Are you Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing?

What is your life about?

Honestly.

What do you live for? What are you most passionate about? What gets you most excited? What do you most desire to understand? What do you most love to talk about?

What’s the main thing in your life?

There are many different ways you might answer that question...career, family, ministry...but ultimately, there’s only one right answer and it’s not hard to figure out what that answer is.

Want some help?

Think about the apostle Paul.

If you asked him, what do you live for?

His answer: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil.1:21)

If you asked him, what gets you most excited?

His answer, “…far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal.6:14)

If you asked him, what do you long to know and understand?

His answer, “…whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Jesus Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ…” (Phil.3)

If you asked him, what do you love to talk about?

His answer, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor.2)

If you asked him, Paul, what’s the main thing in your life, what are you focused on, what defines you? I’m convinced it’s not difficult to figure out how he’d answer.

“I’m Paul. A servant of Christ. And I struggle, I labor, I give everything I’ve got that the elect of God might know Christ and understand the glory of the gospel.”

Paul was a man who clearly knew what was most important and lived his life in light of that. As Pastor C.J. Mahaney explains, Paul “…recognized the universal danger of forgetting what is most important. He refused to be pulled away from the gospel. The cross was the center-piece of Paul’s theology. It wasn’t merely one of Paul’s messages; it was the message.”

Everything that Paul did, everything that Paul said, everything that Paul was about, revolved around one holy passion. He was a man who focused his entire life on Jesus Christ. He was a man committed to living a cross-centered life.

The same should be true for each of us. Paul was to be the norm, not the exception. We’re to live our lives centered on the exact same thing. Whether we are pastors, businessmen, house-wives, soldiers, whatever we do, whoever we are, we are to be a people whose lives revolve around Jesus Christ.

The Christian life is all about making much of Jesus Christ.

Each one of us should be able to say with Paul - I live for one thing and that is “Christ…” Each one of us should be able to say with Paul – I boast in one thing and that is the “cross…” Each one of us should be able to say with Paul, I long to know one thing and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Each one of us should be able to say with Paul I proclaim one thing and that is the word of the cross. And each one of us should be able to say with Paul I am about one thing and that is glory of my wonderful Savior Jesus Christ.

As believers we should stand out for our unreserved, overwhelming passion to know Jesus, to think about Jesus, to worship Jesus, and to love Jesus with absolutely everything we've got.