USE YOUR CHRIST COMPASS

Friday 14 February

And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. Luke 24:27

5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:5-6 (NIV)

Have you ever been orienteering or walking through a rainforest or some kind of wilderness area before? Places so remote where there is no Google maps to save you because you are so far off grid? It’s in moments like these that technology is rendered useless and only one analog instrument is going to give you a true point of reference amid the feelings of being lost. I’m talking about none other than your trusty old compass.

The reassuring attribute on any compass is its ability to point to north. We have been told that this is due to the earth’s magnetic field which points the needle toward the North Pole or what is called ‘true north’. The reality is you can be situated anywhere in the world and it works the same way.

This devotion is called Christ centred daily because Christ is the centrepiece of the Bible. Without Christ as your ‘true north’ you have no frame of reference with which to navigate through the different terrain that you will encounter. So many believers wander aimlessly through the scriptures without seeing Christ. It’s like they have no compass and yet are trying their make sense of the surroundings that they find themselves in without the proper instrumentation with which to do so.

You can’t read the Old Testament or even the gospels for that matter without seeing types and shadows of the real that was either standing in front of them as Jesus or of what was to come after His resurrection. Despite what you may have seen, you can’t just take a verse from Genesis, a verse from the Old Testament, a verse from the gospels and a verse from the epistles and join them all together. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. You might just create a monster without realising it. That’s what creates bad theology.

When you read the Old Testament with no Christ compass then all the information that you are taking in will not make any spiritual sense. For example, in the Old Testament we are told that Adam and Eve ate the fruit and man fell into sin because of it. In the gospels Jesus makes the point that it is not what goes into a man i.e food that defiles a man but what comes out from within a man that defiles the man. He was attempting to explain to children of the flesh that the Genesis account of eating fruit to fall into sin was not what actually happened.

In Romans 5 Paul clarifies it further by saying that through one man’s disobedience sin entered the world and death by sin. Do you notice that there was a progression of revelation until it could be said plainly in the epistles to those who had the capacity to receive it? This is one of many occasions where what was said in the Old Testament and the gospels were progressively moving toward the truth of the matter in the epistles.

This is why Jesus went through the scriptures from Genesis through to Malachi with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Take note; He only expounded on all the things in those books that pertained to Himself who was Christ. It’s like the picture book ‘where’s Wally’ or ‘Waldo’ where you look in the picture to find that one central character in every illustration and on every page. It’s the same when we open our Bibles.

We should be looking for Christ in the Bible, not reading a bunch of stories and situations and miss the main character. The person of Christ Himself. Notice it doesn’t say in Luke 24:27 that Jesus explained everything that was in Genesis to Malachi. He only explained to them the things that concerned Him. No wonder Jesus made an audacious claim about Himself. He said I AM the way, truth, life This is how it is written in the original text. Look at the first one again. He didn’t just say He is a way or knows the way.Only God could talk like that. He is the way!

APPLICATION

If you feel like you have lost direction in your life, don’t worry, just shut out all the noise and let His Word and Spirit be your compass everywhere you go in life.