Page 5 - Of Course You Can Walk On Water - eBook

continually walks on water.

What is Christianity all about, anyway? What is its purpose?

Basically, its purpose is twofold: First, to vindicate the character of God (exemplified in
His Ten Words) and, second, to restore man to his Edenic condition, which is to reflect
that character.

This was the reason that Christ came to this world. It is of the utmost significance that the
first words spoken of Jesus in the New Testament are: " 'You shall call his name Jesus, for
he will save his people from their sins'" (Matt. 1 :21).

Have we gone deep enough in our understanding of sin? Sin is a disease that has
permeated every area of the human soul.

Various approaches are made to the sin problem in the church. One is to treat it
superficially, dealing with the symptoms while ignoring the real issue because we don't

know how to handle it.

Another approach is to say that man is so elementally sinful that we can do little else than
deal with the symptoms. We must keep on knocking off the bitter fruit, and hacking rather
ineffectually with our impotent pocket knives at the stubborn root. This may result in
some small improvements, but the source remains. The fruit keeps on growing.

John the Baptist, heralding Christ, stated, "'Now the ax is laid to the root of the trees'"
(Matt. 3: 10).

"We may pick the leaves from a tree as often as we please, but this will not cause the tree
to die; the next season the leaves will come out again as thick as before. But strike the ax
at the root of the tree, and not only will the leaves fall off of themselves, but the tree will
die." -My Life Today, p. 265.

Jesus always went for the source. The root must be killed, He said. Whenever He talked
about sin, He labored to get this idea across to His hearers.

It is interesting to note that it is in Matthew, where Jesus is announced as coming to save

His people from their sins, that He is most frequently quoted in defining sin, and this
mainly in His Sermon on the Mount.

Among the Jews of Jesus' time the Pharisee was the model as a holy man. (That this was
so illustrates how far the Jews had drifted from the Old Testament ideal.) The Pharisees

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