The Almighty God, creator of the heavens and the earth, offerd His own Son as a sacrifice to destroy the power of sin. Jesus who knew no sin became sin for us, He became a curse for us. The condemning judgment that belonged to us fell on Him. He raised up from death to bring liberty, freedom to all who place there trust in Him. God set Jesus at His right hand as sovereign ruler, Lord, over all things. And mankind says, “No, we don’t want him to rule over us”. We’ll continuing doing what we want. Or, well figure out a different way to be good.
Faithless humanity. A den of snakes. No one seeks after God, all have followed there own ways.
In Christ Jesus alone is salvation, safety and hope.
But does that mean he is the way through the example of his life or as the secret code for gettinginto the heavenly speakeasy? You knock at the pearly gates and a voice asks for the code word and all you have to do is speak the name? I definitely don’t belief in magic words. If Jesus matters it would be because of who he was, not his name and not what knowing it can do for you. My two cents worth.
I think He meant “I am God”. Nothing secretive about his name or anything else. Just that He himself right then, when He said that, was explaining that to get to God, everyone must go through him. “I am the door” “I am the way” “I am the good shepherd” “I am the bread of life, the alpha and the omega, the bright and morning star, the lamb of God, I am the light of the world, the resurrection and the life, I am that I am, the true vine, I and the father are one.”
His life, death and resurrection and the Holy Spirit living upon our invitation inside us
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How many posts have you read about who Jesus is and still not understand.
His name is not a magic word.
It is the name of the Son of God, Lord, Master, Sovereign Ruler of all things, King of Kings and Lord of lords, Savior of those who bow before Him in faith and brokenness of spirit. He alone can save you from your slavery to your sin.
We who love Him honor His name, for when we call out to Him to save us from temptation, He hears and delivers us. We worship Him and the Father as do those beings in Heaven. His name is not a secret word, it is who He is. What else would we say or what other name are we going call out to besides Him? Of course those who love Him call Him by His name, what else would we call Him. He is Jesus.
He is the way not because His life is only an example. Go ahead and try to follow Him without loving Him and submitting to Him as your Master and only Ruler. Go ahead and don’t lust after a woman in your thoughts. Let me see you stop loving the things of this world. Go ahead and give up your life for His sake without first turning away from self and loving Him with all your affections, thoughts, words and deeds. Try to have nothing more important than God in this short existence you have. Have no other thing that you hold higher than the Father of Jesus. Try to hunger and thirst after righteousness without having Jesus as your righteousness, your Master. Don’t hate your enemy, but pray for them, bless them, give to them.
He is the way because He became sin so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him.
He is the way because those who love Him are bound to Him, united to Him as He carries us through, death, judgement and resurrection to eternal life now, in the present.
He is the way because He is the provision for us to enter the very throne room of God.
He is the way because it is His very Spirit that lives in us, leading, compelling us into the was of His Father, the way of righteousness.
He the person is the way. Being actually united to Him is the way of safety from sin, the evil that has you. He has provided forgiveness of past sins. His shed blood cleanses us from sin.
His Spirit gives live to ours, eternal life, the very nature and character of God.
His name is the representation of who He is. When we say Jesus is my Lord, we are acknowledging that all that name represents is my Master.
The very person of Jesus Himself is the way. I would of thought you would have known this by now.
There is no secret code and your disdain does not serve you well. The deep dark secret is what manifold multitudes have easily found and joyfully accepted. It is a free gift called the grace of God.
I looked for a short video that explains neuroplasticity in a way that a non-scientist can understand it. It is only 2mins long. Here:
Neuroplasticity - YouTube
Well, thank you. I understand neuroplasticity, a little. I’ve been hoping for my brain to neuroplasticize into something like a human’s, but alas, not yet.
I believe there is only one God. And I see all the different peoples of the world and the prophets that have appeared to them as ways of trying to understand and know the Unknowable.
I am a Muslim because Mohammad’s words “there is no other God but God” ring true to my ears. But I can appreciate that though the Hindus have 33 million gods and godesses, there is only one Absolute. Brahman. This is God, just as Allah is God. I have had other Muslims react to that rather badly. But really we can’t know God. And all the peoples down through the ages have tried to understand and know God and if we look at their attempts to understand God we don’t see any fundamental differences.
For example in pagan religions, Wicca for instance where the ritual begins the Witch will start by saying “where all things meet as One”. He or she is pointing to a Oneness, which is God.
Christians are not the only ones, who insist that their way is the only way or the only true way. But I don’t know that all peoples of any particular religion have this opinion. I know of a few Christians that see things the same as me. One the other hand we see even restrictions within Christianity. Some of my relatives think it is extremely bad to become a Catholic. You run the risk, I was told, of waking up in your coffin like the Count from Transylvania. This is extreme intolerance of other Christian denominations. So they are really saying if you are not Greek Orthodox or at least Orthodox then you are not really Christian or not true Christian. Highway prejudice. I guess to some extent I am reacting against these views too.
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Funny but it points to a kind of folly we should all hope to avoid and I think some in every religion and denomination manage to avoid falling into it but probably they all have some who do. Don’t Muslims as well? Certainly my lot is rank with true believing, fundamentalists who can’t imagine how their WV could be wrong or anyone else could possibly be as right as they. But it is unbecoming in every case.
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I agree with you. I have seen this sort of folly in may religious settings. It was just that some of my relatives made the most dramatic imagery that I had heard of. But I have seen it in Buddhist circles and in Sufi circles as well.
The people who say these things are not understanding of religion, in my opinion. I don’t see how they can be prejudiced in this way and still be on the Path of Righteousness.
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The body wastes away but through Christ our spirits are refreshed. That led to Francis finding the Lord. He was astounded working with one Christian patient in particular. She was very ill, but she presented as an inspiring person who trusted God even as her body decayed. She asked him what he believed and he didn’t have an answer, which embarrassed him as a scientist. So, he began to do his homework.
Therefore we (2 Corinthians 4:16 NASB95 - Therefore we do not… | Biblia)do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our (2 Corinthians 4:16 NASB95 - Therefore we do not… | Biblia)inner man is (2 Corinthians 4:16 NASB95 - Therefore we do not… | Biblia)being renewed day by day.
Those who trust in the Lord will never be put to shame.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding. Acknowledge the Lord in all your ways and He will direct your path.
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Why do you think Christians insist that Christ is the only way? Human nature? The desire to be better than others? Christ’s claim about himself? Does it make a difference?
Some of them have been brain washed, but sure there is a desire by many to be right and that means they then consider everyone else wrong.
It makes a difference, because firstly it becomes a political matter. The idea that “we can go to the Middle East or wherever and shoot and kill and hey they are only cockroaches because they don’t believe what we believe”. I find that extremely repulsive.
Secondly, everyone has a different stage of spiritual development,. Thus their perceptions and awareness of themselves as spiritual beings and their connection with God is going to be different. We are all on a path. Some fall off of the path that leads to eternal life by being immoral and unethical. But those who are on the path, adhering to ethics and acknowledging their errors and having remorse and a change of heart and ask for forgiveness, will eventually be granted eternal life.
I don’t believe that Jesus is God or the son of God and that a person needs any go-between to be connected to God. Our words, thoughts and deeds are what count. God sees who we are and knows our struggle and our desire to be faithful to God’s way. When we truly become the lovers of the Beloved, i.e., God, then we are granted eternal life and live in the lake of life.
No one who is evil is going to get a white wash from what I understand. My father was an atheist. He went to church but only to revere Orthodoxly because it was Greek It had nothing to do with God, So does he get a white wash?
My mother on the other hand professed to be a “good Christian” because she believed that Jesus was the savior and whenever she did evil deeds, which was everyday, she would say “Oh I sin my Lord, how great are your deeds and acts of salvation”. This I heard many, many times in my childhood. Is she gonna get a white wash?
I rejected Christianity from childhood. I wasn’t baptized until I was 2 and a half years old. The argument I later heard from my mother is that she hated me and hoped I’d die. And if I died before I was baptized then I’d surely go to hell. It was the outcries of relatives, her sisters, that she eventually had me baptized, but they had problems.
Greeks baptize a child at infancy, less than 1 year old usually. The infant is taken to a huge chalice like baptism bath and dipped under water three times. I didn’t fit in the bath too well. I stood up in it when I was place in there by the priest and the top of the bath came to my waist. He couldn’t push me under because I placed my legs apart, from what I am told and clutched the edges of the bath with my hands and stood solid. The priests had to call on my father to help. And two grown men took quite a while to force me under even once, let alone the three times.
But the baptism didn’t do much. By my early school years I was already advocating Hinduism, which was still fresh since my last incarnation in India… One of my primary school teachers claimed something along the lines of only Christian… blah, blah etc. and Hindus were ignorant. I shouted at her angrily. “You wrong”., Then in my late teens I joined Buddhism. However it was through Buddhism that I met someone who was a Muslim and he took me to a Sufi center, where I learnt about Islam, Shia Islam. I took to it better than a duck to water. So here I am. A devout Shite, many decades later. Allahu Akbar!
Yes. We don’t see this in just religion but in other aspects of culture. A country gets successful and they see their way of doing things as the solution to all the world problems… “if only they would do things the way we do!” pan-Spanishism, pan-Britishism, pan-Germanism, pan-Japanism, pan-slavism, pan-Americanism… It is the type of thinking that leads to world wars.
Jesus isn’t a way.
There is no way. “With men this is impossible.” Matthew 19
There is only God. “But with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:26
Jesus is God.
When Christians insist “Christ is the only way” what they usually mean is that Christianity (their Christianity) is the only way… they mean THEIR way is the only way… That is just human beings strutting around as blind guides no different than the Pharisees.
If I understand, He never said, “I am the way”?
Bless you for your faith!
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The bite of sarcasm…
John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.
The point is what we read in Matthew 19, where the man was looking for a way to get to heaven, asking Jesus to tell him what he could do to get that done. Jesus concluded, “with men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
It is not what we do but what God does.
No sarcasm. I don’t know what you know or how you interpret what He said.
He is the way to God for He is in fact God. He is the way to his father who always seems to be preëminent in his thinking. The father always seems to place his son above himself. They have such sweet devotion to one another, such tender concern, such respect and desire to honor the other. He is truth in its fullness because He is God and He is telling us the truth about himself and his father and the comforter and the future. No guile in him.
That really is what God is about–putting others first. His love is so pure, He is always consumed with the welfare of others. That’s one way we can best immitate him. By placing others ahead of ourselves, we are most liberated to be ourselves. Mom Teresa. Perfect example although she would insist no way. We come across people occassionally who are so flooded with God himself, we can’t imagine them worrying about where they will find the money for their next car payment. Instead, they will be praying for you and your next car payment.
These things are soooo difficult to explain to people who can hardly imagine what we are talking about. Don’t you think?
And that was my point. He is God.
He is God, not a way to God. Is there a way to mathematics without mathematics?
Of course not.
But while mathematics is something we can do, salvation is not. There is indeed a way of mathematics. But a way to God? No. That is not a mountain you can climb or tower you can build. Christians don’t have a way to God any more than any other religion. We are blind guides just as much as any guru or imam.
And what? That will conform us to the image of the Son? Only in the distorted image of the dark mirror of our sin. The world is full of people imitating Jesus and Jesus called them false-Christs.
I would say that we occasionally come across people so flooded with God that it is like heaven to be in their presence – just as there are other people, where being around them is like being in the pit of hell.
None speak for God, but God can use many voices to speak to someone ready to hear.