Quotes about Jesus

Our example in this is the ultimate Servant Jesus, who came to serve but graciously accepted the service of others—people like His hosts Mary and Martha, the use of the colt He rode into Jerusalem, and others.

As Jesus dealt with sin's cause rather than effect, so the spiritual leader should adopt the same method in prayer.

As far as we have any historical information on the subject, the public history of Jesus began when he was about thirty years old (Luke 3.23), with John the Baptist.

Every historian, whether he is a Christian or not, ought to take account of this strange fact—that a certain Jesus, a man who lived in the first century in Palestine, was actually convinced, as He looked out upon the men who thronged about Him, that He would one day sit on the judgment-seat of God and be their judge and the judge and ruler of all the world.

At that point the enemies saw clear. You may accept the lofty claims of Jesus. You may take Him as very God. Or else you must reject Him as a miserable, deluded enthusiast. There is really no middle ground. Jesus refuses to be pressed into the mould of a mere religious teacher.

The assertion is often made, indeed, that Jesus kept His own Person out of His gospel, and came forward merely as the supreme prophet of God. That assertion lies at the very root of the modern liberal conception of the life of Christ. But common as it is, it is radically false.

According to all the four Gospels, and according to all the supposed sources which modern criticism has tried to detect back of the four Gospels, Jesus put himself into his gospel; the gospel of Jesus was also a gospel about Jesus; the gospel that he preached was also a gospel that offered him as Savior. He did not say merely: "Have faith in God like the faith that I have in God," but he said: "Have faith in me.

The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example for faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.

The very basis of the religion of Jesus was a triumphant belief in the real existence of a personal God. And without that belief no type of religion can rightly appeal to Jesus to-day. Jesus was a theist, and rational theism is at the basis of Christianity.

We shall never have vital contact with Jesus if we attend to His person and neglect the message; for it is the message which makes Him ours.

The truth is that if Jesus be merely an example, He is not a worthy example; for He claimed to be far more.

According to modern liberalism, in other words, Jesus was the Founder of Christianity because He was the first Christian, and Christianity consists in maintenance of the religious life which Jesus instituted.