Mark - Lesson 4...Continued from page 46

God saved you by his special favor when you believed. And you can't take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so that we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” (Ephesians 2:8-10, nlt)

3.  We face three choices to make about who Jesus was and is to us today.  We can brand Him as His family did:  a religious nut driven by insanity and self-delusion.  We can reject Him as the religious leaders did:  claiming He was demonically influenced or just plain lying.  Or, we can accept that what He was saying was true, and choose to follow or reject Him.  To call Him a liar, we have to pass up the fact that He was the greatest teacher on truth, moral ethics, and unselfish living.  To call Him crazy is also crazy, because He had great perception and a clear, sharp intellect, and if Jesus Christ is insane, what does that say about the rest of us?[xxv]  The only other option is that He is telling the truth, and is the only way, truth, and life, and is the Lord of Glory.  It is up to us to accept or reject it.  Ponder these classic words by C.S. Lewis, and record some of the things that led you to see that Jesus is who He claimed to be, and follow Him:

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 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 mad man 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 up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.[xxvi]