Over and over I hear lately about how people are down with Christianity yet they are not okay with the "Great Commission" found in Matthew 28: 16-20. It is there that Jesus empowers His disciples to share all that they'd learned about Him over the three years that they spent with Him. We too are given that call when we accept Him to be Lord and Savior because in John 14:6 Jesus tells us that He is "the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [Him]." We hear it from Jesus' own mouth. Either you believe that He is the only way to God, or you don't believe in His word.
C.S. Lewis puts it like this in Mere Christianity:
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Amen. Let us cease and desist with this garbage of sitting around thinking that Jesus was a nice guy, that we can't tell anyone differently, and that anyone can get to God by any variety of methods. Why are we so paralyzingly terrified of telling people that we believe differently? I ask this question to myself as well.
Now, I will say that I do not agree with the way people try to force Christ on people. An example of the wrong way to go about it all is the guy who would come to the UNCG campus with signs condemning all to Hell and preaching fire and brimstone. I think that Jesus is more than capable of using our sweet spirited, loving advances to woo people to Himself without us beating people over the head causing them to flee the scene. What if Jesus' people were so unforgettably kind and genuine that the world was left wondering? What if we ever so gently and yet completely honestly directed people to Jesus? But this, Friends, is another blog for another day.
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2 comments:
Agreed. I will say that I have some hesitancy to share Jesus because the Jesus that my mind is programmed to speak of is pre-conditioned and objective based. It's as though my mind is taken over by a robot whose goal is to get someone to pray a prayer through a series of statements that rationalize God.
In that case, I think it is good to hold back. An honest dialogue about Jesus is ideal. I'm concerned that the status quo in our culture does not embrace that.
Amen amen amen amen.
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