The last of the snow is gone. I just returned from the mailbox and noticed that the snowman Diann and I built has melted into oblivion with only a small pile of snow, a hat, scarf, carrot and two charcoal briquettes to mark the spot. Your letter was in today's mail and I'm already writing you back. How's that for promptness?

Considering that in my last letter I insisted on the existence of ultimate truth, I guess your question as to which truth I consider to be the greatest is a fair one. Actually, I didn't have to give much thought to what I would answer. It's the truth on which I'm building my entire life, my foundation, I suppose you could say. What is it? That Jesus Christ is God come to earth as a human being to save us from our sin and make us right with God.

Jesus Himself stated that He is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one gets to God except through Him. I'm convinced this is true. I've bet my life on it.

I know, a lot of people say that Jesus was a great religious teacher and a very moral man, but that there have been other great religious leaders such as Buddha, Muhammad, and Confucius, and that they founded equally good religions. The popular view today is that you can believe in Jesus and His teachings but not go to the extreme of believing He's the only way to God.

I encourage you to do a comparative study of these great religious leaders. Jesus is distinct in that He's the only one who claimed to be God. It was a primary focus of His teaching. In fact, His claim to be God was the official charge leveled against Him at His trial by the religious leaders of the day. So even His enemies recognized that He taught that He was one with the Heavenly Father: that He was God. Jesus also stated that He fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, had all authority, was sinless, and was the savior of the world. These teachings of Jesus are either true or false. If they're false, Christianity is a farce and should be forgotten. If these teachings are true, Jesus Christ deserves to be Lord and savior.

Those who believe that Jesus was a great teacher and moral leader but not the one and only way to God hold to an illogical view. His teachings simply don't allow for such a position.

One of my favorite authors is C.S. Lewis; I think I've mentioned him before. Lewis was a professor of medieval and renaissance literature at both Oxford and Cambridge -- no dummy by anyone's estimation. He was an atheist who found the evidence for Jesus so compelling that he became a believer. I encourage you to read his book, Mere Christianity. In it he wrote that when you take Jesus' teachings about Himself seriously, you have to come to one of three conclusions: that Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.

Was He a liar? Did He know He wasn't the Son of God, but got people to believe it? It's hard to imagine that Jesus was a liar. No one ever caught Him in a lie. In fact, almost everyone, including non-Christians, will admit that Jesus was a man of great integrity. No, it doesn't make any sense to call Christ a liar.

Was He a lunatic, believing Himself to be God when He really wasn’t? That's just as difficult to imagine. When you study His life and the way He responded to situations and people, you see a picture of a very emotionally healthy person. Again, even non-Christians will admit that Jesus was just about the healthiest specimen of a human being there's ever been.

That leaves one option -- that Jesus was who He said He was: Lord. We must either accept or reject Him on that basis. Jesus leaves us no middle ground to stand on.

Now that I've left you with such an important choice to make, I'm going to wrap this up. It's the middle of a sunny afternoon with the temperature in the 40s. Enough ice has melted on my pond that I can see the goldfish underneath. They're alive! I'm going to break up the ice so they can get some fresh oxygen in their water. I wonder if stale water smells as bad to fish as stale air does to us? Can fish smell? I know dead ones do!

A fellow seeker after truth,
Dave