Avoiding Hell and Being Acceptable....

I'm getting more and more frustrated with lot's of people who seem to think that my blog title is the whole point of Christianity.

To me it is sad that someone who is as bold, forthright and dynamic as Jesus should be reduced to being a founder of a religion that excels in making people feel bad about themselves.

Let me be clear here, I'm not making myself out to be perfect or enlightened in any way, because I'm far from it, but increasingly lately I've become aware of how irrelevant we are becoming as the Church. Going around living lives that shout out to people "you're not good enough", or "you have to be like me to be accepted by God" is as far removed from the Good News that Jesus brings as you can get.

When I think about Jesus as He's portayed in the Gospels, I think of someone who constantly affirmed people of His love for them, who never judged, but who left Judgement up to His Father. He once said He'd come to do the will of His Father, and He only did what His Father told Him. I do remember one occasion where He lost His temper though, and it resulted in a man being healed. In fact, the only people Jesus lost His temper with, got frustrated at, were the very people who should have recognised Him for who He was. The religious people, the people who said that they followed God. They should have known better, and Jesus got angry everytime he saw them "convert" people to their way of thinking, the way of conforming to be like them in order to apparently please God.

In fact, He once called them "the blind leading the blind", a tragic picture if you think about it.

Jesus sees to create a reaction whenever he's brought up in a conversation, or included in a discussion. Usually, Jesus himself is not the object of scorn, it's people like me who represent him who get that sort of reaction. That makes me think that I should be reflecting him a bit more clearly. But again and again, the religious side of me wants to keep resurecting itself, I suppose Paul put it best in the Bible when he talked about us not doing the things we want to do, but instead doing the things that we hate.

I guess I have to learn to keep putting other people first ahead of myself, and to keep bringing that other side of me, the hypocritical, self-serving side that's so desperate for acceptance and appreciation back to the Cross, where I can crucify it and share as Paul says, Jesus' death, and then in a miraculous way, be raised to life a new person, after encountering God's transforming life in me.

I guess that's what the Christian life is in the end, a cycle of death and rebirth everyday, learning to die to myself and accepting the new life God offers me through Jesus. How I wish I could be like that. How I wish all people who claim to know and love Jesus could be like that. I know a few good people who are like that, and occasionally I get a glimpse of me being like that too, but very often I find myself reverting back to the same old religiosity of those who find it easier to condemn than to show grace, who judge first and think later, who are more concerned with other people's opinion than the One who really matters, the kind of person that wants to set themselves as superior to everyone else.

This, I find, is the person I am most of the time, and I wish I wasn't. I hope someday that as I look back on my life, I will see God changing me gradually into someone who really does care about people, and who acts in love first, and thinks later.

Oh well, pondering over.