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Jesus A modern English blending of the New Testament
Introduction Table of Contents
Chapters
Charles Templeton Home Brad Templeton Home Brad's Photo Pages
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Several accounts have been written about the beginnings
of our faith, each being an attempt to compile an accurate record from all
the facts passed on by eyewitnesses and disciples. And I - having made a
thorough examination of all evidence for some time now - decided to write
an orderly account of it all so that you may have before you the truth about
the things you have been told. - the introduction to the gospel according
to Luke. Jesus Christ is and always has been what God has to say to
mankind. He is eternal and he is God. All creation exists because of him.
He is life, and his life is a light to show us the way - a light that nothing
can extinguish. At a point in time, God sent a man named John to announce
that the light was then coming into the world. John was not himself that
light, he was the herald of its coming, so that through him everyone might
believe. Jesus came to the world, and though the world owed its existence
to him, it did not recognize him. He came to his own people and they did
not recognize him. He came to his own people and they did not welcome him.
But to those who did - those who put their faith in him - he gave the authority
to be members of God's family; not through ancestry or sexual passion or
choice but because they had been adopted by God. Jesus - God's communication - became a human being and lived
briefly among us. We actually saw his glory; the splendor of the only son
God ever fathered, the embodiment of all love and truth. When John announced
his coming he said, "He’s the one of whom I said, 'Here’s my successor; he
existed before I was born.’ ” We are, all of us, the beneficiaries of his kindness - bounty
heaped on bounty - because, although the Law came to us through Moses, love
and truth came to us through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but he has been revealed to us
by his only son, who has now returned to his side.
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