02/19/2025
I thought my task was more complex than I now see it to be, not less difficult, but less complex. When I first went to India, I was trying to hold a very long line -- a line that stretched clear across Genesis to Revelation, on to Western Civilization and the Western Christian Church. I found myself bobbing up and down that line fighting behind Moses and David and Paul and Western Civilization and the Christian Church. I was worried. There was no well-defined issue. I found the battle almost invariably being pitched at one of these three places: The Old Testament, Western Civilization or the Christian Church. I had the ill-defined, but distinctive, feeling that the heart of the matter was being left out.
Then I saw that I could shorten my line, that I could take my stand at Christ and, before that non-Christian world, refuse to know anything save Jesus Christ and him crucified. The sheer storm and stress of things had driven me to a place that I could hold. Then I saw that there is where I should have been all the time. I saw that the gospel lies in the Person of Jesus, that he himself is the Good News; that my one task was to live and present him. My task was simplified -- but it was not only simplified -- it was vitalized.
From "The Christ of the Indian Road" by E. Stanley Jones
