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1 John 4:1-10  Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.  ² This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,  ³ but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.  ⁴ You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.  ⁵ They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.  ⁶ We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.  ⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

We are in the second week of a series I’ve called Why Believe?, where we’re discussing some of the biggest objections to the Christian faith.  We’re doing this to strengthen your faith if you are a believer, to give you reason to believe; and if you do not believe or are not sure what you believe, to challenge you to think critically about some important issues of faith.  Last week we talked about the resurrection, which is really the central issue of the Christian faith, touching as well on the reliability of the gospels and the possibility of miracles.   Today’s objection is to the belief that Jesus is the only way to salvation, the only way to God, that all other religions and philosophies, while they consist of some good teaching and good people, are ultimately wrong, and that Jesus is the only true path to God.  That is a provocative statement to make, especially in our pluralistic, democratic society.  Let me first be clear by what we believe:

I believe, and our church teaches, that God is a tri-personal community, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that this God created not out of need or loneliness but out of an overflow of that community of love.  We believe that humanity sinned and fell away from God’s perfect design, creating disharmony between man and God, man and man, and man and nature.  We believe that, because of God’s great love for His creation, in order to rescue us and this world from the effects of that sin, the second person of that Trinity became flesh, born of the Virgin Mary as Jesus of Nazareth.  We believe that Jesus lived a sinless life, perfectly loving God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself, and that he was crucified unjustly and rose bodily from the grave, in the process paying the penalty for the sin of the world and overcoming death.  We believe that all who repent of their sins, acknowledging their need for God and desire to follow His leadership, receive forgiveness of sins, are given the Holy Spirit as God with them, and begin to live a quality of life known as eternal life, that begins now and will extend past death and into eternity.  We believe that in the end, heaven and earth will be one, sin and death will be destroyed forever, and all who have trusted in Jesus will live forever with God in the renewed heaven and earth.

We also believe that this is the truth for the whole world, that the foundational problem of the world is sin and brokenness and the only solution is the forgiveness and reconciliation found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  And in that statement comes the big trouble, because while it is fine to declare that this is what I believe, many would say that to claim that this is the truth for the whole world and the only way to God for people from here to China, from South Africa to Iceland, is downright ignorant, arrogant, and dangerous to the peace of our world.