Follow Me (I)

On Genuine Faith

"[There] is a broad religious road that is inviting and inclusive. This nice, comfortable, ever-so-crowded path is attractive and accomodating. The only thing that's required of you is a one-time decision for Christ, and you don't have to worry about his commands, his standards, or his glory after making that decision. You now have a ticket to heaven, and your sin, whether manifested in self-righteousness or self-indulgence, will be tolerated along the way. But this is not the way of Jesus. He beckons us down a hard road, and the word Jesus uses for 'hard' is associated in other parts of the Bible with pain, pressure, tribulation, and persecution. The way of Jesus is hard to follow, and it's hated by many." (10-11)

"When Jesus calls Nicodemus to believe in him, he is calling Nicodemus to be born again--to begin an entirely new life devoted to following him. Likewise, when the Philippian jailer believes in Christ, he knows that he is joining a community of Christians who are being beaten, flogged, and imprisoned for their faith. The cost of following Christ is clear. In the same way, Paul tells the Roman Christians that to believe in the saving resurrection of Jesus from the dead is to confess the sovereign lordship of Jesus over their lives. In each of these verses (and scores of others like them), belief in Jesus for salvation involves more than mere intellectual assent. After all, even demons 'believe' that Jesus is the crucified and resurrected Son of God. Such 'belief' clearly doesn't save, yet such 'belief' is common across the world today. Just about every intoxicated person I meet on the street says he 'believes' in Jesus. Scores of people... around the world, including some Hindus, animists, and Muslims, profess some level of 'belief' in Jesus. All kinds of halfhearted, world-loving church attenders confess 'belief' in Christ." (15)

On Matt 7:21. "Jesus is not saying that our works are the basis of our salvation. The grace of God is the only basis of our salvation... But in our rush to defend grace, we cannot overlook the obvious in what Jesus is saying here (and in many other places as well): only those who are obedient to the words of Christ will enter the Kingdom of Christ. If our lives do not reflect the fruit of following Jesus, then we are foolish to think that we are actually followers of Jesus in the first place." (16)

"Spiritual deception is dangerous--and damning. Any one of us can fool ourselves. We are sinful creatures, biased in our own favor, prone to assume that we are something when we are not. The Bible says that the god of this world (Satan) is blinding the minds of unbelievers to keep them from knowing Christ. Couldn't it be that one of the ways the devil is doing this is by deceiving people into believing they are Christians when they are not?" (18)

"When we think of worshiping idols and false gods, we often picture Asian people buying carved images of wood, stone, or gold or African tribes performing ritualistic dances around burning sacrifices. But we don't consider the American man looking at pornographic pictures online or watching ungodly television shows and movies. We don't think about the American woman incessantly shopping for more possessions or obsessively consumed with the way she looks. We don't take into account men and women in the Western world constantly enamored with money and blindly engulfed in materialism. We hardly even think about our busy efforts to climb the corporate ladder, our incessant worship of sports, our temper when things don't go our way, our worries that things won't go our way, our overeating, our excesses, and all sorts of other worldly indulgences. Maybe most dangerous of all, we overlook the spiritual self-achievement and religious self-righteousness that prevent scores of us from ever recognizing our need for Christ. We can't fathom a Christian on the other side of the world believing that a wooden god can save them, but we have no problem believing that religion, money, possessions, food, fame, sex, sports, status, and success can satisfy us. Do we actually think that we have fewer idols to let go of in our repentance?" (22-23)

"For every Christian in every culture, repentance is necessary. This doesn't mean that when people become Christians, they suddenly become perfect and never have any struggles with sin again. But this does mean that when we become followers of Jesus, we make a decided break with an old way of living and take a decisive turn to a new way of life. We literally die to our sin and to ourselves--our self-centeredness, self-consumption, self-righteousness, self-indulgence, self-effort, and self-exaltation. In the words of Paul, we 'have been crucified with Christ and [we] no longer live, but Christ lives in [us].'" (23)

On the Human Condition

"In our sin, we have alienated ourselves from God and are hostile toward him. We are slaves to our sin and dominated by Satan. We love darkness and hate light. We live in impurity and wickedness. Our minds are depraved, blinded to the truth by the god of this world. Our desires are disordered, our hearts are sinful, and the wicked passions of our flesh wage war against our souls. Our bodies are defiled. We are morally evil and spiritually sick." (33)

"Our problem is not simply that we have made some bad decisions. Our problem is not just that we've messed up. Our problem is that we are--at the very core of our being--rebels against God, and we are utterly unable to turn to him. This is what the Bible means when it says we are dead in sin. When Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians and said, 'You were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live,' he meant that they were completely dead. Not partially dead. Not almost dead. Not halfway dead. Not kind of dead. Completely dead." (34)

"[Our] sin is not something that exists outside of us. Sin is ingrained into the core of our being. We don't just sin; we exist as sinners. So when Jesus went to the cross to die, he was not just taking the payment of sin, as if it were separate from us. He was not just dying for our lusting or our lying or our cheating or our other sins. Instead, he was paying the price that was due us as sinners. He was dying for us, in our place, as our substitute... When Jesus was pulverized under the weight of God's wrath on the cross, he was experiencing what you and I deserve to experience. He was enduring the full punishment due you and me as sinners." (43)

"The only reason we can seek Christ in our sinfulness is because Christ has sought us as our Savior. The glory of the gospel is that the God of the universe reaches beyond the hardness of our hearts, overcoming our selfish resistance and sinful rebellion, and he saves us from ourselves. Such mercy magnifies God's pursuit of us and crucifies our pride before him." (47)