Saying You Are a Christian is Easy

Saying you are a Christian is easy.

It is easy because you didn’t do anything to make it happen. Not one thing.

God, through His Son, did it all. Every single bit of it.

Christians are saved by grace through faith in Jesus. The grace comes through Jesus. Faith is a gift of God through Jesus. Jesus is Jesus. So the saving that happens is all done by God through His Son.

Christians are saved by Jesus through Jesus in Jesus.

So it is very easy to say you are a Christian. Sure, sometimes Christians get it wrong when they say they ‘found Jesus.’ No, Jesus found you.
Or sometimes when they say they gave their lives to Jesus. No, Jesus allowed you to understand your weakness and the need for a Savior and He is the one who gave you the ability to understand and the ability to turn your life over to Him.

Jesus did it all. So it is very easy to say you are a Christian because you had nothing to do with it. It is all about Jesus. He did it all and that is why He is worthy of endless praise.

Living the Christian life – not so easy. We have all read the Bible and have been convicted during different times, wondering why we don’t love more, or give more, or serve more, or still struggle with the old nature that Jesus took away from us. So while saying you are a Christian is easy, living the Christian life out, as described in the Bible, is not as easy…and maybe it is because we expect the ‘living out’ part to be as easy as the salvation that we obtained through Jesus and because of this we don’t work at it like we should.

The Bible tells us to die to ourselves. The Bible tells us to put to death the old nature. The Bible talks about spiritual battles and struggles that we must undergo to be sanctified and transformed. Is it possible that we as Christians are under the impression that this sanctification will simply happen the same way our salvation did?

Dying to ourselves, putting to death old natures, being involved in spiritual battles is not a passive endeavor. It requires our participation. It requires sacrifices on our part. It requires us taking up our cross and dying to ourselves each and every day.

Now don’t get confused. We aren’t battling, we aren’t praying, we aren’t reading our Bibles, we aren’t worshipping, we aren’t serving others, we aren’t telling others about Jesus to gain anything…our salvation was given to us as a gift entirely by the work of Jesus…we are doing these things as a result of our salvation to be sanctified and transformed.

Our obedience, our battles, our working through our sanctification is a result of our salvation, not a requirement of it.

Put that in your theological pipe and smoke it…