Ouch.
This is the great fear of many a believer. We read Jesus’ words that narrow is the gate
that leads to life and few there are who find it . . . and we fear that we
aren’t one of the few. Many books have
been written to reassure people of their salvation. And that’s all well and good, I suppose. But I suspect there is more need these days
to shake up those who should not be assured, because I fear there are a
lot of us.
A huge number of people reject
Christianity not because of its tenets but because of the lives of those who
claim to hold to its tenets. Folks look
at “Christians” and don’t want to be one of those. I wish those folks would understand this
Guinness quote – that those “Christians” turning them off to the faith are
actually atheists unawares. They may
claim Christ with their lips, but they walk atheism with their feet.
That may sound harsh, but understand that I direct the
harshness to myself as well. My heart is increasingly heavy about CINOs – Christians In Name Only. Christianity seems to be the default to check
in the Religion box around here. A lot
of Americans think of themselves as Christians just because they grew up in
America, and their parents went to church, and they go at Christmas and Easter,
and they have a Bible . . . somewhere . . .
Of the masses of people who will be sitting in Christian
worship services this coming Sunday morning, I fear that the vast majority are
not on that road to the narrow gate.
They are happy to have Jesus as their Savior, but have no real intention
of making him their Lord. They love the
god that they have created in their mind -- who gives them good things, smiles
and forgives all their foibles, rushes in to save the day when life gets hard .
. . but they don’t want much to do with
the real God – who actually has expectations of them and their time here on earth.
Even those of us who are very sincere in our desire to
worship and serve Christ, if we really looked at our lives closely, don’t act
on what we say we believe. We live
essentially like the rest of the world – we just vote Republican and stick a
fish on our car. On a day to day basis,
we don’t act on our faith. We don’t
believe this stuff strongly enough to really risk much by it. We are atheists unawares.
This is about more than our eternal destiny . . . this is
about all we’re missing here on earth. I am come that they might have life, and
that they might have it more abundantly, Jesus says in John 10. But read the rest of that chapter carefully -- the promise only applies if Jesus is your Shepherd.
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