The Freedom of Hard Work and Jesus

As a child I worked for farmers, baling hay, toting rocks, discing fields. It was hard, sweaty work. But whenever I was done, it felt like I had accomplished something. My mind didn’t wander, I was in the moment, I was ready to tackle whatever was next in life.

And Jesus. Honestly, it might sound simple, but before this quote from CS Lewis I had this thought and then realizing someone like him had the same thought brought it home for me.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘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 a 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 up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

CS Lewis – Mere Christianity

If you look at Jesus objectively, you are forced to make a choice. And CS Lewis lays out that choice better than anyone.