[I will find a link to this sermon and post it when I do.]

“Fear of hell will never change the fundamental structures of your heart.”

–Tim Keller, from a sermon on the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man

Though all around me shifts and moves,
Though my thoughts and acts accuse,
God will be faithful to His plan,
Righteous to His covenant,
To keep those He has redeemed,
To protect the weak and low-esteemed.
His promises cannot be broken.
He will fulfill what He has spoken.
So trust this God whose heart of grace
Redeems from every tribe and race
Those who others have condemned,
Those too weary to pretend,
Those who sense a soul-deep need
For this God of love, this love that bleeds.
So when your last hope has flown,
God’s shed blood will atone
And redeem all you have lost,
Freely offered at the high cost
Of the Lamb’s deadly wounds,
Of the cool of the empty tomb. 

May you know this shepherd King.
May your soul enraptured sing
Praises to Him who makes you whole.
May joy and peace flood your soul. 

God is righteous.
God is faithful.

So, a recurring question has come up in my life over the past month or so – a question often asked by folks who are truly searching and interested in the faith. A lunch-time conversation, a good deal of reading, and a month filled with prayer and reflection (on multiple fronts) has made a number of things clear to me, but most of all:

We, as Christians, make it a whole lot harder than it should be.

[Now, while I've done the heavy lifting in the background - and I'll be willing to discuss this, and cite Scripture, in the comments - I'd like to keep this at a high, readable level, without all of the breaks, and caveats, and cut/paste efforts from BibleGateway. Yes, these are necessary for understanding what goes on "behind the curtain", but they make simple conversation pretty stilted.]

Depending on our traditions, we’ve got confirmation classes, the Roman Road, The Way of the Master, and all sorts of other systematic methodologies, which lay out the “steps required for Salvation”. But when I open the Gospels, and read the words of Jesus and his Apostles, it seems a whole lot simpler than this. In fact, it seems that we miss the fact that “becoming a Christian” is the first step in a lifelong journey, and that we lose faith in God and His grace by trying to hold off Step 1 until we’re satisfied that someone is on the right road.

And that’s not the Gospel.

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