David Robertson is Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland and a contributor to Christian Today
..If you want to communicate the Gospel better, you need to get to know Christ better. I am intrigued by the rather bizarre fashion of some who state that they don’t go to church because they want to stay home and witness to their neighbours. But what is that witness? It is far too often about how nice I am, or my tribe is… not about Christ. How can it be? We don’t know Him. We don’t long for Him. We don’t even miss Him. If the apostle Paul could say, towards the end of his life, “I want to know Christ,” this man who wrote a third of the New Testament, who had met Jesus and who had planted half the churches in the world, why are we not aware that our greatest need is to know Christ better? To know the love that surpasses knowledge. To know how long, deep, high, and wide is the love of Christ.
Let me give a wonderful testimony that I received from an older Christian last week – I want to share how I’m beginning to see the might and majesty of Jesus. I’ve longed for this all my life. The first part of Colossians vibrates and pulsates as never before. I am beginning to see Jesus as never before. Why has it taken so very long? A benefit of old age? I am now beginning to understand why He is your Magnificent Obsession and of so many others. Now He lives in a wonderful new way. The Bible is coming alive. I thought I loved it, but this is new! Praise Him!
Do you not think that this lady will be a far more vibrant and effective witness to Jesus because of what she is experiencing in and through his Church? We testify to what (who) we have seen and heard.
People need to see the beauty of Christ. They don’t need a course, or Christian values, or Christian tradition or even the Church, valuable and useful though all of those may be. They need Christ ”“ and then along with Him, they graciously get all things. How strange that we so often present the ‘all things,’ and so rarely present Christ.