Jesus is Good News
As human beings, we are all searching for something; meaning, purpose, significance, love, happiness. In a sense, you might say that we are searching for life, and life to the full. While we may be generally ‘happy’, there is something missing in our hearts and lives, something is holding us back from a life of abiding joy and peace. We believe that what’s missing is Jesus. St Augustine, an early Christian thinker, summed it up well when he said:
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”
Jesus is God.
We believe that Jesus is God – Colossians 2:9, a part of the Bible, tells us that:
“in Christ (another name for Jesus) lives all the fullness of God in a human body”
Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. We find this rest in Jesus – God in a human body. John 1:14 says that Jesus became “flesh & blood and moved into the neighbourhood” (MSG).
In some mysterious way, we believe that Jesus is both fully God, and fully human; we believe that in the person of Jesus, God came to earth and took on human form (what is called the incarnation).
Why did God do this? Because he knew that each human being was imperfect – God created each of us, and he created us in his image (which means that we have some special qualities as human beings that reflect who God is) to be his representatives on earth under his Kingship.
And yet each human being has responded not by living under God’s Kingship, but by trying to take over from God – trying to replace him with ourselves, and our kind (human beings in general). This rejection of God’s Kingship is what causes us to do terrible things towards God, each other, and the whole earth – we call this ‘sin’. None of us has lived as God intended for us to live, and so we have this sense that something is wrong – that things are not as they are meant to be either inside us or in the world.
God saw this, and so sent Jesus (who we call the Son of God) to live the life we could not live – a life of perfect obedience to God as Father and King – and to make a way for us to experience life and life to the full: life as God always intended it.
How? By dying on the cross in our place, as our substitute. Jesus lived the life we could not live and died the death we all deserve. You see, God is infinitely holy and absolutely righteous, and so in order to make a way for us to approach such a Holy God, a sacrifice was needed – God himself in the person of Jesus became that sacrifice.
This is good news.
Jesus came to live the life we could not live, and die the death we all deserve so that we could have life and life to the full – life as God always intended it. He offers to substitute his life of absolute righteousness, for our life of brokenness and sin, so that we can have a relationship with God as King. Jesus tells us in John 10:10 that he came so that we might have life and life to the full. Jesus saved us not only from something (our imperfect lives of sin and rebellion against God) but also for something (a better, more content life – a life of abiding joy and peace, as we are all seeking).
Not only does Jesus offer us fullness of life now, but he also offers us life everlasting – eternity in the presence of God our King.
What’s the next step in your journey towards life to the full?
Learning more about what it means to become a fully devoted follower of Jesus can be exciting and overwhelming. You don’t have to go it alone. In fact, it’s best done in a community with others on the same journey.
You can take a next step by clicking any of these.
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