As the earthly parent of imperfect children, I can only imagine how I would respond if someone said to me, “I love you, but your kids get on my nerves. They are crazy! Them I can do without.” I doubt that person and I would be bosom buddies after such a statement. Yet so many people say they believe in our heavenly Father and either outright deny His perfect Son or live in a way that shows scorn to God by not showing love to God’s children or observing His commandments. Many believe Jesus is some sort of good teacher, if he exists at all, or that all paths lead up the great mountain of spiritual enlightenment.
Mere intellectual acknowledgement of God will not do. We must confess His son is the Christ – the Messiah who alone is capable of salvation. We must love God with all our being and love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Love of this caliber can only occur when the love of God exists within us and the fruit of the Spirit finds roots in the soil of our hearts.
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
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