I am sure there are people reading my most recent postings and thinking I am buying into a modern easy-believism. Just believe in Jesus. That is all there is to being saved, to being a Christian. Easy-believism or not, I firmly believe it.
One day riding a long distance bus between Missouri and North Carolina, I sat next to this fellow teenager. We got to talking. I shared that I was a Christian and he said he was, too. He pulled out a cigarette – this was back before antismoking campaigns. I probed him a bit on his response, not because he was smoking, but because I wanted to make sure he understood what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.
An older woman sitting across the aisle from us suddenly went ballistic (this was the Bible Belt). A stranger to both of us, she challenged the boy: “You’ve gone down the aisle at church, right? You’ve been baptized, right?” Both to which he quickly agreed, either because he really had done so or because he was afraid to answer any other way.
“Well, then,” she said, “that settles it. You’re a Christian.” End of discussion.
This kind of thinking is what people fear in what they call easy-believism. I know, because I’ve preached against it and used this very story as Example Number 1. And I still believe that something WAS very wrong with that woman’s response.
According to James in the New Testament, even the demons believe – and tremble. Even the demons believe there is one God, he wrote. He was talking about how you can’t have faith without deeds to prove it. The demons believe and are not saved. So what do they believe? They believe that there is one God. They believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. But this is not saving faith. It is intellectual ascent, to the extent that it can be said that demons have intellects.
So don’t we run the risk of folks getting off easy if we tell them that there’s nothing more to being saved than believing in Jesus? No, because that is the heart of our very powerful Gospel. One of my favorite expressions during the Cold War years was “Just because Communists brush their teeth is no reason for us to stop (brushing our teeth).” Now having close friends who are members of the Communist Party (is McCarthy still around?), I can honestly say that they DO brush their teeth.
Just because someone else who we don’t like or who is wrong on other things also believes or acts as we do on certain things is no reason to abandon what we know to be true.
Once while listening to my car radio, I heard a very agitated discussion going on among callers who all also happened to be fellow Believers, at least as far as I knew. The animated debate was over what is known as the doctrine of “eternal security”. Opinions ranged from being able to fall out of grace like falling out of bed to being eternally secure no matter what you said or did or believed after you got saved, period. As I listened to the discussion, mostly to stay awake on a long trip, I wondered why no one posed this as the question to ask, “How is your relationship with Jesus right now?”
In China, a close friend and I would get together regularly to drink hot chocolate (on cold mornings) and act as “iron sharpens iron” with each other. Regularly he would ask me how I was doing at loving my wife. He wasn’t asking whether or not I was married or would I ever contemplate divorce. He was just asking me how I was treating my wife at that point in time.
Someone who can talk about their relationship with Jesus in the now doesn’t need to be asked if they’ve ever been saved or what they are doing to stay saved or whether they could ever become unsaved. If you don’t have a relationship with Jesus, it is as easy as believing in him. And if you do already, then how are you relating to him right now?
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