A Change of Heart

Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. To join, all you have to do is believe that Jesus died to pay the penalty for your sins and rose again. That's all the thief on the cross did and Jesus said that man would be in heaven with Him before the day was out. There is no need to make a pilgrimage to a certain city, keep from working on certain days, not eat certain things, fast during specified times, or any other religious rites found in other religions.

It is also the hardest religion in the world, for much the same reason. We're used to having to earn everything, especially love and acceptance. We choose our clothes carefully, try very hard to perform well at work, over-analyze our relationships, workout incessantly, and do other things to be seen as acceptable and likable. When we have earned someone else's love, it is an accomplishment.

Unfortunately, if it is an accomplishment, it is not love. Love, by definition, is given rather than earned because it doesn't depend on what it gets in return. It is self-sacrificial, patient, merciful, giving, forgiving, and ever-faithful.

Christianity requires only the belief I mentioned above, and yet that belief requires a change of heart, for to espouse Christianity is to deny yourself at your very core.

Here's what I mean: the root sin of the Bible wasn't really Eve eating the apple. It was Eve disobeying God, choosing herself instead of Him. At the root of all of our sins is a choice of ourselves instead of God. It is that which hinders our relationship with Him. Becoming a Christian is recognizing that you have been doing this and it is, at a much deeper level than you had ever realized (and maybe deeper still than you ever could), fundamentally wrong.

It is here where Christianity is different from all other religions. While all of them promise some form of after-life or next life, all such promises are both: A. Solely for your benefit and B. Based on your conduct. In other words, there is no grand plan for humanity since the beginning of time. There may be mercy, but it is either earned or (rarely) given arbitrarily. There are actions and rewards. That is all. The gods of other religions become little more than cosmic vending machines, doling out to each what they deserve for the deeds they've put in.

While Christianity does still have the law of sowing and reaping, the core of it is based in reaping what you could never sow. You reap an eternity with God, something that only a perfect life could earn, and you could never be perfect on your own. It is based on a gift, not a reward. It is because of this that it requires a change of heart.

If you seek God for only what God can give you, then you make God like the god of any other religion. You will try to earn things from Him, try to be good and help others out so that He'll owe you one, and do your best to not tick Him off. This bastardizes Christianity, because it takes it from the separate belief that it should be and puts it with all the other earned blessing beliefs out there.

As importantly, it bastardizes us as Christians because we are no longer children of God, but supplicant servants who too often pretend to be the masters. We take ourselves from our true place and put our selves in a lower one because we don't really believe the Gospel message. We go from begging God as slaves to demanding reasons for His inaction as though we control Him or have some sort of paycheck coming. In this regard, how can we honestly call ourselves Christians, if we pretend to worship God and yet do so in the same self-serving way every other religion does?