1John 2:23 - What if I told you that I am a poached egg...?

"Every [one] denying the Son neither has the Father, the [one] confessing the Son also has the Father."

-The ultimate litmus test, this then.  Jesus - what say you?  Who is He?  Who is He to you?  Do you know Him?  Do you know who He is?  John puts is rather succinctly - if you deny Jesus, if you agree with that spirit of antichrist and say that He is NOT the Son of God, the One God sent to bring us back to Him, if you are not IN Him, if you don’t have Him, then you don’t have the Father either.  It's a package deal, people.  If, however, I am confessing the Son, if I am agreeing with what God’s Word says about Him, with what He says about Himself, then I also have the Father.  It really quite simple.  It doesn’t require some advanced degree.  It is not necessary to understand Greek or Hebrew.  It’s not necessary to know where you stand on dispensations or Calvin vs Arminius.  It all comes down to one point...

-So then, it all begins with Jesus.  You start with Him, again because He is the Way.  He is the only Way back to God.  His is the only Name given under heaven by which we can be saved from eternal separation from God.  There is no other.  There are not many ways to God, as some insist, many paths to the same goal.  Jesus said it quite plainly.  He said, "I am the Way... no one comes to the Father BUT THRU ME" (Jn 14.6).  So that’s what He said.  The question then becomes, what do I say about what He said?  That is THE question, for each of us, the question of questions.  Jesus - what say you?

I love how C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity: 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say 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 the 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.”