The Bible Is Not About You

The Bible is not about you.

Blessed are you if that statement does not offend you. I wrote the thing and it still gets under my skin. But it’s true. As much as we do not want it to be the case, the Bible is not about you or me.

It’s likely that you have heard preaching and teaching to the contrary. I certainly have. And frankly it’s kind of nice. After all, I like to hear about me. I suspect you like to hear about you too.

How special God thinks you are. How necessary you are to his plan. How he has great things in store for you. How he wants you to have an abundant life, full of many earthly blessings. How everything that happens in your life has some divine reason undergirding it. How you have a unique purpose on this earth and all you have to do is discover it and everything in life will fall perfectly into place. I have heard all of that and more. And I like it. It’s tempting. It’s flattering. It’s exciting.

And it is dead wrong.

I do not mean to say that the Bible has nothing to say to you. But I do want to show you that, precisely because you are not at the center of the Bible, it is actually wonderfully good news; liberating news; news that forgives, renews, and strengthens you in the one true faith.

The Bible is about Jesus for you. If that doesn’t sound terribly revolutionary to you, good. But the state of preaching and teaching in Christ’s church these days has unfortunately—and ironically—made such a statement sound strange to many Christian ears.

We should rejoice that the Bible is about Jesus for us, and yet so often what pulpits, Bible studies, and airwaves give us is a terribly narcissistic—and comfortless—faith.

But when you realize that the Bible is all about Jesus for you—how the promises of Jesus emanate from every page; how the truth of Christ stands firm even apart from you—then the Scriptures become an ever-flowing fountain and source of true hope and lasting comfort.

Near the end of his Gospel, the apostle John reports exactly why he has recorded the events of Jesus’s ministry: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). Here we are told that the purpose of John’s Gospel is not simply to convey historical information, although it certainly does that.

John also does not record the ministry of Jesus, the Lamb of God, as self-help encouragement to stick in your back pocket that will get you through the day when the world has got you down. Rather, John would have you hear of the mighty works of Jesus, so that you would believe him to be the promised Messiah in whom all the promises of God are fulfilled, and that by believing you would have life in the name of Jesus, apart from whom salvation cannot be found (Acts 4:12).

Jesus makes such a claim about himself more than once in the Bible.

Here is the point: the Bible is not about you. It is about Jesus for you.

Jesus says so himself.

All of the Scriptures point to Jesus.

The purpose of the Bible is to give you Jesus, so that you would have true, eternal resurrection life through the forgiveness of your sins.