Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Week 41 - Day 4

Mark 7-9; Proverbs 11

*Click here to read these passages:

The disciples had been with Jesus day in and day out for a while.  They had seen many amazing miracles; they had seen huge masses of crowds follow Jesus to hear Him teach and to seek His help.  The time had come for them to figure out what they truly believed about this man they had been following.  Jesus first asked them, “Who do people say I am?” to which they had various answers.  Then He said, “But what about you?  Who do you say I am?”

This is still a huge question for us today.  Especially in light of the fact that we live in a culture where the name of Jesus is thrown around all over the place … whether you’re skeptical of the Bible and believing in Jesus or you’re a follower of Jesus, we all have to figure out what exactly it is that we believe.  Who is Jesus to you?

C.S. Lewis, once an atheistic who became a Christian, said this:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.  That is the one thing we must not say.  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 the 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 … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend; and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” (From Mere Christianity)

“But what about you?  Who do you say I am?” 

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