The Cross Centered Life - C.J. Mahaney

The apostle Paul recognized the universal danger of forgetting what is most important. He refused to be pulled away from the gospel.

The cross was the centerpiece of Paul's theology. It wasn't merely one of Paul's messages; it was the message. He taught about other things as well, but whatever he taught was always derived from, and related to, the foundational reality that Jesus Christ died so that sinners would be reconciled to God and forgiven by God.

Theologian D. A. Carson writes of Paul, "He cannot long talk about Christian joy, or Christian ethics, or Christian fellowship, or the Christian doctrine of God, or anything else, without finally tying it to the cross. Paul is gospel-centered; he is cross centered."

From his first epistle to his final letter to Timothy, Paul kept the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of his teaching. He "resolved to know nothing ... except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2).

And this wasn't a cold theological formula, either. Paul lived a cross centered life because the cross had saved and transformed his own life.

Writing thirty years after his conversion, Paul's memory of what he had once been, and what God had done for him, remained at the forefront of his mind. "Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man," he wrote Timothy, "I was shown mercy" (1 Timothy 1:13). Read the rest HERE