A fellow student at North Greenville University posted this well known C.S. Lewis quote on Facebook earlier today:
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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, The MacMillan Company, 1960, pp. 40-41.)
The weightiness of Lewis’ statement should not escape us as we step behind the sacred desk. The Gospel is not Jesus’ moral teachings. It may include them, but too often the occupiers of the pulpits of our churches preach Jesus’ teachings and not the cross. If He had not gone to the cross, all of His words would have to be vain ramblings. However, the cross gives validity to all His words. It showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only did He mean what He said, but was willing to live it out. Not only validity, but because of the impartation of the Holy Spirit, the cross gives the believer power to live out Christ’s teachings in their life. Those who fill the pews of Christ’s church need to know Christ’s teachings, but those teachings help them none without knowing the Christ who not only taught, but hung on a cross.
We cannot stop there! We must point past the rugged tree to the place where, “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” (Isaiah 53:9) To the place where,
“on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.” (Luke 24:1-9)
Do not neglect proclaiming that Christ the Lord has risen. He died to be “the propitiation for our sins” (I John 2:2; 4:10) but rose, “the first-born from the dead” (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5), offering to us the right to be called “a child of God” (John 1:12) and “fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). This is the message of the Gospel. This is the message Christ preached. This is the message the Apostles preached. This is the message we are to preach.
