Do you ever play chess?
If you do, you’ve probably experienced something every player is familiar with: you’ve scanned every corner of the board for threats, checks, and captures and you’re feeling confident about your next move. But then – always when it’s too late – you see it: the winning move, hidden in plain sight. A few moves later, the game is lost.
You didn’t lose because of poor play. You lost because your attention was everywhere except on the most important piece: the king.
Chess is often a great metaphor for life, isn’t it?
Many of us do the same thing in chess that we do in our own lives: we scan the edges, we track the pawns and the bishops, but we miss what we’re really supposed to be focused on.
We’re constantly scanning, focused on the pressures of everyday life, the cultural noise and the economic anxiety, the politics. In all that scanning, we become distracted from what’s supposed to be at the center of our lives.
We lose sight of Jesus.
So what does it actually mean to center our lives around him?
It Starts with Recognizing What We've “Added” to Jesus
When the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Colossae around AD 60, the city was already in economic decline. Newer trade routes had bypassed them. Laodicea, a nearby city, was rising. The people of Colossae were asking a question that cuts to the heart of human experience: Are we still worthy?
Into that anxiety, false teachers had arrived with a seductive message wrapped in some familiar theology: yes, you need Jesus, but Jesus alone isn’t enough – we’ll tell you what else you need, just listen to us. You need Jesus plus secret knowledge. You need Jesus plus spiritual achievement.
Paul's response is clear and unambiguous: it’s Jesus you need, nothing added.
He writes to a people he's never met — the church planted by Epaphras, who had studied under Paul in Ephesus — and he celebrates them. He thanks God for their faith. He holds up the gospel message they've received. But woven through the celebration is a steady, urgent reminder: don't add anything to Christ. Don't let the center slip.
This is worth sitting with... the question Paul asks is one we should ask ourselves as a kind of personal inventory: Is it Jesus and something else for me?
For some of us, it's Jesus and political identity. For others, it's Jesus and personal achievement, or Jesus and the approval of others, or Jesus and our theological tribe. These additions don't always feel like additions — they often feel like convictions, like values, like loyalties worth having. But when anything moves from the orbit into the center, when something else becomes the organizing principle of our lives, we've drifted.
Living a Life Worthy of the Lord
Paul's prayer in Colossians 1 is extraordinary: "We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way."
What does that look like in practice? When pressed, Jesus gave us the clearest possible answer: love God with everything you have — your heart, your mind, your soul, your strength — and love your neighbor as yourself.
Consider what this looks like when it's real: if our lives were a crime scene examined on trial, what would we be convicted of?
We should be convicted of loving God and loving others. Not convicted of our political opinions. Not convicted of our cultural preferences. Not convicted of which side we're on in any given argument. Convicted of love.
That standard is demanding. It's also clarifying.
It means that living a Jesus-centered life isn't primarily about what we believe in the abstract — it's about what we are known for in the reality of this world.
The Jesus-centered life is visible; it's a pattern others can recognize. And it bears fruit: good works, growing knowledge of God, endurance, patience, and a joy that doesn't depend on circumstances.
When the Center Slips
Our current political and cultural moment has made it easy for the center to slip. It happens gradually. Loyalties that begin in the periphery start to migrate inward. Language that should never be attached to Christ gets attached anyway — not by fringe voices, but sometimes by people claiming to speak on his behalf.
This isn't primarily a political observation. It's a theological one. When disciples of Jesus embrace violent, threatening, or hateful rhetoric and attach it to Christian identity, something has gone deeply wrong. The problem isn't that Christians engage culture or politics — they should. The problem is when Jesus becomes a supporting actor in a story where he’s the main character, the center of the plot.
The early church struggled with this. So does the church today.
To center on Jesus means to be Christian first, and everything else second. It means our deepest allegiances, our most defining commitments, our loudest witness — all of it — flows from him. It means that whatever role we play in the world, whether we're called to protest, to serve, to run for office, to foster a child, to influence culture or quietly love one lonely person, we do it as people who are fundamentally shaped by the way of Jesus: love, justice, peacemaking, mercy.
You Are Already Worthy
Here's where Colossians 1 takes a turn that I think is the heart of everything.
Paul writes that God "has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light." He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness. He has brought us into the kingdom of his Son. In him, we have redemption.
The worthiness question that haunted Colossae — Are we still worthy in the eyes of the world? — gets reframed entirely. Because in Jesus, worth isn't something you earn. It isn't tied to your city's trading routes or your spiritual performance or how many disciplines you practice or how polished your faith looks from the outside.
Jesus makes us worthy.
And this is precisely why centering on him matters so much. When he is the center, we discover our sacred worth. When something else is the center — our productivity, our reputation, our tribe, our achievements — we're constantly auditioning for a verdict that never quite comes.
We scan the board and miss the king.
Laodicea, the city that rose to prominence as Colossae faded, appears later in Scripture as the "lukewarm" church — the one that thought it was rich and had need of nothing, but was in fact wretched and blind. The city that won the trade wars lost something far more important.
What Keeps Us from Centering?
The question that deserves to land is this: What is restraining us from keeping Jesus at the center?
Is there sin creating static between us and God? Is there an allegiance that has slowly moved from the edge to the middle? Is there something we've quietly added to Jesus — a "Jesus and" — that we haven't named yet?
Centering on Jesus isn't a one-time adjustment. It's a daily returning. It's what Paul is praying for when he says he "has not stopped praying" for these people. It's the sustained, Spirit-empowered practice of bringing our eyes back to the king — not the queen, not the bishops, not the pawns — the king.
When we do that, something opens up. We start to see what we've been missing. Our worth becomes unshakeable. Our witness becomes coherent. And our lives, however quiet or public, become bearers of the fruit that changes the world around us.
That's what it means to center on Jesus.
This blog post is based on a recent sermon from Pastor Tim Ghali that was part of our Centering on Jesus teaching series. To watch the whole sermon, click here.
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