I don’t put a lot of stock in polls. I don’t think you can say 40% of all people like the color blue best when you only asked 1000 people. There are around 7 billion people on the planet! You would have to ask at least 1 billion people and even then you wouldn’t be 100% certain, because there would still be 6 billion people whom you didn’t ask. But, in a poll taken last year, pollsters found that 78% of the people they polled claim to be Christians. Now, I don’t know how many people they polled, or if they polled people coming out of a church after a Sunday morning service or people in Times Square during lunch hour. But, one can certainly say a LOT of people in America claim to be a Christian.
The question that comes to mind is, “With so many Christians in our country, why is our country and even our world in such bad shape?” Well, one of the main reasons is – thousands of people lay claim to Christianity or “religion”, yet they don’t truthfully follow or obey Jesus Christ in their lives.
I am reminded of the Pharisees in the Bible. They CERTAINLY laid claim to religion! In fact, they loved to show off their religious actions and have others praise them for being good “religious” people. Yet, when Jesus Christ came, they clearly rejected Him, because they would have had to change many things in their lives to follow Him.
Many people today if asked if they are a Christian will immediately say something like, “Oh yes! I go to this certain church!” Or they will say, “Oh yes! I read my Bible sometimes and pray!” But, yet they continue to live life completely contrary to what the Bible says is right. Just like the Pharisees. They were the religious leaders of their day – yet they REJECTED Jesus Christ, and made many of their own rules and regulations. Jesus likened them to tombs, which may be nice shiny marble on the outside, but on the inside are filled with decaying rotting corpses.
Lots of people “love” their religion. Meaning, they love their “church social club”, they love the good feeling they get when they can say, “I’m a member of this church or that church…”, and they love the attention they get when they do good things. But, at the same time, they continue to live like everyone else in the world, seeking after the pleasures of the flesh and the snares of this life.
In Matthew 23:33, Jesus told the Pharisees what would come of their love of religion, “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?” All the religious actions one could possibly perform cannot and will not save a person from hell. Only TRUE FAITH in JESUS CHRIST can do that.
If we TRULY Love Jesus Christ, our lives will change, and we will obey His Commandments. Jesus put it quite plainly in John 14:15, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” Lots of people claim to love God, yet their own actions in life say otherwise.
Jesus also said in verse 23 of John 14, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” Now, obviously – we are not perfect, we fail and allow our flesh to win the battles sometimes, yet if we truly love Jesus, we will seek immediately to right those wrongs and change our course back to following Him and obeying His Word.
There is a HUGE difference between “religion” and “true faith in God”. Religion is just a bunch of outward rules and regulations that people occassionally submit to, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them too much. But TRUE FAITH is a PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP with God and with His Son, Jesus Christ that CHANGES our lives from the inside out.
We may claim to be a Christian, but the true question is – does our life back up that claim? Do we REALLY LOVE JESUS?