A Letter To Longtime Christians

The day that we first asked Jesus into our heart and prayed the prayer.

For me, it was at age eleven. At that point, I had been attending church for about two years. I started going to church later than most of my friends, but I was still young enough to only foggily remember life B.C. I read a Christian fiction book that mentioned accepting Jesus into your heart, and knew in that instant that I wanted to do that. A year later, I was baptized and began attending youth group for the first time.

Flash forward two years later. 

It didn’t take long to catch onto the secret lingo of ‘Christian culture’. By freshman year, I knew all of the famous Christian figures (Tim Tebow, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyers, Chris Tomlin, Tim Hawkins, etc.). My favorite singer in middle school was Francesca Battistelli and my favorite movie was Soul Surfer. I knew all about purity rings and owned a Teen Study Bible.I took a Dave Ramsey financial class for teenagers in 8th grade and knew Christian apologetics before I even got to high school.

These are all good things. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to know God from a young age. But, sometimes, when you’ve been in church for years, it can be easy to forget the meaning of it all. It’s possible to know all of the right things, and in the midst of it, forget all about the meaning of our faith: The fact that Jesus died on a cross to save us from our sins. 

Somehow, in the midst of our busy lives and our growing familiarity with the cross, grace becomes just another word; a word to use if we want to sound churchy. We can rattle off about twenty songs with the word in the title, but entirely loose the significance of the word in the process. We hear people talk about grace in the context of a reckless lifestyle and wonder how it applies to us, who have been faithful church attendees since we were children.

The truth is, no matter what our story, we’re all in need of a Savior. In the Kingdom of God, there is no one who is better or worse,  just humans in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. As basic a truth as this is, it can be so easy to forget. It can be easy to get so caught up in being a Christian that we forget Christ. I’m guilty of this myself. But, grace is is a truth that humbles and lifts us up. It replaces works, yet calls us to action. Let us never forget the wonder of the cross.

Let us never forget that Jesus loved us so much that He shed blood for us, that we might all get to spend eternity with Him. 

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