In 2005, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton released a major research study in the form of a book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In this book, they outlined what they considered to be the dominant religious beliefs of American teens. The five tenets of this belief system are listed below:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Cumulatively, Smith and Denton summed up this system of beliefs as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. You can read more about the study here and get the book on Amazon here.

While the whole study intrigued me, I was especially intrigued that the fifth point of belief (Good people go to heaven when they die). I have found that view to be shared by not only Christian teens, but non-Christians as well. I find this idea to be representative of American religion, as a whole: “I’m a good person and good people go to heaven when they die.” I believe this is the dominant belief in theater seats and pews every Sunday.

However, the words of Paul in Romans 6:23 are crystal clear. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I asked my friend Mike to recreate a traditional image that has been used in tracts and evangelism tools for decades.

Historically, these simplistic (and somewhat cheesy) pictures have embodied this concept. Our brokenness and sin estrange and separate us from God. However, God makes the first move towards us in Jesus’ death on the cross, reconciling us to Him through a sacrificial death on our behalf. We respond in faith to this act and offer of grace, and are reconciled to God and redeemed out of our depravity and sin.

Tim Keller, a pastor and author living in Manhattan, put it this way. “[In of myself,] I am more flawed and sinful than I ever dared believe, but [in Christ,] I am even more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope.”

Some of this may be incredibly familiar to you. However, some of you may have seen this idea represented for the very first time. If so, I would love to talk with you offline if you were interested. You can email me at scott.savage@nphx.org.

But for many people with backgrounds in the church, this image is very familiar. Familiarity though is the soil for contempt. The great tragedy I have experienced is that many Christians live as if their sin and struggles as a Jesus-follower send them back to square one. And they find themselves on the other side of the canyon again. The truth is that this is not Monopoly. When you fall short, you don’t head back to Go, you don’t miss out on $200. It was Jesus’ disciples who heard him utter his last words on earth when he said, “I am with you always” in Matthew 28:20. The Apostle Paul hammered home the truth that “Nothing can separate us from the love of God”, in chapter 8, verses 35-39 of his letter to the Romans. Yet, many of us live as if our sin continues to separate us from God, even after we are reconciled to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus. If we illustrated it visually, it would look like this.

We may believe in God’s grace, but functionally we live as if it is all on our shoulders. We may profess faith in the sufficiency of Jesus, but our lives reveal that we are far too similar to that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism I mentioned in the beginning.

The burden of following Jesus in that moment becomes a very heavy load. I believe it was to people struggling like this that Jesus spoke to in Matthew 11:28-30. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Tomorrow begins a season of preparation for our experience on Good Friday and Easter, days in which we remember what Jesus did for us – that we could not do for ourselves. I pray that during this season, you will come to see that in Jesus, you can be free from the burden of trying to be good enough and experience the life God created you to live. Today, my grateful prayer to God comes in the form of those words I quoted from Keller above. “[In of myself,] I am more flawed and sinful than I ever dared believe, but [in Christ,] I am even more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope.”

(Thanks to the middle school and high school students at North Phoenix. I shared the message of this blog with them this past Friday night as a part of their Mid-Winter Retreat. If it hadn’t been for that experience, I wouldn’t have been able to formulate my thoughts on such an important topic. Encounter Student Ministry, you are awesome!)