When you "grow up" in church...when a pervasive part of your upbringing is the Christian faith and morality and "Jesus loves me, this I know," there comes a time when you need to get beyond "This is how I was raised," travel through "this is what I believe," and arrive in the land of "This is who I am."
Josh McDowell's book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, was the tool God used to get me moving along that road of turning my family's faith into MY faith.
Within that book, McDowell quotes C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (another tool that got me acclimated to "This is who I am" territory).
It's an often-shared bit of brilliance, but for me, it spells the difference between just going along with how I was raised and seeing that there are firm facts that form the foundation of my faith.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am 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 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Truth is...No bit of human cleverness will ever be beyond argumentation, but this gets pretty close.
P.S. The Truth is Facebook page is currently a little over a month into its year of daily quotes from C. S. Lewis. You can Like and Follow the page by clicking here or pasting this link into your browser's address bar: https://www.facebook.com/DeweyTruth/
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