Q: What is the main thing in
Christianity—the central idea or goal around which everything else
revolves? What is the place of things
like a changed attitude or moral improvement in Christianity?
If a Sunday School teacher were to
ask her students to answer this question with a single word, they would most
likely give the answer that Sunday School students always give when they don’t
know the answer: “Jesus.” On this occasion, that answer would be
correct. Now, since every teaching of
Christianity either comes from Jesus or points to Jesus, it will be necessary
to answer an additional question: “What
did Jesus come to accomplish?”
The purpose for which Jesus came was
to forgive sins, resulting in eternal life for all who would trust in Him. He accomplished this by living perfectly and
dying innocently as our substitute, therefore fulfilling the law of God and
suffering the punishment of God in our place.
The consequence of this is that all who rely on Him and His life and
death in their place are credited by God with a perfect life and as having the
punishment for their sins already served, with the result that at death their
souls rest with Christ at death and then they will live forever after the
Resurrection on the Last Day.
Because this is thoroughly a gift
from God to the Christian, we call this God’s grace, and this grace is
distributed to humans through Churches where the message of Jesus is taught and
proclaimed from the Bible, and Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are administered
as means through which this grace, won by Jesus, is delivered to individual
Christians.
Everything else which follows in
Christianity is built upon the foundation of those two truths. Unless God forgives sins, none of the other
blessings found in Christianity are relevant, because if one remains a sinner
in God’s eyes (and even one imperfection renders that judgment) everything
else, whether good deeds done by the individual or positive attitudes
experienced by the individual, are immaterial.
The place of our moral improvement or
positive attitude in Christianity is as a result of having sins forgiven. God’s forgiving is not merely a step on the
way to a greater goal of moral improvement, but instead, moral improvement is an
inevitable consequence of one’s sins being forgiven by God. God does desire us to live morally and be
empowered to deal in a healthy way with the challenges of life, but it is not
the central thing in Christianity.
Regrettably, dislocating moral
improvement in the life of the church occurs all too frequently—either by
improperly elevating it to the goal and central aspect of Christianity, or by
disregarding it entirely as unimportant, and it is precisely this dislocation
that is at the root of many of the disagreements among Christians about moral
issues today.
One camp desires to approve and
encourage any act that individuals feel in their hearts is moral, even when
there are clear Scriptural prohibitions to the contrary; while another
adamantly defends The Bible’s moral commands, but in doing so, at least gives
the appearance, if not outright stating, that certain sins are worse than
others—a clearly un-Scriptural position.
Both of these equal-but-opposite errors occur because moral improvement
has been dislocated in the life and teaching of a Church or its members.
When Christian morality is held up as
a good and important thing; but the grace and forgiveness of God through Christ
alone, and the delivery of it to the gathered saints, are retained as the most
important goal and central activity of the Church, steady balance is retained
and the truth shines forth. Whenever
these priorities become dislocated, the foundation becomes unstable and the
truth is obscured.
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