Learning Activity #1: Week Three Devotional

Learning Activity #1: Week Three Devotional Order Description Learning Activity #1: Week Three Devotional Discuss the assigned section of Mere Christianity in this week’s devotions. Specifically consider the quote provided in the devotional section. The devotional each week is taken from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (which can also be found at https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf ). Read through Book II, 3: The Shocking Alternative for Week Three. Week Three (From Book 2, What Christians Believe, The Shocking Alternative, pp. 55-56). He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history. Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do no usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is “humble and meek” and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of his sayings. I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often 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 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