How to spend $419.13 in less than 2 minutes

I don't know if you've entered the world of online banking yet or not, but I've been paying bills online for about 9 months and I absolutely love it. In fact, I just took 1 minute and 48 seconds to pay my auto insurance, power bill, and phone bill. That's $419.13 out of my checking account and I'm not even sad about it. Why? Basically, it's because I was going to have to pay the money anyway (we always owe money for something), but I didn't have to waste a lot of time doing it. Last year at this time, I would have had to pay bills by getting all my bills out of our drawer, pulling the payment slips off the bills, matching them up with the correct envelopes, writing the checks, stuffing the envelopes, sealing the envelopes, putting stamps on the envelopes, and putting my return address on the envelope (which, by the way, is completely useless about 99.9% of the time - when was the last time that a bill to a utility company ever got returned to your mailbox). But with online banking, my billpaying experience is simple.

Have you ever wondered why spiritual things seem like such a drain on people sometimes? I don't think it's the spiritual parts, themselves... after all, basic truths about God stay the same. Instead, I'm beginning to think that maybe it's because Christians have over-complicated the process of exploring faith. We often tell people all the steps (including the ones that we don't even understand) they have to go through to become a Christian, or to become a member of a church, or to become a "fully-devoted follower of Christ," and then we wonder why few people want to follow us in our spiritual journey. Maybe we overwhelm them with complexity and they don't feel like they would ever measure up, or be able to follow-through with all those steps.

So, the real question is: Is the Good News too complex? Or, have we combined it with "The Law" and "tradition" and "expectations" and "we've always done it that way"s or "we've never done it that way"s to the point that the Good News is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to accept? Romans 1:17 says, "The Good News shows how God makes people right with himself - that it begins and ends with faith." That sounds pretty simple. Romans 3:31 says, "So do we destroy the law by following the way of faith? No! Faith causes us to be what the law truly wants." That seems like it eliminates a lot of the steps (especially the ones that we don't even understand). But, what does the law truly want? Romans 4:25 says, "Jesus was given to die for our sins, and he was raised from the dead to make us right with God."

So, let's boil it down. God wants us to be right with him. That happens through forgiveness. Forgiveness happens through faith in Jesus. And the process of having faith in Jesus is simple. Should we, as a church, make it more complicated than that? No. In fact, we should fight against a complex approach to God or faith or being a part of the CATG Community.

Romans 10:17 says, "So faith comes from hearing the Good News, and people hear the Good News when someone tells them about Christ." There it is: people telling people about Jesus. That's simple. The message doesn't change... just the method. As you go along this week, maybe a conversation with one of your friends will turn to spiritual things... if that happens, maybe you will have a chance to share a little bit of the simple Good News... and maybe, just maybe, your friend will start their own journey of faith as a result.