In the time of Jesus and the disciples Judaism was commonplace… the trust in time-tested and hard worn principles and rules that a person would grow up practicing and so ensure a well balanced life that pleased God.

Christians introduced the new guiding rule of “by faith” which at the time meant that all previous reliable practices and habits were superseded and broken away from, giving these followers of Jesus the authority and license to please God in any way they saw fit, no matter how different from the accepted norm.

Nowadays I don’t think the language of ‘by faith’ is adequate as a guiding principle for Christians since liberalism and belief are actually now the norm. Perhaps we could borrow another of the disciples’ words ‘by grace’ to better communicate the uniqueness of the Christian message in todays world.

‘by grace’ means that all we know, all we own, all we feel, even all we believe has been superseded ‘by grace’. To recognise in today’s church and society those who are Christian is to look for those who hold on to nothing, who speak of nothing, who believe nothing, who are nothing. To recognise your brother you look for him who waits for God to reveal his Son. You look for a person who hopes for Jesus this minute, who is tired, bored, sick, angry, frustrated, depressed at the waiting… Jesus’ appearance can only ever take one minute too long.

‘by grace’ are those who are done with everything! God knows those who are his!

Jesus said “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:14). I think we we get a better idea of how many follow the way when we look at the number of Christians in cutures where there ther is no Christian culture to speak of, and where bing a christian results in significant hardship. Numbers like 1% and 2% often come up in those contexts. Even in australia, more conservative figures put numbers at between 3% and 8%.. if you extract the significant cultural pull of church culture (The Baptists, for example, experience more growth through procreation than conversion) we are probably looking at a similar proportion of the population.

Few of us seek God sincerely to risk everything we have and everything we are for him. Few of us choose to follow the narrow winding path.
The question is: when there is nobody around the corner waiting to set us on fire for our faith, to destroy our homes, to take our children, how do we really know where we stand?

We can point to the ‘accepting,’ and we can point to ‘God’s choice,’ that’s your choice

I think free-will is sin-filled, and that is the point of the gospel message… that God rescued us from ourselves at a cost to himself… That is what love is.

Do we have choices to make now? Yes. And the consequences of our decisions, good or bad, continue to remind us of God’s stand-alone righteousness.