Jesus died for your sins

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Imagine you are totally new to Christianity and Catholicism. A Christian acquaintance is trying to introduce, explain and evangelise to you, the faith.
They say:
“God sent His only Son you know. His only Son Jesus, to die for your sins.”
How would you react?
I’ve often reflected that this is a very difficult concept to fully embrace and comprehend. Why? Why did he die for my sins? I didn’t ask Him to? I don’t see the connection. It is not necessarily logical. A creator sends His son to die for everyone’s sins including mine? What ?
So I don’t think it is necessarily a good introduction to Christianity. And it can be a kind of emotional blackmail. “Jesus died for your sins. You owe Him. Whatya going to do about it?”
So I can understand why some people would be turned off the faith.
 
Only if they believe they are perfect and never sin.
I think most people would consider it the “Good News”
 
Some kind of detailed preamble needed leading up to “Jesus died for your sins.” Mentioning it too soon would puzzle me as a potential new believer. IMO that is. 🙂
 
GaryM said:
This article is a little deep for an initial encounter, but provides a good foundation and introduction to the Kerygma, or Proclamtion of the Gospel.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the link which I read. I’d like to read his next article which explains HOW to explain the Kerygma to new believers. Just pasted this part which I think is important.
As evangelizers, we must first know the kerygma if we are going to effectively communicate it to others. Unfortunately, for many Catholics the kerygma remains an enigma. They may know certain aspects of it, “God loves you,” “Christ died for your sins,” but they are not able to confidently and systematically share this core message of salvation with others. I remain convinced that this is a challenge that must be addressed. It is not enough for pastors to tell their parishioners that they are called to evangelize. They need to teach them how to evangelize.
 
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The “how do you actually evangelize” question is a good one. There have been a number of good Catholic writings on this very topic. I think it all begins with telling a story of God’s Love affair with Man and why he created us, why He become Man, what He taught us in his Gospel and what did He tell us we must do to live in eternity with Him, and why did He willingly die on the cross for us? Sherry Weddell in her book “Forming Intentional Disciples” discusses establishing a bridge of trust with whomever you’re speaking with as one of the first steps, as that will open the door to listening and recieving your message. Kind regards!
 
GaryM said:
I think it all begins with telling a story of God’s Love affair with Man
Click to expand...
That’s it. Until we get a glimpse of God the Father’s love, the next part of the story about Jesus, will make little sense. Perhaps potential believers will get that glimpse from our style of communication with them.
 
Usually the problem I’ve found is that while people believe they do bad things, they don’t think they’re that bad. Why they’d be the sort of thing where you need someone to actually die for them and it’s not enough to just try to be a better person is going to be the big obstacle.
 
goodcatholic said:
Imagine you are totally new to Christianity and Catholicism. A Christian acquaintance is trying to introduce, explain and evangelise to you, the faith.
They say:
“God sent His only Son you know. His only Son Jesus, to die for your sins.”
How would you react?
I’ve often reflected that this is a very difficult concept to fully embrace and comprehend. Why? Why did he die for my sins? I didn’t ask Him to? I don’t see the connection. It is not necessarily logical. A creator sends His son to die for everyone’s sins including mine? What ?
So I don’t think it is necessarily a good introduction to Christianity. And it can be a kind of emotional blackmail. “Jesus died for your sins. You owe Him. Whatya going to do about it?”
So I can understand why some people would be turned off the faith.
Click to expand...
Well it is the truth. But I tend to agree. Using “he died for your sins” as an introduction to RCC (or Christianity for that manner) to someone not familiar with the account of Jesus’ life and mission, is a bit like using trigonometry to explain mathematics to a third grader trying to understand the multiplication tables (if they even teach that anymore in grade school)
“He died for your sins” takes a whole lot more explanation and reversion to more basic concepts of the relationship between God and Man, than the Passion, Death, and Resurrection account.
 
I didn’t really hear the full evangelism spiel until I was a teenager and I found the whole “Jesus died for your sins” part really disturbing. The reasons why are too many to go into, but it seems like a very cruel way of thinking about a merciful God.
 
Did you understand that the belief was in a merciful God who Himself suffered for the sins of mere creatures, or were you thinking of just some dude taking on the sins of the world?
 
I try to be open minded, so I’ve looked at it from both of those points and turned it over a good bit. Completely overlooking the general issues for me regarding Jesus being in some way God, neither position makes much sense to me and both are fundamentally alien concepts to the culture I grew up with. Under Islam, God is just in that no one can pay for another person’s sins - another can take the temporal consequences, but the spiritual crime can never be transferred or satisfied by any other person than the one who committed it - but then God is merciful in that He provides routes for individuals to atone for their own sins if they sincerely wish to. So, the idea of such a sacrifice being necessary would have troubling implications for me regarding the nature of God no matter how it’s sliced.
 
So…how does that tie in to ie Jewish sacrifices?

Or was the topic just evaded completely, since Old Testament and New Testament are considered inferior to Qur’an?

But yes, it can be quite a shock. In fact, although we get used to it, we forget how quite different and worldview changing, nay, shattering, the good news of Jesus Christ is.
 
The idea of Jesus (or any other person for that matter) having to be tortured to death so that YHWH would be able to forgive mankind’s sins is basically illogical. In the first place Jesus demonstrated that He had the power and the right to forgive sins. So why would He have to undergo death by torture to accomplish that?

Furthermore, I believe that YHWH is just, and the idea that one person must be tortured for another person’s sins to be forgiven doesn’t fit in with that assumption.

In my opinion, Jesus’ crucifixion is His example to us as to the extreme’s that YHWH expects us to go in following His Laws of trusting Him and loving our neighbors. Jesus had the power to eliminate His torturers at any time, but He chose not to do that. He demonstrated how to trust in YHWH and turn the other cheek. Mankind must learn to follow this example.

Failing to learn from Jesus’ ordeal, we are condemned to learn the hard way. The natural outcome of mankind’s propensity towards violence is global nuclear war, and this terrible lesson rushes at the world now like a runaway freight train. Unilateral nuclear disarmament would save us from this horror, but, being unwilling to trust YHWH as Jesus did, we will not chose this path.
 
Jesus didn’t die to change God’s mind about torturing man for eternity.

Jesus died to change man’s mind about God.

God sent his son while we were yet sinners and Jesus from the cross said, “father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Jesus was speaking about humankind, not just those who put him to death.

The joy of the Gospel is about learning about God’s mercy and live, through Jesus Christ,

As Jesus said, “I did not come to condemn the world.”

Jim
 
Well, the Torah is considered a corruption of the message just as Muslim’s view the Bible as a corruption, so the degree to which blood sacrifice is required is usually explained as being the result of the text being imperfectly preserved or interpreted through time. There’s only one instance of sacrifice in Islam and the sacrifice of Isaac/Ismail story is quite different. Some interpretations have it that it was a test of the two’s submission to God, but also a way of finally ramming home the horror of blood sacrifice, which was a common practice among the surrounding pagans, and setting Ibrahim and his descendants apart from that.
 
According to the great sage of Islam, Mirzah Husayn Ali, the Holy Scriptures are not corrupted. Jewish and Christian interpretation of them may be imperfect, but the Scriptures themselves are not corrupted.
 
I’d rather not debate about it, thanks, especially since that’s not what this thread is for. I’m only speaking from my particular slice and angle of the Muslim world.
 
OK. I agree in general with your perspective. TY for relating it.
 
Thats the problem with our society now, for the first time since christianity was introduced centuries ago we have a generation of which the majority has absolutely no idea who Jesus is. I had a gf a while ago, grew up here in Rotterdam, probably the most un-christian place in europe. For her Jesus was something like Spiderman or Super Mario. And exactly, how can you start? ‘did you know you can reach heaven because a jew was killed in Jerusalem 2000 years ago for you?’ tough one
 
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