Category: The Duty of a Man

I was raised Roman Catholic, served as an altar boy, and attended parochial school through sixth grade. But at home, we never talked about God or prayed as a family (other than a rote mealtime blessing). Therefore, when I entered adolescence and public school junior high, I easily embraced the secular worldview of my (mostly Protestant) classmates because it fit with the secular way our family lived at home. At that point, peer pressure set in and I soon wriggled out of churchgoing altogether, effectively becoming an agnostic from age 13 onward.

At a Crossroads

In a hurry to be an adult, I graduated from college and got married a week later to my high school sweetheart when we were 20. By my mid-20’s, I reached an occupational crossroads, facing one of those career-path decisions that, once made, could not be easily reversed. But I just couldn’t make up my mind. I became so exasperated with my inability to make a decision that in desperation…and much to my surprise…I prayed. I recall looking upward and saying something like, “God, if You’re even there, what do You want me to do with my life?” I barely gave that prayer another thought in the days that followed. But in the weeks that followed, a series of events led to my receiving the beginning of an answer – a beginning I wasn’t expecting.

At a Cross

Within weeks of my agnostic “prayer,” I was having a business lunch with a fellow who told me even before the salad had arrived that he had “accepted Jesus Christ” as his “personal Lord and Savior.” I immediately recoiled at the “Jesus talk” and finished the meal as quickly as common courtesy allowed. However, this fellow subsequently found my office and had the nerve to drop off evangelistic books for me to read! Being thoroughly secular, I had energetically avoided people who behaved this way; but in this case I decided to take the challenge. That is, I would read the Bible for myself…and use it to refute his arguments.

Reading the Bible was neither a Roman Catholic nor a secular thing to do, but I was confident that it would prove my thesis: that God could not be known as well as this fellow and his books were claiming to know Him. Only that’s not what happened. The Bible – especially the New Testament – turned out to be coherent, plausible…and persuasive. I was captivated by what I learned of Jesus. Of course, I had heard bits and pieces of the Bible repeatedly in my Catholic years…but those pieces never came together until I began reading them in context.

This was the beginning of my exposure to learning about Jesus Christ directly from the Bible instead of from a church. The year was 1978. I had been born in 1951. This encounter with the historical truth about Jesus was an unexpected beginning of the answer to my question: “What do You want me to do with my life?” The answer, as it turned out, was way more profound than the sort of career advice I had been seeking. It took me decades to fully absorb it, but I can simplify it for you in this little book.

At a Loss

I’m going to show you how Jesus Christ, because he speaks for God, has the right – the exclusive right – to define the duty of every single one of us. “Us” means Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and whatever other division of human beings you can think of. If you think these sorts of divisions matter, you don’t really understand him.

But why is this book even necessary? Why are we in the dark about a name so well known? It’s simple: we’re at a loss to talk about Jesus because we’ve lost track of him.