Centering Jesus - Print

Centering Jesus: 
How the Lamb of God Transforms Our Communities, Ethics, and Spiritual Lives.

Derek Vreeland.

Soft cover 224pp.
ISBN 9781641586191.
NavPress (2023).
[Allow 3-4 weeks].

What happens when Jesus becomes obscured from our point of view?

With all the hostility boiling just under the surface of our world, we need a renewed vision of Jesus as the Lamb of God who can lead us in the peaceable ways of the Kingdom. When we fail to keep Jesus at the centre of our lives, we lean into the desires of our hearts more than the desires God has for us. As a result, our entire spirituality becomes driven by the self and for the self. We need renewed practices of centering Jesus in our hearts and minds.

Vreeland invites you to imagine what it looks like to keep Jesus as the Lamb of God at the centre of three key areas of our lives – our spiritual formation, our moral lives, and our common life together. With the deep divides in Western culture and the polarization that continues to grow, we need a renewed focus on the Lamb so that we might blaze a path forward into civility and kindness.

Learn how to:

• Identify the problems that occur when Jesus is obscured from our view
• Walk through some of the key biblical descriptions of the Lamb
• Describe a Lamb-shaped and Jesus-centred approach to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, the foundation of our moral lives, and
• Experience the Lamb at the centre of common life together, specifically worship life, participation in acts of justice, and political life.

To be a Christian is, literally, to be of Christ. But as every long-time Christian knows, our lives are not automatically oriented around Jesus, particularly in a culture, like ours, obsessed with self, dismissive of virtue, and liable to forget God entirely.

Centering Jesus is a timely and cogent call to refocus our eyes on Christ as the Lamb of God who calls us to witness to his peaceable Kingdom in faith, hope, and love. “Life is hard and humanity continues to invent new ways to compound the difficulties,” Vreeland writes, “but I remain hopeful.”