Who is Jesus? - Part 2

Romans 10:9-10 “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”

Continuing Pastor Obie message on “Who is Jesus?”, he told us that Christian C. S. Lewis wrote in his classic book ‘Mere Christianity’: “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.” What “good” person would claim to be God?

Who is Jesus? How you answer that question is a life and death issue. Jesus explained in John 3:16-18 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Come Judgment Day, when we physically die and stand before Christ in Heaven at the Great White Throne and have to give an account of our life, if we have not repented of our sins on earth and accept the redemptive and atoning blood of Jesus Christ for them, then we are condemned by them. When sin came into the world, the wages of sin which we earned (death) came along with it and our spirit connection with within us died. We are condemned already; dead in our trespasses and inequities. How many times over a lifespan do you suppose you sinned against God, His creation and you fellow man?

Romans 3:23-24 confirms that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6:23 reiterates that “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Ephesians 2:1-5 explains that “you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air (the devil), the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” We must be “born again”. Born once, die twice (the second death being Hell). Born twice, die once.

Pastor Obie explains that repenting of sin and making Jesus Lord and Savior of your life does two things. (1) It resurrects us from death to life. The Holy Spirit transforms our heart, renews our mind and regenerates our spirit in resurrection. (2) It makes you adopted sons and daughters of God. John 1:12-14 tells us that “as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

It’s all about God’s everlasting love that we were mercifully redeemed. But, we have a choice to make. John 3:36 says it once, “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” 1 John 5:11-13 tells us a second time “that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.” Love God back and believe in Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord of your life. Submit everything to Him.

In Christ, Brian