BYM ONLINE DESK Blessing English April 2018 Emagazine | Page 13

APRIL 2018
mad age.
We Christians must share the guilt. We have
limited Christ to the sanctuary, to the temple, to the
religious area of our lives. We worship Him behind
thick church walls. We tuck Him away in quiet little
recesses. From Sunday to Sunday, He is rarely
mentioned. We spend little time reading His Word or
praying. We Christians act and live as though Christ
was dead.
Dr. Billy Graham
The vast majority of the people around the
world are looking to politics, science and education
for the solution to life's problems, and not to Jesus
Christ. Why is this? What is happening?
I believe part of our dilemma is that we have
preached a weak, watered-down Christ. We have
preached a watered-down Gospel. We have caused
young people to doubt the authority of the Scriptures.
We have given people a god of our own imagination.
Christ has been robbed of His deity. The supernatural
has been eliminated from our faith. We try to
rationalize away the full deity of Christ, which
includes His resurrection from the dead.
It was the resurrection of Christ that caused the
disciples to go out as burning young revolutionaries
to change the world of their day. They preached that
Christ was alive. This should be our message, not
only at Easter but every day of the year. The risen
Christ wants to come into our hearts today.
But bewareHe is a disturber! He did not come
to bring peace; He came to bring a sword (Matthew
10:34). He came to divide even families. People
reject that kind of Christ because it costs too much to
follow Him in this materialistic, secular, pleasure-
When Christ was on earth, He would go to the
temple, but He did not stay there. He went into the
streets where the sick, the needy and the dying were.
His love and compassion broke the bounds of class,
race and creed: “The c ommon people heard him
gladly” (Mark 12:37).
I was invited to have coffee one morning with
Konrad Adenauer before he retired as the chancellor
of Germany. When I walked in, I expected to meet a
tall, stiff, formal man who might even be
embarrassed if I brought up the subject of religion.
After the greeting, the chancellor suddenly turned to
me and said, “Mr. Graham, what is the most
important thing in the world?”
Before I could answer, he answered his own
question. He said, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If Jesus Christ is alive, then there is hope for the
world. If Jesus Christ is in the grave, then I don't see
the slightest glimmer of hope on the horizon.”
Then he amazed me by saying that he believed
that the resurrection of Christ was one of the best-
attested facts of history. He said, “When I leave office
I intend to spend the rest of my life gathering
R
O F I N T E G
The Power of Risen Christ
This kind of Christ will never make an impact
on the world. This is not the Christ of the Bible. He is
too weak and small; He is irrelevant. The weak,
emaciated, impotent Christ of the church of today
bears little resemblance to the Christ that Isaiah the
prophet talked about. He bears little resemblance to
the Christ who is found in the early church, who
dared to challenge the world and turn it upside down.
*2018*
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