There are times when “maybe” is a very appropriate answer.
“Do you want to go to the beach next Saturday?”
“Maybe.”
But there are times when a “maybe” response just isn’t acceptable. How would you react if you asked someone, “Did you pick up the package at the post office that I have been waiting for” and they answered, “Maybe”?
.
When it comes to the person of Jesus Christ, people often see him in a “maybe” kind of way. They will describe him as an “Enlightened Spiritual Guide” or a “Wonderful Moral Teacher”, but that will be as far as their description of Jesus goes.
What makes that response flawed is that Jesus never gave people the option of seeing him as great, but only human. Repeatedly he claimed to be nothing less than God himself. When people protested that this was either a fit of megalomania or worse, Jesus doubled down and reaffirmed his claim. It was his insistence that he is God which led to his crucifixion.
A Christian from the last century put it this way,
“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
If you feel like you’re stuck in a “maybe” understanding of Jesus: you admire what he said and did but aren’t ready to accept him as God, join us for our worship service this Sunday morning. We’re going to study an event in Jesus’ life in which he does some startling things and makes some equally shocking statements. You owe it to yourself to see Jesus for who he is.
Sunday Morning Worship: 10:00 am