The Christian Classics - Part I

If you had all the time in the world to read, what books beside the Bible would you invest your time in?

Jim Ware is a longtime member of the Focus team. He is a highly talented writer as well as a gifted musician. He can often be seen simultaneously reading and walking on his lunch break around the streets of our campus. He would probably deny it, but he may be the most well-read person you would ever meet. And since summer is traditionally a time when many of us find a little extra time to read, whether it’s on our front porch or beside a lake while on vacation, I thought it would be fun to ask Jim to recommend some of his favorite passages in Christian literature. I’ll be sharing these pearls of wisdom with you all week.

For now, here is our first installment:

Liar, Lunatic, or …?

(from Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis)

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about [Jesus Christ]: “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 a 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.