Many think that
Because of God’s grace
And his amazing forgiveness,
Believers don’t have to repent and grow
And learn and change and overcome ,
And that God adamantly chooses
To see them as if they had
Already done all of that
After which gratitude
Might actually prod
Them to grow a
Little bit here
And there.
But the way
I read the Bible,
His gracious forgiveness
Is given only to the ones who
Have already started to change.
It’s God’s good-faith gesture of hope
That we will continue to walk faithfully
In the Way and the Truth and the Life of Jesus
All our lives, surrendering our own wills
To the will of him who knows better.
In the one religion,
The only work required is
That God should change the way
He sees the people who ask to be saved.
And in the other, he insists that they repent and
Learn to live godly lives in this godless world,
As their own participation in his Life.
The one is about actual transformation,
While the other seems to be more
About make-believe.
These are two separate religions, both called Christianity. And most who take the name of Christian have got the two ideas somewhat mixed up, sometimes having the real-world commonsensical view that people ought to be responsible for themselves, but frequently shutting that view down with the more chimerical notion that God somehow exempts the Christian from all that. And they can’t seem to make up their minds, shifting first this way, and then that. Double-minded. Indecisive. Unwilling to go all out, and afraid that God and Jesus really meant what all they said about that.
“…those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”
Jesus. Luke 14:33b. Niv.
I imagine a man humbling himself, and asking permission to move into God’s house, yet supposing that he’ll be at liberty to ignore the house rules once he’s there. His notion is of a once-and-done humility/repentance, rather than humility/repentance as a way of life. Even having such a perfect model in Jesus, they find a way to imagine a religion in which they themselves don’t have to be self-responsible like Jesus was.
Naturally, they know better, for the realities of this world often remind us of the practical necessity of self-responsibility. The lesson is not a new one. Yet they hope like crazy that that lesson will be irrelevant to their religion. They want a once-and-done religious “conversion” experience, without the lifetime of learning and growing and submitting themselves to God’s will. And the way I see it, that’s a make-believe religion that only works if you can redact 99% of the Bible and just cherrypick a few verses out of context in order to spin them into a religion in which the Almighty God is so desperate to be loved that he’ll take mere lip service from people who are not sincere about following the example of the Man he sent here to show us how people ought to live.
They could understand these things now, of course, but they are not willing to read the whole Bible and to listen to it all―even as they tell themselves that God is actively leading them somehow through the indwelling of his Holy Spirit. It’s the same Spirit who was behind all the scriptures, but they are really hoping it will tell them something different from what it told those people back then. Something too good to be true. Something that does not require them to do anything in order to get everything―except to say the words, “Jesus is Lord” and to never say the words afterward, “Jesus is not Lord.”
That’s their chimerical idea of faithfulness to God, even as they regularly see real-world marriages fail because of irresponsible spouses that won’t actually live up to the vows they made. They desperately want to believe that the irresponsibility that won’t work in a marriage will work in a relationship with God. This is what they pay their preachers to tell them again and again.
