Grace.

Earlier today I was cruising through FB when I came across a post from one of my Muslim friends. Yes, actually, I do have those. My friends' post was claiming that Jesus is mentioned in the Quran on several occasions and that Muslim's view him as a great prophet. Okay, cool, I've heard that before. Recently we watched a video in my Sunday School class called "The Case for Faith." In this video, it talks about how Muslims view Jesus as a great prophet but not the Son of God, but if you think about it, it really makes no sense. Jesus openly proclaims to be the Son of God on several different occasions. But Muslims believe that Allah is the ONLY GOD. So someone please explain to me how Muslims still consider Jesus to be a great prophet even though, according to their belief system, he lies about being the Son of God. In the Muslim culture, Jesus proclaiming to be the Son of God should discredit all of his teachings, right? So why are they still acknowledging all of his other teachings, except that whole Son of God thing? Muslims should not think of him as a great prophet. They should think of him as a liar or a lunatic, quite frankly. IDK, just a thought that doesn't make sense to me.
I absolutely love studying other religions. I love comparing and contrasting the different beliefs and cultures that go along with religion. I love that every study I do comes back to Christianity being the only way, JESUS being the only way. The thing that really gets me is grace. GRACE. No other religion on earth preaches grace. A large majority of the religions believe that you can work your way to heaven. But Christianity is different. Christianity is the only religion on earth where God says, "You guys will never be good enough to work your way to me, so I'm going to make a different way. Here's Jesus. He's the only way to get to me. He's the only way to get to heaven. He's it. He's grace." No other religion on earth does that. Can you imagine how crazy it sounded to the early Christians? "What? You mean we don't have to kill and sacrifice animals anymore when we sin? Jesus covered it all? This is too good to be true." YES, it is! Grace is supposed to sound too good to be true. Grace is supposed to get your attention. Grace is different. Grace is new. Grace laughs in the face of the enemy who tells you that you can't work your way to heaven, that you'll never be good enough, that you should give up and accept your lost fate. Grace says, " there's no need to fight, you don't have to struggle, I paid the price, I did the hard part, just come to me." It's crazy. It's beautiful. It's love. It's GRACE.