7/27/2019 The One Thing Needed.docx
1/2
You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all
of you who were baptized into
Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew
nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to
Christ, then you are Abrahams seed, and
heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:26-29
C. John Miller writes in Outgrowing the Ingrown Church about the
crucial place that the heart of
the Gospel has in the life and the work of the Christian Church
and in the lives of individual believers.
The important point is that the Spirit of grace wants to bring
people to Christ, release them
from their fears, and fill them with His missionary presence. As
preachers we must cooperate with this
purpose as we prepare and preach the text, confident that Christ
will give us His specific application
for the particular message, and that the message will transform
lives. To put it another way, we must
be willing to make fools of ourselves to see this expectation
fulfilled.
Matthew Arnold went to hear Spurgeon preach, and then concluded
that Spurgeon with hisdramatic preaching was something of a fool.
But Spurgeon was simply surrendering all his powers to
preach the foolishness of the Cross with a confident spirit.
Spurgeon was not attempting to preach
artistically chiselled messages, but to preach the excellence of
Christ, and to do it with all his powers
of mind, heart, and bodyand to do it by faith. Preaching for
Spurgeon was merely aiming the gospel
at peoples hearts and minds and expecting it to bring them to a
knowledge of the forgiveness of sins
and the power of a new life. People believed because Spurgeon
believed. (Miller, C. John,
Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, Zondervan, Grand Rapids,
Michigan, 1999, p. 128)
I believe that something of Spurgeons approach can be seen in
the Apostle Pauls writing of the
letter to the Galatians. Paul is here dealing with Christians
who are facing a crisis of faith. They haveencountered false
teaching, and are as a result in danger of drifting away from the
truth as it is found in
Christ. Given the situation that they are facing Paul writes
them this wonderful gospel letter. He has
one main point that he is seeking to impress upon the minds and
hearts of the Galatians. This is that
they need to be restored in their communion with the LORD Jesus
Christ. In everything that Paul writes
here he is pointing them back to Christ. That is the one
essential point that they need to be clear upon.
Everything else depends upon that issue being straightened
out.
The Christian faith is all about Christ. He and He alone, is the
fulfillment of all that the Scriptures
promise to us. When we go astray, what we need is to find our
way back into fellowship with Him.
Every part of this letter calls us to this. This is the heart of
the reformation message to us. The
reformers were calling the Church back to Christ, just as the
Apostle Paul was doing to the Galatians. In
this time in which we find ourselves struggling with many
questions regarding the relevance of the
gospel message for our society the one thing that Paul calls us
to must become central to us once again.
Once again we must seek and live out the reality of faith in
Christ. When we rebuild communion with
Christ then we will discover that every part of our life and
work will begin to display the living reality that
can only be the fruit of faith.
