Nurturing Faith

Christ is our all. He is the center of the gospel message and our faith. Every book of the Bible points to Him from Old Testament to New. If we are to nurture faith in those we are ministering to, we need to teach Scripture through a Christ-centered lens. Here are four reasons why.   

1. Because We Follow Jesus’s Example   

In Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus met up with two disciples. Not yet recognizing Him, they told Jesus all that had happened in Jerusalem concerning His crucifixion and rumored resurrection. They, however, were still perplexed about what had happened.   

Jesus knew they had not understood the message of redemption that God had planned in history. “Then beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27, CSB). Jesus taught them how Scripture pointed to Him. Jesus knew that He fulfilled Scripture and the promises that God gave His people. As we read and teach the Bible, we should follow Jesus’s example in interpreting Scripture through a Christ-centered lens.   

2. Because It Tells the Full Story   

The gospel message starts with God’s beautiful creation in Genesis, but quickly humanity sinned. And from that point, humanity and the world were broken. But God, because of His love, was going to do everything necessary to rescue His people and to bring them back into relationship with Him. Repeatedly in Scripture, however, we see how God’s people were faithless, but God was not. He was and is faithful and constant.   

Seeing God raise up prophets, priests, and kings to steer His people back toward Him, and seeing the sacrificial system and rituals put in place to remind His people of their sin as they lived in relationship with a holy God, helps us recognize that it was all insufficient to do what only the Messiah could do.   

So when Jesus entered the picture, He fulfilled what human leaders could not. Through His blameless life, ministry, and sacrifice, He became the true Prophet, Priest, and King who would lead His people to salvation through His death on the cross. We need this fuller story when teaching Scripture to help our people understand all that Jesus did and why He needed to do so.   

3. Because Christ Truly Is the Focus 

Without Christ, we have nothing except shame, guilt, sin, death, and separation from God. The apostle Paul said it best: “He is . . . the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:18, CSB). Jesus holds all things together and must be “first place in everything.” This includes the way we teach Scripture.  

This, however, doesn’t mean we draw allegories or illustrations that aren’t there. Not every talking donkey or floating ax screams “Jesus!” What it does mean is that we see Scripture through a gospel-story lens of rescue and redemption, because of the love of the Father, through the sacrifice of the Son. When we truly understand Christ and the gospel as central to the whole of the Bible, we will start to see Christ and the gospel as central to our lives.

4. Because It Transforms Us   

Knowledge is important, but a transformed life is even better. When we focus on Christ-centered teaching in our ministry, we know our path will be straight when cultural values so easily creep into our discipleship. But we can tell if our ministry has been Christ-centered when we see lives transformed for God’s glory, when we see people telling others about the joy of knowing Jesus and His gospel, when we see broken relationships healed and the kingdom and church growing, both in depth and breadth.    

Christ-centered teaching nurtures faith in a transformative way and helps us remember that He is our all and without Him we can do nothing (John 15:5). When we center our teaching and our lives on Christ, He transforms us. And what more can we ask for than to be transformed into the likeness of Christ Jesus, our Lord?