“Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we don’t know where are you going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” John 14:5-6
I’m continuously learning and coming to understand the depth of Christ’s love for us through His Triune identity—one with the Father and the Holy Spirit—and the breadth of the universal invitation to all people to be a part of His work of redemption in the world.
I’m finding Christianity to be less of a religion and more of the very nature and alignment of the universe in which we live. The Way of Christ is the Way Everlasting. The salvation Christ offers is not simply a transactional atonement for our sin, but rather the means by which we can all participate in the New Creation established through His birth, life, death, and resurrection.
Christ’s invitation to be His disciples necessarily involves denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Him (Matthew 16:24), because His Way is greater than ours. In a culture where the right to self looms large, Jesus’ invitation is likely offensive to many. The freedom we are given by a gracious God to be a part of His rule and reign—only if we choose to be—is a testament to His love and respect for each of us. He never forces Himself or His purpose upon us, but oh, how we would do well to honor it and accept His merciful and grace-filled invitation upon our lives.
When I consider the intricate details of each of our lives with which God is concerned (as illustrated in Psalm 139, for example), I am humbled by the heart of God. And when I zoom out from my little life to imagine the cosmos, I am awestruck by the mind of God. As a part of the Triune God, I recognize that Christ has to be more than simply a good moral teacher if He is truly all that He claims to be. In the famous words of C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
“You must make your choice: either the 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.”
In a pluralistic world in which I desire to live peacefully alongside my neighbors who are of other faith traditions, I do not seek to diminish their quest to know God. On the contrary, I pray that we would all come to know God more as we seek Him with all of our hearts, as stated in Jeremiah 29:13. But as Jesus commanded His disciples to “Go and make disciples...” (Matthew 28:19), I’m increasingly convinced that such a task is most effectively done not by telling others how to live but by genuinely becoming that which Christ has invited me to be—His disciple.
~em
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