Jesus Is Everything

20 September 2026  Philippians 1:20-24,27

“For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”  (Philippians 1:21)     

Jews don’t talk about Jesus much. He is really only a topic for scholars and historians, and when they mention Him at all, they say little beyond that he was a heretical first century rabbi, whom some mistakenly called the Messiah. He got on the wrong side of the Romans over matters of politics, as a variety of other false messiahs did, and was executed for it. He didn’t bring universal peace, He didn’t rebuild the Temple, and so He was definitely not the Messiah. In short, Jesus was a fraud.

Muslims talk rather more about Jesus – in fact, the Quran mentions Jesus by name more than the Prophet Muhammad is mentioned by name. Jesus is considered one of five Muslim prophets, along with Noah, Abraham, Moses and Muhammad.

For Christians, Jesus is everything, or He is nothing. If He is anything other than everything, then Christians are indistinguishable from Jews who call Him a fraud, Muslims who consider His most serious claims to be utter lunacy, or atheists who do both.

Muslims believe Jesus was sent as the Messiah of the Jews, was certainly a healer, and the Gospel was to correct Jewish errors. But Muslims do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah for anyone other than the Jews. They completely reject the claim that He was divine, the Son of God, or a Savior, and they do not believe that Jesus was crucified, killed, or rose from the dead. In fact, anything beyond Jesus’ moral teaching in the New Testament is dismissed by Muslims as Christian crazy talk. In short, for Muslims Jesus is a kind of moral prophet, and anything else is just Christian insanity.

Atheists simply second the conclusions about Jesus of the Jews and the Muslims. Jesus is a fraud, or a moral teacher. Anything else is just nuts.

For St. Paul, however, Jesus was everything – “For me, to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). He is True God and True Man, Redeemer, Savior, the purpose and objective of life in this world, and Heaven is just more of Him forever.

For Christians, Jesus is everything, or He is nothing. If He is anything other than everything, then Christians are indistinguishable from Jews who call Him a fraud, Muslims who consider His most serious claims to be utter lunacy, or atheists who do both.

But none of this goes much beyond what C.S. Lewis said in his deservedly famous “trilemma”:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman, or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity, p. 52)

St. Paul saw the alternatives with crystal clarity, and said: “For me, to live is Christ.” Jesus is everything, or He is nothing. The next revival of Christianity in America will begin when a critical mass of us say the same thing.