Monday, June 16, 2014
396 - The Only Thing Jesus Ever Was
Spirituality Column #396
June 17, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
We Christians believe Jesus is everything: life, love, joy, truth, knowledge and good. He is trustworthy, challenging and unchangeable. He is yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever.
June 17, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
The Only Thing Jesus Ever Was
By Bob WaltersWe Christians believe Jesus is everything: life, love, joy, truth, knowledge and good. He is trustworthy, challenging and unchangeable. He is yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever.
Jesus
is fully God and fully man. He is eternally
present in the Kingdom, and eternally present tense when spoken of. Jesus
is today’s news, whatever day it is.
A
sermon on the radio recently offered an interesting point. Of all the things Jesus is, present tense, there
is only one thing that Jesus ever was, past tense:
He
was dead.
That
struck me as a great thing to remember, containing great perspective, and a
great way to explain our Christian faith.
We
often hear in our churches that the thing that makes Jesus Christ different
from every other philosopher, theologian, priest, king, poet, pastor, hero or
religious leader in history – and “in history” means they lived as a human
being – is that all the rest of them are dead.
Are
dead. Still dead. Gonna’ stay dead. When we humans who are alive today pass on –
and that’s all of us – we too will stay dead to this human realm.
That’s
the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. He
didn’t stay dead. Jesus died for our
sins. He died to defeat death. He died to assure the eventual and eternal
fellowship of all believers in Him to join Him in Heaven – alive – with God
Almighty. Jesus died and was resurrected
so we could share, trust, and have firm hope in God’s promise of our eternal
relationship with Him and our adoption into His Kingdom. Jesus Christ is the way and the reason – “the way, and the truth, and the life” says
John 14:6 – that God’s glorious Creation, now fallen, can return to God in
glory forever.
When
someone, perhaps our child or our neighbor, asks why we believe in Jesus, we
can say with full confidence, “Because He died, but now is alive.”
When
the world urges us to believe that “all gods are the same,” we can assert
truthfully, “No, Jesus Christ – God and man – did what no one else has done:
died and returned to life. He lives
forever with authority over all things.”
When
the libertine insists he must “believe in Himself,” with gracious tact we must
affirm that when he, the libertine, dies, he will stay dead.
Only
in Jesus Christ will man find life eternal, because Jesus is the only man with
eternal life. Yes, Jesus was dead. That He is alive is the best news of all
time.
Be
sure to tell a friend, and to forgive an enemy.
Jesus is alive and watching.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that our faith can die, but Jesus cannot. He’s been there, done
that.
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