Jesus is the answer for the world today
Above Him there’s no other, Jesus is the way
– Andrae Crouch
Two comments from yesterday’s Catch taken together make a Catch of their own. Andrew reminded us that Jesus ultimately has an answer for everything, but then Bob pointed out that the one big question, “Why?” stuck in his craw and sent him on a long journey from which he finally came back to Jesus.
Yes, Jesus is the answer, but learning to satisfy our human nature and our free will as to how and why He is the answer is the story of our lives.
Our job is not to sit there like Johnny Carson’s late-night Swami character holding up an envelope to our brains with the question inside, then pick up a new envelope every few seconds and utter the same answer, “Jesus” every time. We have a responsibility to show and tell why He is the answer.
There are two sides to this telling why. The first is the experiential, emotional side. What is the personal process by which you came to know that Jesus is the answer to your own need? When did God become real to you? Was it a cry in the night? An empty hole in your heart? A brush with death? The other is the intellectual side — what theologians call apologetics. This is the ability to reason our faith intellectually. This is about finding rational answers to questions like, “How do we know there is a God?” “Are the scriptures reliable?” “How do we know Jesus rose from the dead?” “How could a loving God allow suffering?” “How can there be only one way to God?” These are the how and why answers we need to know. It’s not that they will satisfy everyone’s doubts and make everyone a believer, but they may remove some barriers to faith in someone’s journey to finding that, indeed, Jesus IS the answer.
“Jesus is the answer for the world today,” is Andrae Crouch’s famous Jesus movement song, but it is not enough for us to spout off “Jesus” as the answer to everything. Our entire life lived out in the world is the process by which we tell the world why.
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