption. In Rom 5:12 we read,

“Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin and so death passed upon all men for all have sinned:”

We further read it was Adam’s disobedience which made us sinners (Rom 5:19). This tells us our experience has nothing to do with anything! When Adam sinned we all sinned because he was our representative. This is the legacy he left to all his descendants. What a rotten inheritance! We didn’t become sinners when we first experienced sin; we were already sinners when we were born. The poison was already in the blood. We were sinners at birth having become sinners in Adam. This was nothing to do with our experience! We weren’t there when Adam sinned. However, as the head of the race, he represented us and we were all incorporated into him. When he stood before God, he stood not only for himself but also for all of us. It is vital we grasp that we did not become sinners because of something we did or because of something we experienced. We became sinners because of something someone else did outside of us and apart from us.