What does a Jesus Centered Church look like?
That may sound like a crazy question. After all… shouldn’t every church be a Jesus centered church?
Yes! Absolutely.
But you know like I know that it’s so easy to forget what really matters, it’s so easy to loose our center and forget why we’re here. And if we lose our center, if we somehow forget why we’re really here… everything falls apart.
So what does a Jesus centered church look like.
The Apostle Paul once described it this way. He wrote,
“Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.”
Ephesians 2.20-21
Jesus the Carpenter
You may remember that Jesus was a carpenter by trade. And carpenters in ancient times didn’t just work with wood, they worked with stone.
Anytime a carpenter built an archway for a door or a window, they would carefully place the stones together and then, at the very top of that arch they would place what was called a keystone. It would be shaped kind of like a triangle and this stone was the most important stone.
This stone held the arch together. Remove this stone, and the whole structure collapses.
The Apostle Paul wanted us to think about God’s church in the same way. Jesus is our Keystone. He holds us all together.
Jesus at the Center
Jesus is the only one who can be at the center of his church. He’s the only one who can hold us all together.
It can’t be the idea of Jesus. And it can’t be Jesus plus anything else. It has to be Christ and Christ alone.
He has to be at the center of why we gather and why we go into the world. He has to be at the center of our worship and the at the center of our service. He has to be at the center of who we are and who we’re striving to be.
It has to be all about and only about Jesus.
We don’t have time to get caught up in other issues, we can’t be distracted by our preferences, there’s too much at stake. We have good news to share about the great love of God revealed in Jesus.
What does a Jesus centered church look like? It has to have Jesus as it’s Keystone.
May we keep Jesus at the center of His church today.
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