Excerpts from The God-Centered Life:

I suspect that for many of us, our Christian experience is too often influenced by our circumstances. When we are "up," God is great. When we are "down," God is distant. if things go our way, we have much for which to praise God. if times come that would test the patience of Job, we are tempted to give up.

I have taken the time to write this book because the great message of the Bible is one that is God-centered, not us-centered or me-centered.

This makes all the difference. God always comes first. He is always at the heart of life. He influences and invades all of reality. He is, and there is no other. Why does this make all the difference? Because then my happiness is not dependent on my personal experience, but on God’s grace and love for me. Of course, this is the very heart of the gospel. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. His love is not dependent on our moral performance, but on his divine affection. it was God in Christ who was reconciling the world to himself. it is not only the heart of the gospel, it is also the very core of what it means to become a Christian at all. We are "born from above," of the Spirit, we repent and we have faith in Christ. We undergo a revolution of the heart whereby our core being is altered; changed from being centered on the self, however nice or clean that self may be, to being centered on God. What is more, this God-centeredness is not only at the very heart of our faith, it is also the element of the Christian message most likely to be missed in our day. if the contemporary West is anything, it is individualistic, centered on answering the great question, "What’s in it for me?" So this matter of being God-centered needs to be trumpeted from our pulpits. We need constantly to reorientate ourselves around God and his Word, lest our vision and purpose become subtly influenced by the market, or trendy humanistic moral sensibilities. it really is urgent. And surprisingly, for something so contemporary, i have found that significant help in this area comes from one Jonathan Edwards, a pastor-teacher from a bygone era, whose work, life and writings witness particularly to the foundational reality of a God-centered life.

This is a book for anyone concerned about the health of the contemporary evangelical church, or indeed for the future of biblical Christianity, in our secular Western culture. There is no doubt that the challenges we face are massive, if there is ever to be a substantial change in the spiritual climate of the “developed” world. Our intellectual non-engagement with postmodernism, the unreality of so much that passes as “doing church,” the sheer incredibility of the Christian world-view – all of this and much more constitutes the daily experience of today’s Christian ‘mountaineers’, who really want to make a difference for god in daily life. it is like climbing a precipitous rock face, and it can often be paralyzing. Yet we have a god who not only empowers climbers, but can also move mountains. As the title implies, our biggest problem is that we are centered on ourselves, rather than on God, which is why we find it so hard to imagine that things could ever be different. We need a radical realignment of our thinking and our living, and it is the genius of this engaging study that Josh Moody uses the eighteenth-century New England Puritan scholar-pastor, Jonathan Edwards, as his catalyst. Having carried out his doctoral research on Edwards’s life and ministry, Dr. Moody is a sure guide to the heart and mind of a man who has been called the greatest American theologian, and by some her greatest philosopher. Here you will find church history at its very best – detailed research, scholarly insight, pithy quotations, mature judgment – but always in the service of the contemporary church and the issues we are currently facing. For Moody’s thesis is that Edwards also faced a shifting of the cultural tectonic plates in his own generation, so that he provides us with an enormously relevant and helpful model of how to respond biblically in a similar context. Not that Edwards is the focus of the book. This is not hagiography. But the immense spiritual and intellectual stature of the man and the powerful continuing influence of his life and works show us how true god-centeredness revolutionizes Christian ministry and eventually can even change cultures. In Edwards we see a man, totally submitted to the authority of Scripture (as we must be), but, as Josh Moody points out, without that becoming “a prison to his mind.” His biblical intelligence fed and informed his faith, just as his faith enabled him to think straight about the challenges he faced, whether from the growing scientific skepticism, or from the fanaticism of revivalist enthusiasts, to name but two. Like his mentor, Josh Moody exhibits the strengths of both scholar and pastor. I have known him since his days in student leadership in Cambridge and rejoice to see the flourishing of his ministry in new Haven, with his involvement at Yale. There is much to help us here, as through Edwards’s lens, we refocus biblical ministry priorities for today. The rehabilitation of the biblical concept and definition of revival, the relationship and interaction of reason and faith, the poverty of so much modern preaching, the criteria by which spiritual reality can be recognized and assessed, the principle of biblical intelligence – all these are areas carefully explored, with wise insight and penetrating applications to our current situation. But none of this is dusty or remote. I came away from each chapter informed, challenged and above all renewed and refreshed in my dependence upon the God of the Word, whom Edwards knew, loved and served so uncompromisingly, but so humanly as well. We are greatly indebted to Josh Moody for producing a quality historical account that is so accessible and engaging, but then using it to speak with such help to our day and especially to the priorities of our Christian lives, in the church and in the world. It moves us to thank god for Jonathan Edwards, who still speaks so powerfully, but above all to worship and adore his God and ours.

David Jackman
London, February 2006