1993 West Church Street, Freeport, IL 61032  
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"Why Talk Of Jesus?"

The reason for people to talk about Jesus is that what people decide about him makes a tremendous difference. Jesus claimed to be God. He also claimed that people would be punished forever (i.e. Matthew 25:46) for their sins unless they trust in him for forgiveness and never-ending life (John 3:16). If his claim is true, then it is important that we should be talking about Jesus, so that more and more people might hear and accept his claim, trusting in him for forgiveness and life. If his claim were not true, it would be important to talk about him, so that people might reject his claim and not waste their lives trusting in someone who "won’t deliver." We should talk about him so that people can be as informed as possible in their acceptance or rejection of Jesus’ claims.

If Jesus’ claims are true, then rejecting him and being punished forever is an obvious thing we’d want to avoid. If Jesus’ claims were false, then we would want to avoid accepting his false claims not only to be "right," but also to avoid the difficulties of following him. 1 Corinthians 15:19 tells us, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."

We need to be talking about Jesus because so much depends upon what we think of him. We can’t take a middle road. He was not a great teacher among many others, or he would not have claimed to be more than that. He did not simply teach us how to live a more moral life, or he would not have talked about eternal or never-ending life. Either Jesus is everything he said and we should follow him, or he is evil or crazy and we should reject him. Our lives are an opportunity for each of us to talk about Jesus with each other, and to read and study his words in the Bible, so that each one of us may be informed as we accept or reject his claims.

The late atheist-turned-Christian Englishman C.S. Lewis wrote, "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 [exclusive, divinity-claiming] things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on 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."

We pray that you take the claims of Jesus seriously—that you talk about and study his claims and respond accordingly.