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"He Is, I'm Not" - Preaching at Harderwyk - John 8:42-58 - February 21, 2021

Resources For "He Is, I'm Not" Series From Each Harderwyk Preacher

Pastor Aaron VanDerVeen - Watershed Preacher

Tim Keller - The Reason for God - “Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have... A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.”

NT Wright - John for Everyone "Jesus’ basic charge against them [religious leaders] is that they are trying to kill him; that this shows that they do not know the God whom he knows as his father; and that this in turn shows that their boast to be children of Abraham is spurious. When someone is bent upon murder, they are thereby disclaiming descent from the true God, and are silently claiming instead that they belong to the forces of darkness. However we imagine the devil, it is clear that there is a force which opposes God and his good creation, which drives people to commit acts of destruction and murder, and which regularly invents lies—the ‘religious’ ones are often the most effective—to excuse such action, and even to make it appear noble and right. There are plenty of these in today’s world, including (alas) several that call themselves Christian. If we want to see where this passage applies most obviously to today’s world this is where we should start." 

Heavenward - Daily Prayer Blog with Scotty Smith - CLICK HERE to learn about different ways to get the daily prayers of Scotty Smith.


Pastor Bill Lindner - Celebration & Fusion Preacher

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions .  .  .  Ideology—that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.”

CS Lewis - Mere ChristianityI 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 patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. 

Is C.S. Lewis's Liar-Lord-or-Lunatic Argument Unsound? Justin Taylor on TheGospelCoalition.org - CLICK HERE for a 2016 posting with helpful explanation, background and reflection on the classic statement above.

C.S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

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