Has anyone ever told you about Jesus?
The Good News
If you are reading this, and you are an American, you have most likely “heard about Jesus”, at least indirectly. You are probably at least aware that there are people called “Christians” who talk a lot about someone named Jesus. You may know quite a bit more, you may know less, but I don’t want to assume anything here. I simply want to tell you about him if you’re willing to hear me out.
Where to begin? How about some claims that Christians hold dear?
Jesus is God become man.
Jesus died, by Roman crucifixion, to save his people from their sins.
Jesus rose bodily from the dead on the third day and conquered death and sin.
Jesus is the sole and exclusive way to have forgiveness of sins and everlasting life.
Jesus offers the whole world salvation if they will turn from their sins and believe in him.
There is a good deal more than that which could be said, of course, but those are some pretty key claims about Jesus. One of the best things you could do to learn more about Jesus is to read about him from the original source, The Gospels, in the Bible. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written in the first century (when Jesus’ earthly ministry took place).1 Matthew and John wrote as eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and ministry, they walked with him and went with him everywhere for about three years. Mark wrote his Gospel based upon the teaching of Peter (who was also a close follower of Jesus). Luke wrote his Gospel like an investigative journalist, interviewing and speaking with people who saw it all happen. Luke also wrote the biblical book called Acts which is a recording of the earliest days of the Christian church after Jesus’ ministry on earth was complete.
All of this being said, I think that in my eagerness to tell you all about Jesus, there are some other things you might need to know first. The Bible, which Christians hold to be God’s own word in written form, teaches us some other foundational truths that help put what I said above about Jesus into a better context to be understood. Here are some things taught in the Bible:
God is eternal with no beginning or end.
God is a Trinity, one being in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
God created all things, visible and invisible, by his will and power, out of nothing.
God made human beings, male and female, in his own image and gave them dominion (authority) over this world under his rule.
Man’s first parents, Adam and Eve, rebelled against God and this placed mankind at odds with God.
Because of man’s sin we are in a state of spiritual death, separated from a relationship with God, we die physically, and many things in our world are very broken.
It’s only in light of these things that the good news about Jesus starts to make some sense. I suspect that some of these claims resonate with you more than others right away. Some of these claims, like God being a Trinity, can only be accepted by faith as it is revealed in the Bible since it is not something that can be discerned by looking at nature.2 On the other hand, that something is very wrong in our world, that things are broken out there and, if we are honest, that things are very broken in us seems pretty evident doesn’t it? I suspect you have often felt the injustice in the world around us as people starve to death, as heinous crimes are perpetrated, etc. I suspect also that, if you are honest with yourself, you would say that you are often unjust too. You have at some point taken what does not belong to you, you have been dishonest with your friends, family, or co-workers at times, you have hated someone in your heart and maybe harmed them physically or emotionally, or just harbored bitterness and resentment toward them. You have placed your own self before the good of your fellow man and you’ve been selfish in a myriad of ways. You did not respect your parents, elders, or boss as is their due. I know that this is all the case. Do you know why?
I know you have done these things because so have I. So have we all.
Something inside me, and inside all of us, is broken. But these things which I have just mentioned are slight in comparison to our greatest sins which I have not yet mentioned. You and I have not loved and honored God, our Creator, who is worthy of our love and devotion, as we ought to have done. We have instead worshipped other things. We have worshipped money, we have worshipped power or status within a group or at a job, we have worshipped a house or a new car, we have worshipped a man or woman we have loved more than anything, we have worshipped our own children, we have definitely worshipped the image we see in the mirror.
In the ancient world idolatry referred to the worship of images of gods made out of wood, stone, or metal. Some of that kind of idolatry persists in the world today but largely it has taken a different kind of form. The point is, however, whenever our devotion to something is higher than our devotion to the God who made us for himself we are committing what the Bible calls idolatry. We are all, you and I included, very guilty of loving things more than we love God who made us for himself.
The Bible gives us a list of God’s law, in summary form, called the 10 Commandments. The first four commandments pertain to how we should behave towards God, the latter six are about how we should behave towards our fellow man.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
“You shall not murder.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.”
This summary of God’s moral law tells us what our actions ought, and ought not, to be if we are to live in harmony with God and man. Many people do not have the commandments about God on their mind at all but they are actually the most important. As for the commandments about how we should treat one another I suspect that we have all given them a bit more thought. Now maybe you have never “coveted a donkey” but you understand it is the principle behind this statement which matters. To covet means to jealously desire something that belongs to someone else. Ever coveted anything? I certainly have…probably a few things in the last 24 hours.
Part of Jesus’ own teaching about the 10 Commandments includes the idea that the attitude of our hearts is what God is ultimately concerned with. The outward actions of murder and theft and adultery are merely the product of corrupted hearts. This means that even when we don’t do the physical acts themselves, we are still guilty of those sins if the state of our heart is such that it lends toward those actions. In Matthew’s Gospel, in chapter 5, he records Jesus’ most famous sermon known as “The Sermon on the Mount.” In this sermon Jesus tells us that to have hate in our heart towards someone is to have murdered them in our heart. To lust after someone is to have committed adultery in our heart. I think we know this is true. To really hate someone is basically to desire their destruction. To lust after someone is to violate them in our minds. To covet is to steal someone’s things in our imagination and take it from them. God counts the motivations of our hearts (for good and ill) the same as the actions themselves because the actions come from these intentions of the heart once we give them enough sway.
Jesus actually affirmed a summary of the commandments of God which reduced the commandments from 10 to down to just 2. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Here we see the same division as in the 10 commandments, toward God and toward our fellow man, and we see just as plainly our failure to obey. I don’t love God with my whole being as I ought and I don’t love my neighbor half so well as I love myself.
In reality, you and I have, at least in principle, broken all of the 10 Commandments. I break them constantly and in new and surprising ways all the time. I hate my sin, and still I struggle with it daily. I am the worst sinner I know because I know the dark corners of my own heart the best. What I really need is someone to save me from myself and from this tragically broken world I live in.
And so do you.
The Bible is a collection of many independent historical documents (generally numbered at 66 books) which contains many stories (historical narratives) and many different teachings about a myriad of things. The Bible is even so diverse as to have poetry and songs as part of its composition! Even so, it also has incredible cohesion so that the many different stories form one grand, incredibly consistent, story. It’s a story about God and a story about us, who he is, how he made us, why he made us, and how we have rebelled against him and tried to set ourselves up as our own ruler. It’s a story about how our attempt at self-rule has broken us and the world we live in. It’s a story about how God, despite our rejection of him, has spoken to us through prophets and apostles and most particularly through Jesus. He has offered to restore us to himself, and to one another, and all that is required is that we believe his promise that he will do so.
Every other religion in the world sets before you a list of to-dos in order to try to earn heaven or nirvana or whatever else the ideal is supposed to be. Not Christianity.
You might say, but didn’t you just tell me about the 10 commandments? Aren’t I supposed to keep those? Yes. But you can’t. I can’t either. No one can, not perfectly. Certainly we ought to. Certainly we must try to. But we can’t. And worst of all yet, God demands them to be kept perfectly from birth if we are to reach him by that road. The Bible actually says “You be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”
Jesus told his hearers, at the Sermon on the Mount, that their righteousness “must exceed that of the Pharisees and the Scribes” (who were considered the best at keeping the law of God in Jesus day) if the people were to enter God’s kingdom. This was pretty deflating to them just as my telling you “perfectly keep God’s commandments from birth” is probably disheartening to you. We can’t. It’s too late. But even if I got a do-over it wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t last a day…probably not an hour… my heart is a mess! I have sinned and I will sin again despite my desire not to. My sin has separated me from God and keeps me from having the kind of relationship with my fellow man that I ought to have. Jesus tells us that those who die in their sins, pursuing their own desires and rejecting him, will not enter the kingdom of heaven but be cast into the outer darkness and the torments of hell forever.
So, that’s the bad news.
But, if you remember, I started with the good news. God offers us an escape from the penalty of our sins through Jesus. The Bible teaches that God the Son, became a man, lived a life free from all sin and in perfect obedience to all of God’s commandments, and that he died in our place for our sins on a cross. God took Jesus’ death as a substitution for the death we deserve to die. God the Father accepted his death as a payment for the debt of our sins so that whoever believes in him (Jesus) will not perish but have everlasting life.
The good news is that although you and I cannot be perfect, we may be counted as perfect because of Jesus if we will simply trust him to save us. By God’s grace, through faith in Jesus, we are saved and our sins are forgiven and we are counted as though we had never sinned and even our future sins are wiped away in his sight. The perfect life and obedience of Jesus is credited to us by faith. So ought we to keep his commandments? Yes, they are good and they help us to live a life of happiness the more we keep them, but when we inevitably fail to keep them as we ought there is grace.
You cannot save yourself, but Jesus can. This world cannot fix its own problems, but Jesus can. Jesus proved that he is who he said he is, and that he can save us from our sins as he claimed, when he rose bodily from the dead. So what do you need to do? You need to repent of your sins (which means to turn from them with your heart and your actions) and trust in Jesus to save you (because you cannot save yourself). Confess your faith in Jesus, find a faithful church that believes and teaches the Bible and join it, be baptized (as a physical sign and seal of Christ’ washing away your sins), and begin to walk in his ways (imperfectly but with grace to cover our failings).
That’s it. I mean, there is a lot to learn still, of course, we will always be learning how to follow Jesus better. There are lots of good questions you might rightfully ask about what it means to live as a Christian, how it practically affects your daily life, what other things we believe as followers of Christ, but that’s all you need to know to belong to God and his people. Cling to Jesus, start reading the Bible, get into a church that will help you grow.
As time goes on I intend to add articles below that will provide answers to common questions about how we can know Christianity is true and about various matters of Christian belief and practice. The collection of articles will grow over time but, in the meanwhile, if you have a question about why you should follow Jesus or believe Christianity is true, or if you need help figuring out what is means to follow Jesus faithfully, feel free to reach out to me in the comments.
Why Should I Believe Christianity is True?
Because there is great evidence for the resurrection of Jesus
Because God’s existence is necessary for life to have meaning
More to come…
What Should I Believe as a Christian?
Coming soon…
Don’t have a Bible? You can read it online for free HERE. If you want a physical Bible and don’t have access to one, reach out to me and I’ll do my best to get you one.
Faith is equal to “trust”. It’s not contrary to reason, it is simply confidence based upon the character of the one who is telling us something is so. I am not irrational for believing something my parents have told me even though I have not experienced what they have told me it was like living in the 1970’s. God can tell us things about himself and we can believe it based upon his good character and trustworthiness as is demonstrated in what we do know and experience otherwise.
Many tried to tell, but I couldn't listen. Until He reached down His hand for me.