The Man from Jordan

I flew back to Ft. Worth on Monday morning. I got placed on this small little jet 3 seats wide. My seat mate was an elderly man from Jordan. He had lived most of his life in Texas, but had retained his thick Middle Eastern accent. This encounter was God ordained. We talked for 2 out of the 3 hours about Christianity. He is not a Christian, but wants to learn about it. Every possible topic that could have come up in an evangelistic conversation (which is what it was, it wasn’t an argument, just a conversation) did come up. This man is wise and yet open. He simply doesn’t see why it has to be Jesus. He is comfortable with the fact that he is a moral man and his faith rests in Civil law, the Constitution and government. He sees Christianity as a good thing, in that it established civility in people and though he believes Christ really lived, civil law was his only purpose, lowering him to prophetic or “good man” status.
This man shared all of what he thought with me, and I with him. I am not discouraged. It was a great conversation and I pray that this man would see from the life of a child that Christ is so much more.
I was reading in Romans 3 this morning and this is what God showed me:

We are justified through faith in the death of Christ Jesus. We uphold the law through faith in the life of Christ Jesus. This man on the plane asked me, “Why does it have to be Christ?” This is the answer. The answer is found not simply in the life of a good man (like the basis of most other religions) and its not found simply in the martyrdom of one man (if this was the case Jesus would have no need to live a full life on earth, he would have just come and died). It has to be Jesus. He is the WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE. The WAY he lived out his life, revealing to us the TRUTH about the way things are and granting us LIFE through his death