One Solitary Life

A child is born in an obscure village. He is brought up in another obscure village. He works in a carpenter shop until he is thirty, and then for three brief years is an itinerant preacher, proclaiming a message and living a life. He never writes a book. He never holds an office. He never raises an army. He never has a family of his own. He never owns a home. He never goes to college. He never travels two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He gathers a little group of friends about him and teaches them his way of life. While still a young man the tide of popular feeling turns against him. One denies him; another betrays him. He is turned over to his enemies. He goes through the mockery of a trial; he is nailed to a cross between two thieves, and when dead is laid in a borrowed grave by the kindness of a friend.

Those are the facts of his human life. He rises from the dead. Today we look back across nineteen hundred years and ask, What kind of trail has he left across the centuries? When we try to sum up his influence, all the armies that ever marched, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned are absolutely picayune in their influence on mankind compared with that of this one solitary life...

I have read several diferent variations of the above writing, this isn't the one I'm most familiar with... but apparently it is the original. I chose it because it is the only one I could find that references the fact that Jesus rose again. I'd add the following for your consideration: Even those who do not believe in Jesus cannot escape being influenced by his story. For... art, literature and culture have been saturated with him literally and through semiotics and allegory.

How many songs... how many poems... how many books... how many paintings... how many movies... how many programmes while not explicitly being about him... have absorbed elements of Christ's story? Too many to tell!

Do you feel mediocre or insignificant? Do you come from humble backgrounds? Rejoice, that is how Jesus started and he changed the world forever. If you want to be a world changer... follow him.

Jesus is alive, but to truly experience him... you have to accept him... not just as an obscure and vague historical figure... but as the man who died for our sins and rose to reign as king and prepare a place for us.

He lives...