If you ever feel discouraged about your lack of progress in the Christian life, remember the words of 1 Corinthians 15. Let the words you find there bathe you once again as you reflect on Christ’s accomplishments, rather than focusing on your failures. He died and was buried in your place. Though you feel unworthy and condemned, in Christ you are graciously accepted and reconciled. And he not only bore your sin but was also raised again to new life, objectively—for you. It has already been accomplished.

If I were to ask you to write down the most important things taught in the Bible, what do you think you might include on your list? Worship, prayer, discipleship, faith, heaven, grace, the Trinity?
Now this next question is a little harder. Which of the topics that appear on your list would you end up placing at the very top? In other words, what is the most important topic in all of Scripture? Would you be able to come up with a single answer to that question, or do you think it’s just too difficult to rank biblical topics in this way?
Jesus himself said that some matters of the law were weightier than others.
You may be tempted by the thought that because the Bible is God’s inspired word, all its precepts are of equal weight and value. Yet, Jesus told the Pharisees, “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, but have neglected the weightier matters of the law:  justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matt. 23:23). Now of course it wasn’t that tithing mint, dill, and cumin were unimportant things, but according to Jesus they apparently carried less weight and significance when compared with the much more important themes such as justice, mercy, and faithfulness.
There is also another passage in Scripture where a lawyer asked Jesus which of the commandments found in the law of Moses was the greatest. And as you may recall, Jesus didn’t end up saying that all the commandments were of equal value and importance, but he instead cited the words of Deuteronomy chapter 6, which says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This he said, “is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:36-40).
There is an important distinction between the most important commandment in the Law and the most important thing in all of Scripture.
Perhaps, then, following Jesus, we could say that “loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength” is the most important thing in all of Scripture. Well, if we consider carefully the lawyer’s original question, he didn’t actually ask Jesus, “What is the most important thing in all of Scripture,” but rather, “What is the most important commandment recorded in the Law of Moses?” This, as we’ll see, is an important distinction.
The thing we should notice at this point, however, is that Jesus didn’t seem to have any difficulty ranking various biblical themes in the order of their importance. And so, in light of this, what do you think every Christian should place at the very top of their list? What biblical idea should be considered the thing of first importance?
The apostle Paul reminds the Corinthian church of the most important thing in all of Scripture—the gospel.
Thankfully, we don’t have to go through the difficult process of weighing and comparing all the doctrines of the Bible in an attempt to answer this question, since the apostle Paul has already done the heavy lifting for us in the first few verses of 1 Corinthians 15:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures… (1 Cor. 15:1-4)

According to verse 1, Paul makes clear that he is writing to the Corinthians in order to remind them of the gospel of Jesus.
In many churches today the focus ends up drifting away from the gospel to other things.
Now, I’m convinced that in far too many churches in our day the gospel appears to be taken for granted. And because it’s something that many pastors simply assume that everyone already knows, over time our focus ends up drifting away to other things—things that are more practical, relevant and me-centered.
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When done properly Christian worship does not just target the intellect, but also the whole person. The singing and praying, the sermon, the sacraments of baptism and communion, the entire liturgy, appeals to multiple senses—the ear gate, the eye gate, the nose gate, the taste gate, the touch gate. Worship, therefore, is incarnational, affecting both head and heart—both soul and body—which are not separate entities but enmeshed.

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
— Augustine

As James K. A. Smith reminds us in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, Augustine’s prayer reveals several aspects about the human condition. First, human beings are made by and forthe Creator. Furthermore, to be human is to be for something—for a vision or some perceived good. Finally, the heart is just as important as the head. That is to say, the pull of a vision toward a perceived good is not primarily a pull of the intellect, but the heart.
Bob Dylan put it this way:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna serve somebody, yes
Indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Or think of it like this: A guy goes to a marriage counselor and says, “I want a divorce from my wife.” The counselor says, “Why do you want to divorce your wife?” The man says, “Because I don’t love her anymore.” The counselor says, “Well, who do you love?”
Augustine (and Dylan) are saying it’s not a question of whether you love something because we all love something. You cannot not love. The more difficult question is who or what do you love? All people have a longing for God because it is built in—a distant echo from the Imago Dei. The problem is that sin has warped this longing. So, people spend a great deal of time trying to fill this vacuum. In doing so, they are all looking for some version of the Good—some version of the Kingdom.
Smith reminds us that people live for what they love. They get up in the morning and they do their thing day after day and this forms them. Our loves are formed by what we think and do—our habits. The ancients said that good moral habits constitute virtues and bad moral habits constitute vices. From a Christian perspective, virtue is what we mean when we talk about godliness. Likewise, vice refers to ungodliness.
Essentially, Smith’s book addresses the subject of sanctification, which is described in the Bible as a two-step process: renouncing and reorienting. Paul says, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:11-12 ESV).
In the same way, Paul says in Ephesians that the way of Christ teaches us to put off the old self, which belongs to our old way of life corrupted through deceitful desires, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:20-24).
Perhaps the most significant contribution of Smith’s book is his notion of cultural liturgies; that is, the daily rituals or routines that take up our time and affections, which tend to form our loves. For example, Smith says the American affection for shopping is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of consumerism.
Likewise, one could say the time we spend in front a television screen is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of entertainment. The time teenagers and preteens spend with their cellphones—taking it to bed with them—is a habit of the heart that constitutes a cultural liturgy. Facebook time is a kind of cultural liturgy in its own right, especially if the first thing you do in the morning is turn on your computer to see if someone has messaged you.
Of course, not all of our pursuits are not necessarily bad within themselves, but they shape us in ways we don’t always realize. Here is what we need to understand: People who design cellphones, build malls, or produce television programming don’t really care what you think, but they very much care about what you love.
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Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. 

A problem we face as leaders is that the original mission is almost always overtaken by the way that mission is delivered. In 2005, the late Clayton Christensen wrote the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He observed what happened inside businesses when they successfully developed a service or product and brought it to market. The dynamics hold true for ministries as well.
As a business has success with a new product, increased demand requires more organization. The delivery process is refined. There may be investment in the system that produces the service or product. People within the organization become convinced that their service or product – what they see as “The Best Way” – is the best or right solution to getting the mission done. Bureaucracy grows around its delivery and a self-perpetuating loop reinforces the value of The Best Way. New people join the team. Some are specialized and only participate in one aspect of the system that has developed. They do not have the perspectives of the whole, but they are very good at doing what they know how to do.
In the business world, the innovator’s dilemma reaches its peak when a new competitor enters the market. There is often an innovative improvement, and the incumbent organization, focused on delivering The Best Way, cannot adapt. They are experts at doing what they do best, not this new and novel solution. Their success has doomed them because they have become so good at what they do. The organizational culture affords no other means of delivery.
Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. Another reason it is difficult to identify is that our competitors are different. We are competing against worldview and cultural change. We may have developed culturally relevant ministries, but rapid change has now made our Best Way, whatever it might be, irrelevant because the people it was designed to serve are growing old, the next generation is always different from the former generation, and culture has changed.
The classic example from business is Seagate, a company that once dominated the hard disk industry. As customers moved from larger drives to smaller ones, they squeezed more and more profit from the factories creating hard drives. They got really good at creating 5.25-inch hard drives. Then the industry shifted to smaller drives using different materials. Seagate could not innovate fast enough. Smaller players, not invested in the same production facilities, took over and Seagate faded.
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