Not a terribly deep thought today but an important one. I often wonder about those of us who call ourselves “Christians,” how many of us really believe? I don't even really mean that in the sense of how many of us are truly saved (although that's connected to it); I mean do you treat your faith as a real thing. When I say that I'm a Christian what I 'mean' is that I believe in a God who really exists and with whom I have a relationship. I believe in God who exists in one essence but in three persons whom we know as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. I believe in angels and demons and the souls of men. I believe that beyond this physical reality is a whole spiritual realm that goes unseen by us but is in reality far more important than what we do see. I believe that reality as we know it was created in a specific moment not too long ago and will cease to be, replaced by something far better, at a predetermined time in the near (according to God's reckoning) future. I believe all of this and more.
This is important to point out because there are quite a few people who also claim to be Christians and by extension claim to believe all these things but who don't live as though they do. You say that you believe in God but you don't work toward aligning your life with Him. You say that you believe in His moral law but continue to fudge the rules and step close to and over the line. We all do so much that is really quite contradictory to our “belief.” What I'm really asking is do you just say that you believe, or do you believe but don't think about it much, or do you not really believe but you find your life more fulfilled when it has a lovely spiritual wrapping on it? In the words of the The Truth Project (which I highly recommend), “Do you believe that what you believe is really real?”
If you do, then that has consequences. You cannot live as the world would say, with a private spiritual life that doesn't effect your public actions. God is real and He is watching! I cannot pray at home but not in the square, I cannot make decisions in a moral vacuum, I cannot go against the Word that He has given to me, I CANNOT! These are not fairy tales we were told as children, nor stories we use to comfort us in our older days; we carry in our hearts and in our heads and in the pages of sacred Scripture the very words of God! We must not place them to the side and deal with them as a trivial thing. We must be affected by them, we must be wholly transformed by them!
I have heard it said that it is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but that Christianity has been found difficult and left untried. God does not propose to us an easy life, He requires of us a hard life of struggle followed by an eternity of reward! Some will have a harder time of it than others but we will all face problems. In the light of eternity however, all our troubles will seem like such a minor thing. Don't be fooled or mislead into an “easy believe-ism” mentality. Let God's Word guide you and change you. What can we do but listen, when we hear the truth?
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