Christ as the center.

Alexander Maclaren on how Christ’s grace and truth unite and build the body of Christ.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

In Ephesians 4, the apostle Paul speaks earnestly and eloquently about the “unity of the faith” and that which binds the Body of Christ together. Those who belong to Christ are, of course, tethered by “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:5–6), by whose grace and providence the most miserable of sinners and miscreants are pulled out of darkness and death and into his light and life. It is this unmerited favor “given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph. 4:7) that calls us and keeps us together. The church, to imbibe the words of hymn-writer Edward Mote, is “built on nothing less / Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” Most significantly, though, Paul expresses the way in which the church stays together — namely, by “grow[ing] up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15). There is no such thing as “Christian growth” divorced from the person and work of Christ himself. 

As straightforward as that might sound, the history of the church is no stranger to “self-made religion” and trumped-up notions regarding the discipline of piety in one’s life (Col. 2:23). However much the church may be rooted in Christ, its scaffolding and structure are, in many ways, fastened to its own institutional or doctrinal moorings. This, as you might imagine, breeds no small amount of confusion as some ecclesiastical traditions seem content to “grow up in every way” into themselves instead of into Christ. Indeed, this is a good lens through which to understand the religious environment of the first century. When Jesus of Nazareth appeared in the public sphere of life and ministry, Judaism was largely a self-satisfied institution that had long since lost its grip on the one who had given it its rise in the first place. What was once a system of communion between creatures and their Covenantor and Creator was now a regulatory complex by which one could pursue holiness by degrees. 

A similar gangrene understanding of faith has cluttered the church’s past and, in many ways, still does today. Popular notions of Christian growth seem to be calibrated by a sense of graduating from the gospel to embark upon the loftier thoroughfares of faith and knowledge. All this does, though, is bifurcate the oneness of the Christian gospel. Again, as the apostle Paul put it, Christ’s church is summoned “to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:15–16). Christian growth and discipleship don’t exist apart from Christ. Indeed, as Alexander Maclaren comments, we ought to understand the trajectory of growth for those in the Body of Christ as “into” and not “away from” Christ himself. Maclaren writes:

Suppose that a man could set out from the great planet that moves on the outermost rim of our system, and could travel slowly inwards towards the central sun, how the disc would grow, and the light and warmth increase with each million of miles that he crossed, till what had seemed a point filled the whole sky! Christian growth is into, not away from Christ, a penetrating deeper into the centre, and a drawing out into distinct consciousness as a coherent system, all that was wrapped, as the leaves in their brown sheath, in that first glimpse of Him which saves the soul. (163-64)

I will resist the pun that Maclaren tees up so well by referring to Christ as the “sun of God” to whom we are drawn. But the point remains that it is Christ around whom everything revolves. Part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit is to absorb us in the person and work of Christ so that we are continually enraptured by him and conformed to his image (Rom. 8:28). This is the function of the church, then — namely, to placard the finished work of the Christ of God as the foundation upon which and the hub around which all of life is situated. “We do not obtain the benefits of Christ apart from, but only in and with His Person,” attests B. B. Warfield, “and that when we have him we have all” (356). It is Christ who “is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). He alone is whom the church proclaims; he alone is whom the world needs. 

Grace and peace to you. 

Works cited: 

Alexander Maclaren, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Colossians and Philemon (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1901).

B. B. Warfield, Studies in Perfectionism, The B. B. Warfield Collection (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1958).