Western Christians love to study the teachings of Jesus, as all Christians should. The problem is, often Western Christians think that Christianity is primarily about the study of the teachings of Jesus. The truth is, though, if we possess the whole bulk of Jesus’s New Testament teaching and nothing more than that, the world today would still be perishing as if he had never come. As important as his teachings are, Jesus is far more than his teaching. Someone has said, “It is not the teaching of Christ that saves, but the Christ who teaches.” Someone else said, “Jesus came not so much to preach the gospel as rather that there might be a gospel to preach.”
Look at Paul’s extraordinary description of Christianity in Galatians 2:20; “I have been crucified with Christ; I now no longer live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live in the faith of the son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.” Christianity is not an accumulation of information about Jesus. Instead, it is a personal actualization of a vital union with Jesus. It is the experience of an indwelling resurrected Christ. Paul didn’t preach about Jesus as much as he preached Jesus. There is a difference. “For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man, for I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ (not a revelation about Jesus Christ). But when he who had set me apart, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.” (Galatians 1:11-12,15-16a)
I have been a Bible teacher for 44 years, and so I love to study the Scriptures and to communicate to others what I’ve learned, but Christianity is not a what or a how to. Christianity is a who. It is the daily moment by moment experience of this extraordinary “Who” that lives in us to live through us. Even when we search the Scriptures, we should never be just searching for information; we should be searching with the expectation of encountering him. The Bible, by the way, is a Him Book.
Living from, not for Christ.