The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part III

Why I Need Christ to be Moral:

I think this is the question to be answered after all is said and done. Inevitably, someone will think, that it is nice and all that you have found meaning and whatnot from Jesus Christ. I'm glad it makes you moral. I, however, don't need it to be moral. In fact, I wonder why you couldn't just do the right thing. It is a good question. Let me attempt a response.

Morality is not the problem, according to the Bible. Morality is the symptom of the problem which is idolatry, the problem that people have put things before God in significance. Morality is not some abstract principle. It is rooted in the very nature of God. The more we pursue goodness the more, whether we know it or not, we pursue God. God, being all that is good and holy, expresses ultimate goodness in Jesus Christ, who told us to love even our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

The longer we seek after goodness, the sooner we will find Christ at the end. The ultimate expression of human morality might be to die for a family member or a friend. In dying, we give up something for ourselves that we cannot get back. The ultimate expression of God is to die for those who hate Him, so that they might be set free from themselves. It is not like a family member dying for a family member. It is like an American soldier taking a bullet for Osama bin Laden not because bin Laden deserves it, but because the soldier recognizes that even someone like this terrorist is made in the image of God. I'm not saying that bin Laden doesn't deserve justice, but love is not about what we deserve. Love is ultimately about giving of one's self for the sake of another.

The first part of the answer is this: the degree of goodness of which we are capable pales in comparison to the goodness of God.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)."

Without the realization of God, we fail to see the true depths of our own shortcomings (read: sins). The wrongs of others are worse than our own, or our own are grossly exaggerated in comparison to others. In either case we measure ourselves against other people and use it to justify either loving or hating ourselves, whichever we are prone to. Measured against God there is no place left to hide. We see ourselves as we are, compared to the only measure that matters, the nature of God Himself.

The moment of my conversion I was able to see my own sins for what they were, and how I had contributed to relationships which I had felt victimized by. I had no where to hide, no reasons to throw up in the face of God's convicting spirit, no sob stories to justify what I had done. I saw my own sin, how my sinful behavior had trapped me in certain behavioral cycles that were crushing the life from me, and that I was incapable of freeing myself. I needed a savior because, without Him and still suffering through the realization, it would have been me on the cross, dying under the weight of my own sins.

The second part of the answer is this: I am both victim and victimizer, and to see both as they are rquires being measured against the unwavering standard one cannot hide from - God Himself.

"For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)," and "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand (Isaiah 41:10)."

If I am not living for God, then I am living for myself or for some other creed. Living for myself, I have no one to answer to, no one and nothing to reveal the truth of my sin, and I can basically do as I please. If this is how I choose to live, the question is - why be moral if I live for myself? However, perhaps I live for someone else, or for some other creed, or religion, or whatever. These can still give us places to hide from the truth. Heck, even professing Christians can hide from the truth even though they regularly attend church and Bible. They hide from the truth in the very fact that they do these things. We hide for so long that we become lost, and we are lost for so long that we think to be lost is actually to be home, and to know the truth is to become lost!

We realize we need a savior when we realize that we are lost. Now, someone without Christ may very well not feel lost. Lostness, like belief, is not a feeling so much as a state of being. Coming to the point of realizing our lostness often requires us being, to some extent, broken. We will never become Christian until we see our brokenness and our moral ugliness for what they are. Much like breaking a bone so that it may be properly set, so it is with those of us, professing Christians or not, who have lost or buried the truth about what we are really like. Only the conviction of the Holy Spirit, in light of the crucifixion, can bring us this truth about ourselves. Otherwise we either explain it away or we are unable to live any longer in the burden of our own trespasses.

The third part of the answer is this: we hide from the truth about ourselves. We may conceive of ourselves as people desperately searching for the truth. We're not. We are people alienated from the truth, who want to fill that need we have for real truth but are content to fill ourselves with a comfortable one.

"The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end (Jeremiah 5:31)?"

I have heard many people complain about the things Christians do. As the prophet Jeremiah says, however, yes sometimes the religious leaders are corrupt. Yes soemtimes they lie, cheat and steal while holding themselves up as exemplars of the faith. The question the skeptic must ultimately ask, however, is not why are so many Christians terrible people - but rather: why am I a terrible person? And what is there to be done about it? But what will you do in the end?
The answer for the hypocritical believer and the skeptic will, more often than not, be the same.

Why do I need God to be moral? To be truly good is to be like God, and only God Himself can enable me to do that. As Jesus says, "there is none good but God!" His truth lets me see what I really am and does not let me hide in circumstances, rationalizations, or existential sollipsism.

Aldous Huxley put it well in his book "Ends and Means," that he and many others declared life to be meaningless not because it was true but because it allowed them to chase their own desires.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind (The Last Word by Thomas Nagel).

How are you served by what you believe? And what service does that belief demand? Not what you think is true, but why do you want it to be true?

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it (Matthew 16:24-25).'"

The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part II

The Sanctifying:

The truth is a powerful thing. It can save a person wrongfully accused or condemn someone to die. It can levy justice and inspire awesome acts of love and faithfulness. It brings light to lies and sets free the captives imprisoned within their own minds.

To be sanctified is the process of being made holy. After accepting Christ, that night all alone in my quiet dorm room, I immediately felt the burden lifting from my shoulders. I still had a lot of wreckage to deal with, and still do, but ever since then there has been a presence and a knowing that has dogged me, sometimes hunted me, always working away within me even when I don't cooperate. I had become weighted down by my struggles to find life in things, relationships, reputation, causes and creeds. That is the sin of idolatry, the chief sin, for from it came all the other sins in my life and any one else's. I had locked myself into a certain way of living from which there was, perhaps literally, no return.

It is tiring to carry with us all the hurts, the failures, the dark moments. Equally heavy can be the victories, because sometimes the loneliest moments are those when we accomplish what we feel is the ultimate and find it lets us down. For me it was like breathing fresh air again. My first reaction was to read more of the Bible, to learn more about who God was. My second reaction was to read about the Bible itself, to see if what I believed to be true was actually true or if I merely wished it to be. Having fallen into atheism years before I had read plenty of things to make Christianity seem ridiculous to believe. I never knew there were thinking people who defended the faith, nor had I ever read them.

So I did. You see, the atheist views on religion are not neutral nor are they free of bias. They assert the denial of that which Christianity rests upon. How can the atheist perspective then be free of bias? SImilarly, one can't dismiss the Christian perspective out of hand simply because it is religious, without betraying an enormous prejudice for religion. And prejudices have nothing to do with the truth.

So, familiar with the atheists perspective, I undertook to understand that of Christian thinkers and scholars. I learned about the Bible's history, about how it had been penned over centuries by many different authors. Yet within the Bible's pages I saw the internal consistency, how it was the exact same God throughout the ages. I had my doubts at points and I worked through them. Nor did I ever feel bad about having doubts - doubt is a halfway house between sin and salvation, as I have heard. There is no growth without doubt. The sin is in how we respond - either we raise the questions and assume they are unanswerable, or we raise the questions and seek for answers. I can say I have never had a question prove to be impossible to answer, nor do they require me relying on straw men or rationalizations.

I found that Christ gave me great insight into myself and others, for in His light I was coming to know myself for the first time. I came to see some of my fundamental weaknesses and problems, and in some areas I saw the need for therapy. I realized that I could not always trust my thoughts or reactions, nor my motives. I realized that the burden I had felt lifted was the weight of God's judgment upon me which I had reaped, unable to do anything else. For without Him I could do nothing but sin. Most of all, I learned that Christ was not rules, regulations, confessions or creeds.

I learned that Jesus Christ, from that moment I prayed alone in my room, has come to live in me through the power of His Holy Spirit. I have learned that I can't evict Him, that He is faithful to complete the work He has begun that night several years ago whether I am working with Him as much as I should or not. I have learned that either I am a slave to my own desires, hurts and longings, or that I am a slave to Christ and am freed from all those things.

From studying the history I have learned that the best explanation for the Biblical narrative and what I have seen in my life is that it all actually happened. The Bible is not just a bunch of stories with moral teachings. Moral stories do not radically change lives, and philosophies do not free from the burdens of sin. If Christ had not died to suffer God's judgment I would still be under it, and if He had not risen from the dead then there would have been no lifting of my weight.

I've learned that God does not wave a magic wand and fix all of my problems. But God does provide the strength to see my problems for what they are, the strength to endure them, and the power to take me through them. God does not deal in sidestepping or avoiding issues, He leads you through the worst parts of it in love, to remind you that He is God, and you are His. This, truly this, is the power of Christ in those He has rescued. Not in miracles, although they are powerful. Not in convicting words, although they are needed. The power of Christ is this: the truth of transformed life. The truth my brother began to see in that photograph I mentioned in my last post, the truth that between then and now I have been changed dramatically. Not a mere change in behavior by adherence to rules, but a change in kind, a deep and fundamental change concerning who and what I am.

But more than that, He has given me love, joy and peace. The love of His son to know that I am precious in His sight, and was bought at a price. Joy to understand that circumstances come and go but Christ carries me through happiness and sorrow, and that the joy in Him enables me to worship and love Him even in the midst of pain and tears. Peace to calm my anger, to know that if God is for me that what does it matter who is against me, and that all things work for the good of those who love Him. Those who know me have seen the difference. Being Born Again is a uniquely Christian thing. I have never encountered anyone from any other philosophy or faith that can claim the same radical transformation that is found in Christ Jesus.


I've learned that there are many things I must unlearn, such as how I think about some people, places and things. Like a house built on a poor foundation, anything above the break must be torn down, the break fixed, and built upon anew with good, strong materials. This has required the sacrifice of some ideas I held sacred, some images I held to be important, some attitudes I held to be necessary. Yet the more I turn them over to Christ to bear on the cross as only He can, the more I find that they were never really what I wanted in the first place.


I've learned that temptations remain ever present, and to remember that a good sign of Christianity gone wrong is to identify people as enemies. The Christian's battle is never against people, the battle is a spiritual one against sin to establish the kingdom of God in the hearts of all those who believe in Him until He returns. It is not to blow up abortion clinics, to legislate relationships, or to elect republicans. It is to preach the life transforming power of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This is what the religious right does not understand - that only God, not laws, can change people.


I have a long, long way to go. I cannot answer every question, nor right every wrong, nor perfectly conduct myself so as not to insult people or sin before God. But I am His, and He is mine, and though God does not love all that I do He does love me. That love is the strength to deal with and work through who I am and what I have become.


He does not have a message. He is the message, and that message is life. There is no life apart from the truth, and there is only one truth. Not your truth or my truth, only His truth. The problem isn't that there is only one way. If He gave us a hundred ways we would want a hundred and one - we would want our way.

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).

The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part I

The Problem:

A few years ago while my brother was home visiting, he happened to be sitting at the dining room table and flipping through a photo album. In it were pictures of me, looking miserable as I often did. He asked me something along the lines of why I used to look like that, presumably because I no longer do. My answer was very simple: I saw no meaning in life. I believe one of his girlfriends once referred to me as "sullen." She was correct. I wanted for nothing physically; I was well fed, lived in a good house, and did fine in school. I had gone to Sunday School, been baptized and confirmed, and it meant absolutely nothing to me.

Outward adherence to a creed is religion. I had experienced religion and found it wanting, and therefore doubted that there was a God. There was neither substance nor depth behind it, and certainly not an all-powerful and loving God. That left me being the product of blind forces adrift in a world, supposedly free to choose and find my own meaning. But here is why I remained miserable, though I would not have been able to vocalize it as such back then.

Being free to find my own meaning is slavery. Choosing to give my life meaning is a lie. Either life has meaning or it does not, and if it doesn't than anything else is just how I decide to polish the outside of my tomb. Hope, too, becomes pointless because hope, like faith, requires an object - we put our hope or faith in something.

If life has no meaning then merely imposing some reason to live, because I find myself in need of one, is self deception. I end up living a lie but the problem is I know I am lying to myself. So while I might fool everyone into thinking that I am a man with purpose and a "self-actualized destiny," or somesuch, I know that it is mere facade - until the day I eventually begin to believe my own lie. And let me tell you something, dear reader, there is nothing more pitiful than believing your own lies. That is bondage in its truest sense. Seeing that my recourse was to give myself a lie to live for, and unable to shy away from that truth, I was left with only one other option - the details of which I won't address here. Suffice it to say, if life is fundamentally meaningless, then living or dying ultimately makes no difference. To live was to live with a lie, the other option was far more final but seemed to embrace the truth of it all.

Either it ends all at once, or I endure with the living lie. But in so enduring I would die as well, just the slow death of hope and of the soul. Until, at the end, I no longer really care if I live or not because I am too numb to anything to care.

At that point I began to question and read, in order to make sure I was arriving at the correct conclusion. I read many things, and it's funny how we tend to make truth so dependent upon our perspectives. But, when we are stripped to the core, and when we relieve ourselves of any pretentious notions and academic blindfolds, we tend to know what is true when we discover it. We just don't really like the truth, but more on that later.

I read the Qur'an. I've read it twice now, once as a believer and once as someone who was seeking. The option of Islam was tempting, perhaps the most tempting. What struck me was the immense discipline it seemed to instill, in rising, praying and submitting utterly to Allah. Merely submit to his will and one would find one's place in the universe.

Allah, however, is cold and distant. Nor did he seem to have much to say about the modern day. So I read the Tao The Tchung and meditated upon Daoist truth. I found kernels of wisdom in its teachings, and many riddles that helped me expand my mind, but nothing to fill me. I knew that if there was one thing I needed, it was not more of myself. Being me had brought me to this point, and to be anyone else was again another meaningless lie.

I read Satanic scriptures from the "official" Church of Satan, founded by Anton LeVay. This proved equally fruitless, offering me only a philosophy to help me ascertain power over and in my personal life. Power for power's sake was also meaningless and offered me nothing. Mastering my inner world would leave me master of a desert, and mastering my surroundings would not change that. All it might let me do is impose that desert upon others, all to prove that misery does indeed love company.

Lastly, I read the Bible for the first time. I came across a verse in Matthew (16:24-26) where Jesus said: Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"

This really is the crux of the matter. I had been trying to fill my life with myself, with my grasping for what would bring life meaning, whether they be skill in my interests, friendships or romantic attachments. To live for these is to live like a vampire, draining the meaning from others until they no longer satisfy before casting them aside out of necessity. It was then that I saw how I had been existing as just that, and how the weight of it had brought me to a very uncomfortable but necessary decision: live with a lie or die in truth.

However, God also told me that those desires I had were given by Him, I had been trying to fill them inappropriately even some of those things were quite good. I was longing for many things, ultimately for truth and meaning, and had found them only in the possibility of death. The irony was I had long since moved past the point where the truth and life might be one in the same, and yet that was the answer.

"I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me (John 14:6)."

You see, I was not looking for any reason to live. I needed the reason, for anything else was mere fantasy and delusion. Christ had met me where I was, seeing life without hope for what it was and no longer being able to hide from it. In seeing that truth I came to know another, that I myself was a morally unlovable person. The tendency, of course, is to dismiss all that happened to me as the response of a desperate person at the end of his rope. May I submit to you that it was only upon coming to that brink of dawning desperation that I saw things the most clearly, without the easy conceits and rationalizations to hide behind. I saw that there was only darkness, a darkness necessary before I could see the light that is Christ. For by Him not only do I see, but by Him I see everything else - including myself.

I had seen the truth of my condition, and the truth of myself. It is a terrifying thing and yet it is a liberating thing. We all crave and desire love, yet sadly most of us project images of ourselves we know to be false because we think we really are unlovable. There is no love without truth, because true love is knowing someone truly and deeply, and still enduring and abiding in love.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:31-32).