The Personal Christ

A. B. Simpson was an author, hymn writer, conference speaker, evangelist to the urban masses of New York City, and a missionary statesman.  He founded The Christian and Missionary Alliance and Nyack College.

The following is from his book The Christ Life:

". . . the greatest conception in the universe is the conception of the personal God.

"We rejoice to know that He is not an abstraction or principle, but a living person whom we can touch with our consciousness and embrace with the arms of our faith and love.

"A lady, just saved from the delusions of Christian Science, exclaimed as once more she was able to apprehend the personality of Jesus Christ, 'How strange that I never realized the awful error they taught me, that Christ was only a principle and not a person. I might as well try to love the grape-vine on my trellis as the divine principle. Oh, I am so glad that Jesus is as real as I myself, my own blessed Saviour.'

"As we read the story of His life, back of all His wonderful works and words is the Living One Himself, and so lofty is His personality that even infidelity has been compelled to say that the hardest thing to explain away is not the Bible, but the Christ of the Bible.

"What other man ever talked so much of Himself or so often used the personal pronoun, and yet it all seems so natural, so becoming, so majestic, and so consistent with His character and personality that we listen with awe and admiration as we hear Him say, 'I am the Bread of Life,' 'I am the Light of the world,' 'I and my Father are one,' 'Without me ye can do nothing.'

"We instinctively feel that He has a right to stand without egotism, always in the front of the stage, and that He Himself is greater than all the truths He revealed and all the works He accomplished. And not only so, that personality is still a living Presence. 'Lo, I am with you all the days.' 'Behold, I am alive for evermore.'

"He walks through all the generations as really as in the days of Galilee. He is the Heart as well as the Head of Christianity, 'the same yesterday, and today, and forever.'"