Your Choice

Your choice

“You can’t force people to do what they don’t want to do, to feel what they don’t feel.  If someone wills one thing, you cannot tell it to will another.  It has to come from within.”
-Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaic scholar and professor of biochemistry, quoted in 
 “Of Thorns, Idols, and Prophecy,” Hadassah, May 1990

I agree with the professor. You cannot force people to do what they don’t want to do. I believe Jesus and his disciples believed it. Jesus said,
“Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” 
                                                                           Matthew 28:18-20.
This to Christians is the great commission. To go into all the world and present the teachings of Christ to all who will listen.
At no time did Jesus or his disciples force their beliefs on anyone. We are called to present the teachings of Christ to the world. Nothing more.
As a Christian I believe Jesus is the Son of God and the only way to heaven.
Jesus said,
“....“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” 
                                                                                                                               John 14:6
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” 
John 3:16-18
At the trial of Jesus the apostle John records this conversation between Jesus and Pilate,
“Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” 
“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?” 
“Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?” 
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.” 
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” 
John 18:33-37
C.S. Lewis wrote,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 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 the 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.” 
                                                                                                      C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Where do you stand with respect to Christ.
Think about it.