Theme: Who Is Jesus?
During this week leading up to Easter Sunday, we look at the story of Jesus’ coming into Jerusalem and learn about the nature of his kingdom as seen in his own suffering and death for sinners.
Scripture: Matthew 21:4-5
One of the difficult things that I have had to do in working with various organizations is to try to summarize the purpose of the organization in order to focus your energies and sometimes communicate to other people what you’re trying to do. Sometimes when this kind of thing is attempted, one comes up with a comprehensive statement, which is good, but which can also be a bit long. At least in some cases, it is helpful to be able to shorten the purpose statement to make it more effective in terms of recognizing and remembering it.
Some years ago when the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy first began, we spent a whole day working with the people who were part of the council to develop an understanding of what the problem was as we perceived it and how we were going to go about solving it. We wrote a two- or three-page document to describe what the basic objective was to be. But when we finished that we said it was too long, and that we had to encapsulate it somehow. Above all, we said we have to communicate what we believe the authority and inerrancy of the Bible to be, and we then came up with a little statement which we used over the course of the ten years of the organization. The little statement said, “What Scripture says, God says, through human agents and without error.” That has worked very well indeed.
The same thing is true about preaching. Some years ago I heard of a man who was asked how long it would take him to prepare a five-minute summary of a particular doctrine for a certain meeting. He said, “Well, that would probably take me about a week.” And then the person asked, “Well suppose you had 30 minutes to explain it.” He answered, “I could probably do that in a day.” They then asked the question, “Suppose you had an hour to explain the doctrine.” He said, “I’m ready to preach now.”
I give that by way of introduction simply to ask this question: How would you sum up the life and ministry of Jesus Christ? Obviously if it’s difficult to sum up the purpose of a church or an organization, it is much more difficult to sum up the life and significance of the Lord Jesus Christ, the most important individual who ever lived.
Study Questions:
Have you ever had the experience of trying to work with others to summarize the purpose of a particular organization or ministry? How did you go about it? How difficult was it? What challenges needed to be overcome?
How would you summarize the life and ministry of Christ if someone were to ask you?
