Hot Topic: Is Jesus the Only Way

Our last two wrap-up sessions in the leadership class involved some of the hot button issues that shepherds face when walking with new Christians. Here is what ended up on the dry erase board after a few minutes of brainstorming:

Sexuality (Stance, dating, transformation)

Jesus is the Only way

Spiritual Disciplines

Stewardship (time, resources, $$)

Sloth/laziness vs Workaholism

Partying/College Culture/Non-Christian friends

Habitual Sin (addiction)

Pride/Self-righteousness

Parents

Use of media

Vocation

Navigating Culture

Modesty

Authority of the Bible

The Creepy Church

We've dealt with some of these in earlier posts like Sloth, Stewardship, Spiritual Disciplines. Let's look at a few that we haven't like the question of the exclusivity of Jesus.

This is a tough one for many people. Our culture values tolerance and what they mean by that is recognizing all truth claims (especially religious ones) as equally valid which means that all truth claims are equally invalid. The resulting belief is that we really can't know anything for sure (which is a truth claim right?) so the best we can do is adopt truth for ourselves and keep our noses out of everyone elses business.

This is incompatible with orthodox Christian belief not to mention orthodox Islamic and Jewish belief as well. Any committed adherent to any of the world's religions cannot accept that everybody's belief is equal in validity.
So how can Christians make exclusive claims about Jesus?

This takes us to the Bible. Many hot button conversations (sex, money, salvation, etc. ) will require a foundational conversation about the Bible. Do I believe that the Bible is true? Is it inspired by God? If it is, then I must interact with it as an authoritative document and it is required of me to read it, interpret what it is saying, and obey it. If not, then I'm stuck with figuring out my own reality based on my own experiences.

If I believe that the Bible is true, then I must believe that Jesus is the exclusive gateway to God. This is made abundantly clear throughout the New Testament. Here are two examples:

John 14:6

⁶Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

1 John 5:11,12

¹¹And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. ¹²He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

But what if someone says, they don't believe the Bible? It's so old or corrupted or they've been reading too many Dan Brown novels. One approach is to talk about how we got the Bible that we have today and why we can trust it. There is strong evidence for believing that the Bible we have today is an accurate transmission of the original writings and that those that wrote the Bible were eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Here is the short list of evidences:

1. The writers themselves are adamant about being eyewitnesses (1John 1 and Luke 1)
2. We have over 25,000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament and when compared they all say the same thing and do not reveal corruption especially on theological matters
3. The entire New Testament is quoted in the works of the "church fathers" which are the generation of church leaders after the original Apostles. They too affirm the writings of the New Testament that we have in our Bible
4. The Bible is the most well attested document of antiquity both in number of manuscripts in existence but also in the age of those manuscripts. No document has copies of manuscripts that are so close to the original. See the oldest complete Bible and the oldest Bible fragment
5. Very small band of uneducated, unorganized, powerless, persecuted people started a movement that took over the Roman empire within 2 decades before it became the official religion of the Roman empire. Their message seemed to change them and the people with whom they came in contact
6. Almost the entire group of the original progenitors of the Gospel message who were contemporaries of Jesus died as martyrs. We have no example in the course of human history of people dying for something they know is a lie.

But what if after all of this, a person is not persuaded that the Bible is an authoritative book? This is no time to draw a line in the sand and tell people to call back when they get their head on straight. One of the most important things to understand about the Bible is that it is self-authenticating.

What I mean by that is that as people read it, the Holy Spirit speaks it supernaturally into the person's life. They begin to hear the voice of God through his written word and are often convinced through experience (not thinking) that God's word is true and can be trusted. The practical end of this is that we should encourage everyone who is interested in the Bible, regardless of their views on the Bible, to study it and then let the Holy Spirit do the rest.