Okay, let’s have a show of hands. How many of you reading this article are pretty much of the persuasion that the other guy is wrong?
You may be asking, “What do you mean; the other guy?”
You know, the other guy. Whether it is the Democrat, Republican, Tea Party member, or maybe even the pacifist treehugger who just wants to be left alone.
Maybe it’s the homosexual, heterosexual, bi-sexual, pansexual, or asexual. He or she just rubs you the wrong way?
Or it could simply be the guy riding his crotch rocket through traffic, while everyone else has involuntarily decided to make that freeway anything but free, and more like the world’s largest parking lot. Don’t you just wish you could have thrown open your door as he was passing you by?
The point is, it seems anymore that we are all on edge over just about everything anymore, and that without anyone offering a legitimate solution to the things that cause us the most angst.
Yet, the root of our problems with so many “hating” on each other is not the other guy. It is our repeated failure to acknowledge the guy as the solution to those problems.
Jesus said, after commanding Peter to “Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me,” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (Jn. 14:1, 6).
Now, stop and think about it for just a moment. If Jesus was telling the truth, and there does not appear to be a reason that he was not, then why are we, as a human race, looking anywhere else for solutions to the skyrocketing debt, domestic abuse, bullying at school, ISIS, homosexual marriage, identity theft, commercial greed, religious frauds on television, political frauds across the country and around the world, lawlessness among the lawless and the supposedly lawful, and so on and so forth, to go along with the usual things that beset most all people, which are lying, cheating, and stealing that is fueled by self-defeating stubbornness and implacable pride?
One almost gets the impression that we love our misery so much that we would just as soon destroy ourselves amidst it all than embrace what Jesus said.
He is the way, the truth, and the life, and everything and everyone else that points in another direction, to another proposition, or another way of living only leads to all of the aforementioned self-destructive behaviors listed above.
Can you just imagine what society would be like if people lived according to Jesus’ mandate that “No man can serve two masters…You cannot serve God and money”?
Can you imagine what society would be like if people abided by the principle, “however you want people to treat you, so treat them”?
Can you imagine what society would be like if people agreed that all should “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”?
The world would literally be revolutionized! Oh, it’s not that there would not be some lone mavericks out there still trying to do their thing, but comparatively speaking, it would not be like it is today, where the mavericks are in the majority, both in and out of the church, and society is literally falling apart at the seams.
Jesus’ exclusive statement is the solution to all human problems. No one else in human history has ever made such a declaration, nor has anyone in human history ever been able to back up their words like Jesus did.
Therefore, since Jesus is the way, and there are none better, then what is our problem?
Since Jesus is the truth, then all others are lies which do not begin and end by acknowledging Jesus, then what is our problem?
Since Jesus is the life, and all others end in death, then what is our problem?
If, at the end of the day, and after reading this short message, you are still pointing your finger at the other guy, and assuming that you and your plans and propositions are the solutions—neither of which have anything to do with acknowledging or proclaiming Jesus as the solution—then please remember that you have just made all of our problems worse, not better.
In fact, you are the problem.
