True Importance

Love.

Yes.  It sounds cheesy and lame.

But when you boil down my belief system to the most basic, fundamental level, love is what it's all about.

I'm a Christian.

I am not religious.  The distinction for me is that religion involves legalistic effort.  You build up a life and a "goodness factor" and then give it to God.  In response, God is obligated to let you into heaven.  Your long, painstaking effort to "be good" requires that God hand over the keys to the Kingdom.

This model is the same in most religious beliefs.  We do good.  God/Allah/ForestGod lets us into heaven/afterlife/virginland because he/she/it is impressed so much.

The Christianity I believe in is different.

God's requirements to get into heaven (according to the Bible) are as follows: Live a perfect, sinless life.

That's it.  Easy enough, right?  There's a catch, though: anything less than absolute perfection turns you away to hell (which, according to all accounts, is not just a big party).

Now, how many of us have lived a perfect life?  None.  Some of us may have lived pretty darn good lives, and some of us maybe not so much, but it doesn't matter how "good" your life is if it isn't perfect.  Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler were both equally sinful in God's eyes.  They both had sinned at least once, and therefore were both disqualified from Heaven.

That's where legalistic effort leads to [hopelessness and doubt] or [pride and arrogance.]  Either you realize that you're not perfect and never CAN be perfect (leading to hopelessness) OR you think you really are perfect and look down on those who are not (leading to arrogance).

Either way is bad news.

Ok.  Now for the good news (cool trivia fact: "Gospel" means "Good News" in Greek).  I was introduced to the following analogy a long time ago, and I think it works very well to get my point across.

We all have report cards (nowadays we call them "transcripts").  To get into heaven, God demands all A's.  We all have lied, cheated, stolen time and possessions from others, hated others, been selfish, etc.  That gives us good solid "F's" in every category.  Without Christ, we stand before God and hand him our failing report card and are turned away, to burn forever.

But that's exactly why we need Christ.  He stops us, and takes our report card.  He took all of our cards with him to the Cross and paid the penalty for failure.

But even better than that, he gave us his own card.  Now we don't just start from "C" and work our way to "A": we are given his righteousness and perfection.  Solid A's all the way across.  Now we can go to the gates of heaven and give the A's to God and live forever in paradise.

This is where Love comes in.

What is our response to this gift?  What is the motivator for the whole process?

Love.

Christ did such an amazingly good thing for us that our reaction SHOULD be love.

If someone takes away all your mistakes and gives you the greatest inheritance imaginable, what would you do?  Try to live for that person, right?  You'd be that guy's biggest fan.  You'd want to tell everyone how good he was to you.  You'd cringe when others badmouth him, and you'd be willing to make a fool out of yourself just to share with others how cool he was.

That's how I try to live.  As previously mentioned, I am a sinner and will always be a sinner, so I mess up the whole "love" thing too, but the driving force behind what I try to do is always love.

I don't do porn because God told me not to and I love him.  Typically christians (and conservatives) are ridiculed and/or underrepresented in collegiate settings, but I stand up because I love the Lord for what he did for me and want to share it.  I am a virgin because my girlfriend and I both agree that the loving thing to do is to wait until we're married.  I bare my heart and beliefs on a publicly viewable blog because I love my classmates and anyone else who reads this.

Hopefully I'll be able to answer questions in class.