Are You Really Preaching Christ? – by K.C. Moser

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• Edward Fudge
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Feb 14, 2015 2548

A good many years ago I discovered that I was not really preaching Christ. I was preaching only the conditions of salvation, just as though . . . the Lord’s visit to this earth [was] to set forth certain acts as conditions of justification. I was overlooking the importance of the cross upon which he bore our sins. I was not recognizing Jesus as our High Priest who offered himself for the sins of the world. I considered the cross as a means to an end, the end being the endowment of Christ crucified with the authority to originate a “plan of salvation.” I was giving “plan” the emphasis that belongs to Christ himself. It dawned upon me that Jesus did not come to inaugurate another legal system conditioning salvation upon human achievement or human righteousness, but to give his life a ransom for sinners.

The conditions were . . . [not] . . . a “plan” to which Christ directed us, but . . . a proper response to Christ as sin-offering. I saw that we do not go through Christ to the conditions, but through conditions to Christ. So without first preaching Christ as God’s Son and our sin-bearer I saw that the conditions were meaningless. The conditions of salvation are not merely responses to a king possessing “all authority,” but responses to Christ as a sin-offering. They signify reliance upon Christ as a propitiation for our sins. Hence unless and until Christ as a sin-offering is preached it is impossible properly to respond to him. Merely to obey him outwardly is not enough. The obedience required in order to salvation must relate directly to him as a sin-offering and express trust in him for salvation.

– K. C. Moser, from the foreword of “Christ Versus a Plan” (May 1952). In the original text, the author refers to himself in the third person as “he,” a style common in 1952 but strange and distracting to many readers today. Throughout the text, I have therefore replaced “he” (when referring to the author himself) with the more direct first person pronoun “I.” – Edward Fudge