I’ve heard it from people countless times who said, “I’m ‘on the fence’ when it comes to believing in Jesus.”
Please, don’t you fall into the same trap. There is no fence. Either “you is, or you ain’t,” nothing in between.
There is no place to hide, procrastinate or delay when it comes to Jesus. His very presence forces all who behold Him to decide about Him.
Like a great ocean liner ploughing through the waves and parting the waters, Jesus causes people to move either to the left or to the right as He moves through the crowds. They don’t get to just stand there without being affected.
Belief in Christ is a two-position switch.
Saving faith in Jesus can be likened to a two-position light “switch,” with no neutral. It is either on or off. Jesus made that clear in Matthew 12:30 when He said, “… the one who is not with Me is against Me; and the one who does not gather with Me scatters.”
Before I came to faith in Christ, I would have described myself as “on the fence,” truly believing that it was a perfectly reasonable, safe, even sensible position to hold until all “the facts” were in, until I really had time to think about it.
Truth is, I would never have “got around to it” at all had God not broken into my consciousness and revealed the fallacy of my thinking, and convinced me of the clear and present danger that I was in. For me, His ministry of “grace” began by terrifying me out of my wits.
As any good doctor knows, sometimes they must make their patients uncomfortable and wake them out of their complacency, before any talk of treatment can begin. That is one reason Jesus stated, in Matthew 10:33-35, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
His message was no sugar-daddy, feel good concoction of platitudes. A sword is the last thing modern-day “name-it-and-claim-it” prosperity ministers would wield when trying to draw a paying crowd.
Yet Jesus did, unafraid as He was of the approval or disapproval of His audiences.
Lately, I have been following the splendid video series, The Chosen. It brilliantly portrays an “on the ground,” day-to-day perspective of the Gospels as seen through the eyes of the apostles.
I am particularly impressed by their skillful representation of various people’s reactions to Jesus’ manifestly miraculous events. They demonstrate that believing/faith is not a matter of mere information and knowledge, but of willful decisions made for or against Jesus regardless of the evidence.
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah saw this coming for the Israelites centuries before Christ’s time, when he wrote in Isaiah 30:14-16:
“For this is what the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said: In repentance and rest you will be saved; In quietness and trust is your strength; But you were not willing.”
It’s the same today. It addresses something I was guilty of myself. I didn’t WANT this Jesus stuff to be true because if so, the implications on my lifestyle would be unacceptable. It was much easier to just push it off. Isn’t that what the Americans did before Pearl Harbor?
For many “on the fencers,” Jesus Christ is that historically “inconvenient truth” that keeps cropping up despite the relentless attacks of so called “science” and our pervasively nontheistic culture.
Trouble is, a lot of “inconvenient facts” argue to the contrary.
According to the Pew Research Center, “Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people, according to a new Pew Research Center demographic analysis.”
Not bad for a handful of 20 something followers led by a penniless, “uneducated” itinerate preacher from the sticks who was publicly executed nineteen hundred years ago. What are the odds?
How About You?
Have you voted for or against Jesus? We obsess over national and local political elections, studying the candidates, vetting the issues and bills, and rightly so. But none of that will determine the destiny of your eternal soul. Yet we barely give the Lord Jesus Christ a thought — and He carries the universe on His shoulders.
Belief is not primarily an intellectual “thing,” it is a matter of the will in response to the revelation of God’s truth. In John 7:17, a marvelous promise was made by Jesus to authentic seekers of truth, “If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is of God, or I am speaking from Myself.”
If you really want to know, God WILL reveal it to you.
So, is that what YOU want?
— D.C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. A mechanical engineer and internet entrepreneur, he is the author of My Origin, My Destiny, a book focused on Christianity’s basic “value proposition.” Click here for more information, or contact him at don@peervalue.com. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.