Authentic Christianity
The CHRIST Culture Blog | September, 2021 | Rev. Dr. Carole Hulslander
What a shock this would be to many believers today. Some who believe just singing a song or two about HIM puts the creator in their debt. Or showing up for a Church event gives you a chance to ask ELOHIM for a favor later. Our hard hearts sometimes resist and resent any service to ELOHIM or HIS people. We have all had this problem at some point in our lives, but it is time to grow-up and walk more like HIS Son and answer the question, "Do you love ME?"
“As a great Christian writer (George MacDonald) pointed out, “every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk: no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, mature walk in a grown-up son or daughter. In the same way, he said, “GOD is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”
I think everyone who has some vague belief in GOD, until s/he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam or of a bargain in her/his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a failure and give up. They seem to imagine that GOD is very simple-minded! In fact, of course, HE knows all about this. One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. GOD has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a passing mark in this exam or putting HIM in your debt.
Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by GOD. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to HIS service, you could not give HIM anything that was not in the truest sense HIS own already. So that when we talk of a human doing anything for GOD or giving anything to GOD, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to his father and saying, “Daddy, give me twenty dollars to buy you a birthday present.” Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is twenty dollars to the good on the transaction. When a human has made these two discoveries GOD can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins." From Mere Christianity; By C. S. Lewis.