The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World

This afternoon I listened to the first talk from Desiring God's National Conference Above All Earthly Powers: The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World. At one point I had hoped to go to this conference, but it just happened to fall on the same weekend as C4C's Summit retreat. But one of the great things about Desiring God is that they have so much free stuff. Fortunately for all who weren't able to attend the conference, the mp3's of the messages are available for free!

The first talk is by David Wells, who wrote the book Above all Earthly Powers which was the motivation behind this conference. He has an English accent (which is cool), but speaks really slowly (which makes him a little harder to follow.

This was a quality talk though. The central message was that Jesus is in a league of his own. There is no equal to him in all of history. He was fully God and Man. He atoned for sin. He lived a perfect life. No one can match him. These are things we need to hear more!

He then goes onto say that the book of Hebrews was written to Jewish believers tempted to fade back into the woodwork. The message of Hebrews is the uniqueness of Christ, and so the author of Hebrews thought that speaking of Christ would be the best way to encourage believers in the face of trial.

Wells goes onto say that our culture is in a similar situation. We are not being persecuted like 1st century believers, but there are many things trying to pull us away from our faith. Challies.com, who did live blogging at this conference blogs Wells saying, "We are so distracted by so many things that it is hard for us to sustain a focus upon the supremacy of Christ in our world and our lives. This is why people come to church looking to have psychological needs met. But sermons only addressing these matters are exercises in futility if the supremacy and centrality of Christ has been lost. In an entirely different way, we in our churches seem to be shrinking back from Christ."

Wells then goes onto show from Hebrews how Christ is separate from everyone else in many ways. He then closes of the message with this key point: Christianity is only about this kind of Christ - Christ reigning supreme and unchallenged and unchallengeable over all of life's enemies. Any other Christ that we offer the world does them no favours. We need to offer the Christ of the Bible, who is above all earthly powers, or no Christ at all.
----------------------------------
You can see Challies summary of this message here
You can listen to the mp3 of this talk here