Dwight Fletcher | Accept, believe, confess

JESUS WAS fully man and fully God. He’s the Christ, the Son of God who came to redeem mankind. He’s Lord of all, and the day will come when all (living, dead, angels and demons) must bow to Him. We can chose to bow voluntarily by accepting Him now, or involuntarily later. To be spared doing it involuntarily, we must take Him for who He says He is. We must believe and establish Him as Lord of our lives.

Christian author C.S. Lewis correctly said, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people 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 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 … or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make a 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Jesus gives us no choice but to accept Him as the Son of God, the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah, or to totally reject Him. There is no in-between. He’s either Lord of all or not at all.

It isn’t enough to merely believe that He’s God, we also have to receive Him as Saviour and Lord. If we believe Him we must receive Him. That means individually trusting Him for forgiveness of sins, the deliverance from sin and its effects, and for eternal life. If Jesus is who He says He is, only He can do what He can do, it’s imperative that we trust in Him alone. He’s the only one who can save.

Jesus tells us in John 14:6 (NIV), “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, and in Acts 4:12 (NIV), “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

The danger doesn’t so much lie in the worship of idols or even being an atheist. The greater concern is that we become accustomed to church life and being around the things and people of God so much that we’re somehow deceived into believing we’re Christians when we may not be.

The great danger for those raised around Christianity is for them to become so familiar with the things of God that they’re fooled into thinking that they’re part of the people of God. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 7:21 (NIV).

In each of our lives there must come a time when we ask Jesus to forgive our sins, give us eternal life, and allow Him to transform us by changing us to become like Him. We must surrender control of our individual life to Him and allow Him to be Master over it. Do it today; it’s as easy as ABC.