Christ

I’m of the conviction that the worst thing in life is to pay no attention to Christ. As such, the greatest thing is to give Him your full attention. A reality that has washed over me the past year has been the relative ease with which one who really treasures Christ may go about leaving Him in the dust trail of a life unconcerned with Him. A crux was reached one day while I was washing dishes at my advising professor’s home in Findlay Ohio.

Dr. Gary Staats and his wife Janet let two close friends of mine and I stay at their place Monday through Wednesday to take classes as commuting students at Winebrenner Theological Seminary. They are kind, simple living people in their sixties with hearts of pure gold. Being there nearly every week for the past eight months has been a blessing I will never fully comprehend. A trademark my closest friends and I share, aside from being serious about following Christ, is cooking Indian food. Gary and Janet love it, and we have cooked for them every Tuesday for a long time now. We do it early before classes start at 12:30pm and eat it for lunch and dinner. By the end of this past semester we had as many as fifteen guests for dinner between classes. My 12:30 class was Hebrew Exegesis with Dr. Staats. I’d been taking his lunch to him before class because he met early with a few other students with scheduling issues at 10:00am. This one February morning I was cleaning some of the bowls we were using to cook and he was walking out of the door. Janet followed him and they said their goodbyes. I was watching through a window, and as he initially walked out he turned and looked at Janet. With an urgent appeal bearing the innocence of a child he said, “Please pray that I make Christ the center.” She assured him she would and then he left, decaf coffee and books in tow.

Another class I had this semester with Dr. Staats was on the Book of Hebrews. He told the story in class about a time he was teaching this book to a group in Germany on staff with a well known mission organization. One of the leaders stood up and asked him what the practical value of this study was for them and what they were doing. “I told him, ‘This book is practical because it is about Christ and His superiority. What could be more practical for any Christian,’” Gary said to us as he cringed with the memory. I don’t know what that Christian leader wanted from a Bible study, but his sentiment seems to be a growing phenomenon in Western Christianity. That sentiment is that Christ is not enough. He’s not enough to preach about, not enough to think about, not enough to live for, not enough to die for, not enough to study and not enough to teach. And we’ll all sing that “He’s more than enough for me,” but we forget Him. We forget He’s real, He’s God, He created us, He died for our sins, He rose for our lives, He speaks to us, He has an opinion about our everyday decisions, He wants glory from our lives, He said money was the root of all evil, He said to love our enemies, He said don’t worry about tomorrow, He’s going to return, He is the judge over all the world, He wants us to know Him, He wants us to get Him into others lives any loving way we can, He is our great pathfinder to God and we can and should listen to Him more than anything else we do.

I’m of the conviction that giving Christ my full attention is the greatest thing in life or death. This begs the question I’ve begun to ask myself everyday and I now ask you: Is Christ the center of all that you are? Where He is the center, there will be your joy; where He is not, there will be your bane.

“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.” [Hebrews 1:1-3]