4/29/14 Andrew click for video 22
Hundreds
of conversations with Christians and/or churchgoers in general about their
beliefs, like the one in this video with a young man named Andrew, have
convinced me that by far the most common false belief is that we can earn a
right relationship with God and obtain salvation by our good works or simply by
being “good people”. It is this idea
that that keeps many people from a saving faith relationship with Jesus, or
that distracts born-again believers from Jesus as their first love and keeps
them from being able to share the Gospel with others. It seems to me something like gravity,
constantly pulling us down into this default belief that keeps trying to
replace true faith in Jesus. Our human
pride constantly wants us to depend on ourselves rather than God, and/or to
compare ourselves with others and believe that somehow we are better than
them. In this video, Andrew, 22, acknowledged
his sin and told me he has put his faith in Christ for salvation, yet when I
asked him what would be the difference between someone who ends up in heaven
and someone who ends up in hell on judgment day, he pointed to his good heart. “So are you saying you are a better person
than they are?” I asked this because,
bottom line, if we believe we are saved because of our goodness we are
basically saying we deserve heaven but other people don’t. We become like Pharisees, the religious
teachers who looked down their noses at others, the same religious teachers
whom Jesus exclusively criticized. My
conversation with Andrew made me believe he actually has put his faith in
Jesus, but has become sidetracked by the false belief in one’s goodness or good
works. But if we could get to heaven by
our goodness or good works, why did Jesus die on the cross? Toward the end of our conversation, Andrew
told me the real reason he had been sitting in that coffeeshop. He had journeyed from a northern suburb of
Chicago back to his old neighborhood, and was now sitting in Starbucks, trying
to work up the nerve to go talk to his younger brother, Eric, 18, about the
Lord. I’m sure part of that nervousness
was a confusion about just exactly what the Gospel is and how to communicate it. We who are believers can easily become
confused in the fog of worldly ideas that surround us. Paul wrote about this confusion in the first
chapter of his letter to the church in Galatia – “I am astonished that you are
so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and
are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all.” Let us not turn the Gospel of grace into a “gospel”
of works!
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