Me Vs Kirk Cameron

As with so many public Christian figures, I find myself often in agreement, and often in violent disagreement with one Kirk Cameron. There is much about his faith that I admire and respect. But the formulation of that faith often turns me off. Here is an example that is making the rounds on the web: 

"If you had the cure to cancer wouldn't you share it? ... You have the cure to death ... get out there and share it."- Kirk Cameron

Okay, there is a lot that is good here. Being open and sharing one's faith, this is a good thing. I advise it. Be out there, tell people what you believe and why, good on you. But here's the problem: I don't think the message of Christianity is that *I* have the cure for death. This is in so many ways to deny the very center of Christianity: that it is not all about you, it is all about God. 

Over and over again, Jesus eschewed the idea that He should be the center of people's attention. He constantly puts the focus back on God even when He Himself is Divine. Why? Because it is in Jesus' very rejection of the desire to BE God that He proves that He IS, in fact God. The essential sin, the true founding sin, the ORIGINAL sin, is the desire to be one's own god, to replace God as the center of our experiential universe. Any ideas about atonement or salvation that make man the center or vehicle of that salvation usurps the place of God, and turns us back into a legalistic process whereby some particular human act or belief brings about that salvation.

We do not "have" the cure for sin. Jesus cured sin. We do not "have" the cure for death. Jesus overcame death. Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, is the focus of our lives, and of our salvation. Christians need to be out there with the message, they need to proclaim the good news... evangelize my brothers and sisters! But the Good News is NOT that we have some special cure for death. It is that death has been defeated. Christ's Cross destroyed death, not our proclamation. We tell people the Good News of what God has done for them, and that they have been adopted into the family of God. Faith is people's response to what God has done, not the vehicle by which God acts. 

With this message in hand, we can be the proclaimers we are meant to be without falling into the trap of thinking that salvation is somehow our special possession.