The One Thing We Must Not Say

February 26, 2025

C.S. Lewis wrote:

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.

I often reflect on how many people don't believe in Jesus, thinking He was just an ordinary person. I know they haven’t taken the time to truly explore who He was, what He said, and the impact He had on the world. We’ll invest countless hours researching our fantasy football teams, improving our golf game, keeping up with Hollywood gossip, following the latest diet trends, planning the perfect vacation, or building our dream home. Yet so many are unwilling to dedicate even a fraction of that time to studying something that could (and I believe does) have eternal significance.

I think about Jesus and the fact that He was born in a sheep stable, never wrote a book, never held an office, never studied at a university, never traveled more than one hundred miles from his hometown. I think about the fact that Jesus was betrayed by His own people, no followers came to his defense, was executed as a common thief, and buried in a borrowed grave. Yet, as D. James Kennedy points out, “Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today He is the central figure of the human race.”

Through Jesus’ life, teachings, and the Church Jesus founded, we have hospitals, universities, literacy for the masses, abolition of slavery, elevation of women and children, benevolence and charity, health and medicine, inspiration for the world’s greatest art and music, and even the birth of many of the sciences (Thinking God’s Thoughts After Him) by Bible-believing scientists, including natural history, bacteriology, calculus, chemistry, computer science, electronics, galactic astronomy, genetics, oceanography, electromagnetic, glacial geology, and dozens of others. Of course, the greatest evidence for Jesus being more than just a man who walked this earth two millenniums ago are the countless lives changed through a relationship with Him.

Dr. Simon Greenleaf, founder of Harvard Law School, was not a believer. One year, he was challenged to take his three volumes on the Law of Legal Evidence and apply the principles to evidence for the resurrection of Christ. In the process, he became a believer and concluded, "The resurrection is one of the best-established facts in history.” Greenleaf went on to say that it was impossible that the apostles “could have persisted in affirming the truths they had narrated had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact.”

Lord Darling, Former Chief Justice of Great Britain came to the same conclusion, stating, “In its favor as a living truth there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.”

James Russell Lowell, who over a century ago was the minister of State for the United States to England, was once at a banquet where the Christian religion was being attacked by scoffers.  He spoke up and said:

I challenge any skeptic to find a ten square mile spot on this planet where they can live their lives in peace and safety and decency, where womanhood is honored, where infancy and old age are revered, where they can educate their children, where the Gospel of Jesus Christ has not gone first to prepare the way. If they find such a place, then I would encourage them to emigrate thither and there proclaim their unbelief.

Of course, the greatest evidence for Jesus being the Son of God is how He has absolutely transformed my life, proving Himself time and time and time again!

Let me share here a short section from my book, Three Years: Making A Difference in The Time You Have Left, where I share about the night, I experienced God’s grace, through Jesus Christ, in all its fullness and was transformed:

A couple years after my dad’s death, I cried out to God once more. I could not keep going. The burden was too heavy, the guilt too overwhelming. It was, on top of my grief, destroying my relationships, my thoughts, and my connection with God. I needed a night like John Wesley experienced at Aldersgate when his “heart was strangely warmed.”

One night as I was driving home from seminary, I began to pray using a method I had recently learned in a class on prayer. I prayed without speaking, simply focusing all my thoughts, all my desires and energy, on Christ. After ten or fifteen minutes, all my sins and all the moments I had turned away from God surfaced. It was at this pivotal moment that I recognized my need for a Savior. I had accepted Christ in my heart, but it wasn’t until that moment that I truly understood God’s grace. I understood what it meant. I placed all my unworthiness at the cross, giving it over to Christ. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a scripture reference, Malachi 1:2.

The second time, the impression was so strong I pulled over and looked

up the passage. It read, “I have loved you, says the Lord.” At that very moment, I knew I had been forgiven, and Christ had entered my heart. There was no doubt. In that moment I truly, in John Wesley’s words, “felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” This was my moment of assurance and I never picked up the sins I laid at the cross that night again. The guilt I had carried for years was gone.

Peter spoke up at Pentecost:

Fellow Israelites, listen carefully to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man thoroughly accredited by God to you—the miracles and wonders and signs that God did through him are common knowledge—this Jesus, following the deliberate and well-thought-out plan of God, was betrayed by men who took the law into their own hands, and was handed over to you. And you pinned him to a cross and killed him. But God untied the death ropes and raised him up. Death was no match for him… All Israel, then, know this: There’s no longer room for doubt—God made him Master and Messiah, this Jesus whom you killed on a cross. (Acts 2:22-24, 36, MSG).

If someone you know, someone you love, doesn’t believe Jesus was more than a man who walked this earth so long ago, ask them, beg them, to do the research! They will inevitably discover that Jesus WAS and IS so much more!