Do you think the Christian life is easy or hard?
Luke 14:25–34
Matthew 11:28–30
Breaking it down
I often think about my dad. He has been the biggest blessing to me. I grew up having everything I could ever want, largely due to the sacrifices he made for us. When Covid-19 hit, my dad had free time for the first time in 18 years – and a lot of it. A ton of that time was spent rekindling his relationship with Jesus.
But my dad had first come to Christ long ago. Maybe that was the easy part? It’s easy for us to see the brokenness in the world – to realize we need someone to come to fix it. Sometimes we even come to God with a realization of our own sins or needs. It’s a struggle with pornography, loneliness, or drinking too much. The rest we sort of think is okay, right? I mean, my soccer obsession has never harmed anyone?
Well, Jesus calls for all of it. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the parts we haven’t even wrestled with yet. We are quite content for Jesus to come in and fix what we think needs fixing. The problem with this thinking – C.S. Lewis explains – is that, in false humility, we are saying we are quite content to be pretty good people. Jesus is not. He is calling us to be saints. We have been called to abandon everything. Not part, or some, but rather everything.
During my dad’s time at home, I got to see his love for Jesus deepen further than I had ever seen it. Later that year his company was struggling from the lack of business that Covid had brought in and they were faced with a decision. Let off a large number of groundstaff – forcing them to lose their jobs – or my dad could, by choice, leave.
I don’t want to paint my dad as a martyr (although I do see him as worthy of the praise of one) but instead, I want to focus on this: My dad chose the loss of job security, a comfortable income, and the familiarity 18 years had provided. BUT, he did it with joy. He did it, in a sense, easily.
The reality is that the work we do, the cars we drive, and the careers we study do not belong to us. But we may think they do. We may never in our hearts give them over to Jesus. Or maybe more accurately, we may never want to. We may have a vague understanding that we need Jesus’ saving grace, but we think there are parts of our lives reserved for only us. Parts that we earned and deserve to keep.
Live it out!
I started with the question: “Is the Christian life easy or hard?” and I think the answer is yes. I wish the conclusion to the story was that my dad stepped into a perfect new job, but that isn’t true. It’s been difficult. But there is a joy in him that I have never seen before. He is being made more and more like Jesus.
The Christian life is easy in that Jesus has invited you to have rest. Striving in the world, and searching for truth is tiring. But He is not going to be content with just giving us rest (even if we are). The Christian life is hard because Christ is making us more and more like Himself and often that can feel uncomfortable. In fact, it almost always does. But it is Christ that is doing it, not us.
So, if you feel like the Christian life is hard, should you focus more on how it is “actually” easy? Or if you feel like it is easy, should you feel bad because it should “actually” be hard? If your answer is yes to either of these, perhaps check your heart, because you probably have one foot in the other. The remedy is not reframing whether or not life is hard. The solution is the Gospel. The answer is to focus less on us and more on Jesus. If we feel like the Christian life is too hard, we can look to Christ who joyfully suffered for us. And if we feel like it’s too easy, we can rejoice that Jesus has made a way to everlasting life, if only we put our faith in him.
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
Romans 8:28-29