“He is the center of everything” by Sinclair Ferguson

“So when we are in Jesus Christ, all the blessings of the gospel are ours.

The New Testament uses the illustration of marriage to help us understand union with Christ. If you asked a married man, “What do you love most about your wife?” and he answered that it was her cooking, her sporting ability, or how well she does her job, any of these would be true but would miss the main point.

All these may be blessings that he enjoys. But what a right-thinking married man most enjoys about his wife is his wife herself.

And then he enjoys the fact that he is married to her, and because he is married to her, all these other blessings are shared with him-just as she likewise shares in what is his.

It is similar when we come to Christ and realize that we are united to Him. We no longer look outside Christ for the blessings of God’s grace.

They are ours in Him. He is the center of everything, and so we seek never to lose our focus on the Lord Jesus Himself.

You may have noticed in preaching and teaching that you have heard, especially in the media, that what you are actually being offered is blessings, but you are not really being offered Christ Himself.

That is a kind of commodity-centered gospel rather than a Christ-centered one.

Not so with Paul! For him, the central point is Christ and the union with Him that undergirds all these blessings.

If we are to have any of them, we must have Christ Himself; and if we have Christ Himself, and are united to Him, then we will have all of them in Him.”

–Sinclair B. Ferguson, Union with Christ: The Blessings of Being in Him (Sanford, FL: Ligonier, 2025), 27.