Focus on Christ

By John Stott

It pleases the Father, Son and Spirit that the Son, Jesus Christ, be the centre of our worship, have the name above all names, and be first above all things. Everyone has a relationship with him – whether bearing his image but being estranged from him or knowing Christ as Lord and Saviour.

In this book, John Stott draws our attention to how the New Testament speaks of Jesus Christ. He examines the prepositions used to help us understand more deeply, our position in relation to the Son of God. We are to live in Christ, through Christ, on Christ, with Christ, under Christ, for Christ, and like Christ – and this book will help you become truly Christ-centred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Langham Preaching Resources
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783686216

John Stott

The Revd Dr John Stott, CBE, was for many years Rector of All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, and chaplain to the Queen. Stott's global influence is well established, mainly through his work with Billy Graham and the Lausanne conferences - he was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974. In 2005, Time magazine ranked Stott among the 100 most influential people in the world. He passed away on July 27, 2011.

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Foreword

When I was a student at seminary, I was twice invited to have lunch with John Stott. It felt as if I had been invited to meet a superhero! I nervously fumbled through my introduction to him and started on a list of questions that I had prepared. But to my surprise, this giant of the faith turned out to be down-to-earth, humble, kind, and very human! He spoke of his fascination with birds and showed child-like excitement about how much we can learn about God simply from carefully observing them.

Only God knew that seventeen years later I would be invited to lead the global Lausanne Movement that John Stott and Billy Graham were used of God to launch. Within the Lausanne Movement we speak of Stott as Uncle John. Perhaps Uncle John’s greatest contribution to the movement and to the global church was the Lausanne Covenant, of which he was the chief architect. That covenant continues to be the most broadly held confession of faith and mission in the world.

The Lausanne Movement’s clarion call for the whole church to bring the whole gospel to the whole world is as timely today as it was in 1974. Since then, we have experienced two historic shifts: the Global South now constitutes the majority of the global church, and the Global South now provides the majority of the world’s missionaries. I believe that we are on the cusp of another historic shift as Christians and leaders from the Global South take their place in the conversations and leadership of global Christianity.

As these dramatic shifts take place around us, we need to hear the message that is clearly and powerfully emphasized in Focus on Christ. The global church, present among every tribe, language, people, and nation, needs a beautiful and powerful confidence in Christ. We need to remember that God’s whole purpose, conceived in a past eternity, being worked out for and in his people in history, to be completed in the glory to come, may be encapsulated in this single concept: God intends to make us like Christ. (95)

Within Lausanne, we often speak of our commitment to creating and highlighting works of enduring worth, and this volume is certainly that. Uncle John’s teaching here, as in all of his writing, is insightful, world-engaging and Christ-centered. Jesus is indeed all we need.

As we face the challenges and opportunities in our world and in the global church today, there is nothing that we need more than the anchor that is Christ. The world needs nothing more and nothing less than Christ. The global church needs nothing more and nothing less than Christ. This volume beautifully shows the biblical tapestry of that truth.

Dr Michael Young-Suk Oh

Global Executive Director / CEO,

Lausanne Movement

April 2019

Acknowledgements

I express my sincere gratitude to several people who in various ways have contributed to the writing of this book, especially to Robert Potter, Bill Godden, Roy McCloughry, Tom Cooper and Frances Whitehead.

John Stott

1979

Editor’s Preface to Revised Edition

John Stott’s work is loved, and with good reason. Many have been blessed by his godly insight into the Scriptures and his ability to communicate truth clearly. It would be a tragedy if his voice were not heard by a new generation around the world.

But in the forty years since this book first appeared in print, much has changed in the way we communicate. Books now have to compete for attention with material available on the Internet. In the age of the website and the tweet, sentences are shorter and communication tends to be more direct.

The other major difference in the forty years since this book appeared is that the Christian world has both expanded and shrunk. Expanded in that the number of believers and churches around the world has soared, and shrunk in the sense that it is now far easier to get books to believers around the world. John Stott’s readers are no longer primarily Anglicans and Episcopalians in Britain and the Americas. They are found on all continents and in all denominations and in a host of independent churches, and for many of them English is a second language.

It became evident to John Stott’s literary executors that it was time to make his writing more accessible to a new generation. Accordingly, in this book they have used one of the most popular modern translations of the Scriptures, the New International Version (NIV). At times, the changed wording in this translation necessitated minor changes in the surrounding text. We also took out a few terms that are no longer in current use – the most prominent of which is unto, which is used 7,361 times in the King James Version of the Bible and only once in the NIV. So alert readers will notice that there are now two chapters dealing with the preposition for, which has almost completely replaced unto.

As always, when writing this book, John Stott spoke to the contemporary world. But that world is now forty years in the past. So a few verb tenses had to be changed from the present to the past, and a few cultural allusions needed to be either rescued from obscurity or consigned to oblivion.

In doing this, every attempt has been made to be true to John Stott’s voice and his message. May this book go on to bless yet another generation of readers and summon them to live through Christ, on Christ, in Christ, under Christ, with Christ, and for Christ, so that they will become like Christ.

Introduction: The Centrality of Christ

It is remarkable that in some places Jesus of Nazareth is more popular outside the historic churches than inside them. Many church members are strangely shy of talking about Jesus, and when pressed to do so are often equivocal in their beliefs about him. Some church leaders have scandalized traditional believers by openly questioning – and even denying – his deity. Such disloyalty to Jesus among those who are supposed to be his followers was a major cause of the growth of the Jesus Movement in the 1960s and of the house church movement in the 1970s. Uncompromisingly committed to Jesus as God and Saviour, the adherents of these movements despaired of the institutional churches and regarded them as beyond reclaim.

Even those who make no definite Christian profession sometimes seem more devoted to Jesus than those who do. Although, to be sure, most have no theological understanding of him, they nevertheless show little or no embarrassment in speaking about him, and some have a respect for him which borders on reverence. Humanists, for example, who emphatically deny God and the supernatural, recognize Jesus as a true humanist, who was selflessly dedicated to the human cause.

The musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar supply clear evidence of the appeal of Jesus to those who have rejected the church. Neither can claim to be a faithful representation of the Jesus of the gospels. Yet Godspell recaptures something of his infectious gaiety. And Superstar, although it has understandably offended Christians because of its persistent uncertainty about the identity of Jesus, has been an even greater box office success. It is still being performed internationally more than forty-five years after the original production, and there are now two film adaptations. Franco Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth stuck more closely to the gospel narratives. When it first aired in 1977, it claimed 21 million viewers in Britain and 91 million in the United States, while 84 per cent of the Italian viewing public are said to have watched it.

This fascination with the story of Jesus is by no means restricted to the West which, even if it is now called post-Christian or sub-Christian, still retains a high degree of Christian culture. It is to be found in non-Christian cultures too.

Hindus greatly revere Jesus. Mahatma Gandhi, the founder of modern India, although declaring in his autobiography that it was impossible for him to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions,[1] nevertheless had a profound admiration for Jesus and loved the Sermon on the Mount, which, he wrote, went straight to my heart.[2] A visiting Hindu lecturer at Durham University told me some years ago that he called himself a Christ-ian. It was his way of acknowledging his high regard for Jesus. Hindus would gladly assimilate Jesus into Hinduism if only he would renounce his exclusive claims.

Muslims, too, respect Jesus and acknowledge him as one of the great prophets. He is referred to in a dozen or more passages of the Qur’an. These affirm his virgin birth, his sinlessness, his miracles, his inspiration by the Holy Spirit, and his second coming. I have seen the Jesus Minaret of the mosque in Damascus, to which it is believed he will return. And although Muhammad denied that Jesus was the Son of God, and mistakenly interpreted this title in physical terms, yet he acknowledged him as the word of God. Moreover, there have been and still are groups of Jesus people in Islam who in different ways give honour to Jesus.

Marxists, who are ever ready (often rightly) to criticize religion – especially institutional Christianity – as the opium which drugs the people into acquiescence in the injustices of the status quo, are much more reserved in their criticism of Jesus. They are quick to recognize his confrontation with the establishment and his compassionate solidarity with the poor. Pasolini, the Italian Marxist filmmaker, gave a remarkably accurate portrayal of Jesus in his Gospel According to St Matthew (1967), without any distorted revolutionary overtones, and dedicated the film to Pope Paul VI. More slanted is the Czech Milan Machovec’s book, A Marxist Looks at Jesus (1976). Disgusted by a Christian pietism preoccupied with happiness in the next world instead of with justice in this one, he maintained that Jesus proclaimed the dawn of a new age brought about by human effort, so that the true followers of Jesus today are not Christians but Marxists, since it is they who are working for radical social change.

Jews too, despite their rejection of Jesus as their Messiah, and despite the shameful anti-Semitism of generations of Gentile Christians, have never lost their interest in Jesus. There have been scholarly Jewish commentaries like C. G. Montefiore’s two-volume The Synoptic Gospels (1927) and more popular reconstructions like Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot (1966). Much Jewish hostility has been to Christianity dressed in Gentile cultural forms rather than to Jesus himself. Of particular interest, therefore, is the Jews for Jesus movement in the United States, founded by Moishe Rosen in 1973. It is the strongest expression of so-called Messianic Judaism, which combines a believing worship of Jesus as Saviour, Messiah and God with a retention of Jewish cultural practices.

Thus humanists and Hindus, Muslims, Marxists and Jews are all in their different ways attracted by Jesus of Nazareth. They present a direct challenge to us Christians, whether we are members of an ancient church or of one of the many contemporary, unattached churches. What do we think of Jesus? What is our attitude and relationship to him?

My theme in this little book is that Jesus Christ is the centre of Christianity, and that therefore both the Christian faith and the Christian life, if they are to be authentic, must be focused on Christ.

It is true that the word Christianity never occurs in the Bible. Jesus and his apostles did not imagine that they were founding a new religion. They were bearing witness to the truth of God, and sharing with people the good news of the new life which was now on offer. Those who believed this truth and experienced this life were not at first called Christians. This title occurs only three times in the whole New Testament. Jesus himself, of course, never used it. It is not to be found in any of the four gospels. The great apostles Paul and John did not employ the term. The apostle Peter used it only once, when he referred to a follower of Jesus suffering as a Christian (2 Pet 4:16). The other two occurrences of the word are both in Acts. Here Luke tells us both that it was in the cosmopolitan church of Syrian Antioch that the disciples were called Christians first and that King Agrippa’s response to Paul’s defence in court, with a mixture of amusement and sarcasm, was Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian? (Acts 11:26; 26:28).

If, then, the earliest of Jesus’s followers were not known as Christians, what were they called? It seems that their very first designation was people of the Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), an expression which at least implies that they were on the move, going somewhere, although whether the way they were travelling was the way of truth or the way to be saved (Acts 16:17) or the way of peace or the way of righteousness, we are never told. Perhaps it was just the way of the Lord (Acts 18:25, 26) or, as we might say today, the Jesus way.

In the gospels the commonest word for those committed to Jesus is disciples. He was their Rabbi, their Teacher, and they were his pupils who were learning from him. The apostles address their letters to God’s holy people in this or that city, which is not an assertion of their saintliness but rather that the Christian church enjoys a direct continuity with God’s

Reviews for Focus on Christ

[Newbreed · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very good book. Jesus the centre of our worship. Awesome.