“Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’” John 1:45–46
With Easter weekend being celebrated around the world, along with The Bible miniseries that aired on the History Channel to over 100 million viewers, it seems as if the past few weeks everyone has in one way or another been talking about Jesus.
Over the past few thousand years, many have asked the question, “Who is Jesus?”
Was he just a man? The ultimate nice guy? A good moral teacher? A happy-go-lucky Ned Flanders? A Jewish prequel to Gandhi? A bearded hipster who went against the mainstream? A prophet? A political revolutionary? The Son of God? There are thousands more questions we could ask. But instead of speculating, the best thing we could do is to go straight to the source. The most confrontational and powerful truth in this world is a clear picture of the man from Nazareth.
The real question we should be asking is, “Who did Jesus say he was?”
Perhaps no one has put it better than C.S. Lewis, who famously wrote,
“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 a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool 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.”
Over the next seven weeks at Mars Hill Students, we are going to look at seven audacious, offensive, mind-blowing claims that Jesus made about himself as recorded in the Gospel of John, claims that a sane, good, moral person could not make. Throw in some live Q&A and this will be a series that students at Mars Hill—who have been empowered and sent onto the greatest mission in history—will want to invite friends, skeptics, and doubters along to “come and see.”
Schedule
- Week 1: “I Am the Door” (John 10:7–10)
- Week 2: “I Am the Good Shepherd” (John 10:11; Psalm 23)
- Week 3: “I Am the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25–26)
- Week 4: “I Am the Bread of Life” (John 6:35)
- Week 5: “I Am the Light of the World” (John 8:12)
- Week 6: “I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6)
- Week 7: “I Am the True Vine” (John 15:1–5)
If you are a junior high or high school student who’d like to join in the movement, either as a participant or as a leader of your peers, go to the Connect Desk at your local Mars Hill church to get in touch with your Students ministry lead there.
