Jesus is extreme. Here was a Man who descended into society and claimed to be the Son of God. He spent His life teaching that anyone who gave him or herself over to worshipping Him would have eternal life. Jesus is extreme, and there is no way around it.
When we encounter Jesus Christ, we must choose between one of two extremes. We can either accept Him and believe that He was fully Man yet fully God – the Son of God and the Savior of all mankind – or, we must pass Him off as a self-centered fanatic and a lunatic.
The problem we find ourselves in today is trying to embrace some sort of middle ground that does not exist. We say things like, “Jesus was a great teacher, and a good role model,” but we resist drawing the necessary conclusion that He was the Son of God. We look to embrace and cultivate our ‘spiritual side’ without having to make a decision about Who Jesus Christ really was.
Yet we must make a decision. There is no middle ground. If Jesus was not the Son of God, He was crazy. You can’t passively learn soft moral principles from a man who claimed He was the Son of God and demanded that everyone who wishes to make it to Heaven must worship Him. C.S. Lewis put it like this:
“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 patronizing 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
We must make a choice when it comes to Jesus Christ. You must either believe Him, or reject Him. There is no passive acceptance, and there is no middle ground. Which extreme will you choose?
-by Pastor Mike White