Earning Acceptance?
“Christianity is not a religion.” Wait a minute – what did that guy say?
That’s what I heard a few weeks before Christmas as I was listening to a Christian speaker on YouTube (pastors benefit from listening to sermons too). John Lennox is a very well known University of Oxford mathematician who also has a knack for making the case for the believability of Christian faith. To an audience of students and professors he said:
Many people think that Christianity is like that – you pile up your good deeds, you try and please God and you hope at the end that He won’t take His law too seriously and He’ll let you in …
Let me give you an illustration: 56 years ago now I met a girl. She was lovely! So I decided I’d like to marry her. I came along and I gave her a lovely present: it was wrapped up and I said. “Sally I’d like you to be my wife. Now here’s a present.”
So she opened it and it was a cookbook. So I said “Read page 153 – apple cake: thou shalt take so much flour, thou shalt take so much sugar, thou shalt take and put it in the oven and bake it … my dear, I would like you to take this book and if you keep these rules, let’s say, let’s be reasonable, for the next 40 years, then I will accept you. Otherwise, you can go back to your mother.”
Why are you laughing folks? That is how millions of people think about God! You would never insult a fellow human being – and I mean this very seriously – … by making acceptance dependent on their performance. Do you think God does that? That’s turning God into a monster. And that’s why you laughed – it’s ridiculous. Of course I didn’t do that.
Now the amazing thing is she accepted me, it’s not amazing that I accepted her … she accepted me. Does that mean she doesn’t care about how she lives and how she cooks? Of course not, but she’s not cooking to earn my affection – she’s cooking because she’s got it.
Here am I tonight talking to you … do you think I’m doing it to earn brownie points so that God will accept me? Not at all! I’m doing it because I know my acceptance doesn’t depend on it … Christianity does not compete with any other religion because Jesus offers me something none of them offer me … nobody else offers me forgiveness on such terms, and acceptance and love at the very beginning in a relationship. That’s the reason I’m a Christian.
Are any of us immune to the way of believing that Lennox identifies? For more than 40 years of congregational pastoring I have taught and preached grace: that we do not, indeed cannot, earn our acceptance/salvation with God by being good. Yet over and over so many people in those churches, when pondering the mysteries of death and eternity, have said they are pretty confident that they themselves or some other person will be okay because they are/were such a good, nice person.
This perspective is also predominant in our culture. Indeed many people reason that they don’t need to pay attention to God because they are trying to live a good life, and if God is at all reasonable, when their time comes they will “make it” by virtue of being a pretty good person.
As Lennox says, these understandings of God turn Him into a monster. What normal, healthy parent would withhold acceptance and love from their child until they have spent a lifetime showing they have earned and deserve it? Healthy parents bestow abounding love and care upon their newborn baby and never stop loving and caring for them till death do them part. A dysfunctional child may create roadblocks with anti-social behaviours, but the parents’ “love never ends” (I Cor. 13:8). A healthy child luxuriates in the love they are given and grows up to love others likewise.
In truth all relationships that are healthy are not conditional, ie. dependent on performance. Freely exchanged acceptance, love and care are the source of our greatest joys in life, and call forth our noblest human abilities to accept, love and care for others in grateful return.
That’s who God is, and that’s who we are meant to be. Please let go of your nasty perceptions of a demanding, judgemental god. Let yourself receive freely given acceptance, love and care from God and from others. And commit yourself to accepting, loving and caring for others likewise.