Salvation by Faith

For years, Ben Affleck wrestled with alcohol addiction. A consequence, he says, of having an alcoholic father. But the actor shared that he was in a much better place now and doesn't think he will ever return to that way of life.

It is no secret that substance abuse is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. Tragic stories are common. So, how did Affleck escape this fate?

In an interview he credited his Christian faith. Affleck says his Christian faith in later life has allowed him to accept his flaws and imperfections as a man. He said:

The concept that God, through Jesus, embraces and pardons all of us - from those we admire to those we might judge or resent - is powerful. If God can show such boundless love, urging us to love, avoid judgement and offer forgiveness, it serves as a profound model of how we should strive to be.

What I truly appreciate, even as I still grapple with my faith and beliefs, as I think all people do at times, is the profound idea that we all have imperfections . . . It's our journey to seek redemption, embrace divine love, better ourselves, cherish others, refrain from judgement, and extend forgiveness.

In his gripping memoir, Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri recounts the gripping story about why his mother became a Christian.

She grew up in a devout and prestigious Muslim family. She was a doctor and had wealth and esteem. But eventually she would forsake all of that to follow Jesus. She was forced to flee for her life from Iran, eventually settling in the U.S. as a refugee. When people ask her why, she looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her, and she says, “Because it’s true.”

Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than $7 million in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and 10 years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home. And maybe even your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God, and he wants you to believe in him, and he sent his Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or my mother is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks, because she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so.

She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a devout Muslim. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places where people hate refugees. And she’ll tell you––it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true … Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. The whole story hinges on it.

In an issue of Christianity Today, Glenn Pearson shares the story of his journey to faith:

You’re probably familiar with the popular arcade game called Whac-A-Mole, where mechanical moles randomly pop out of their holes while you try whacking them with a mallet before they retreat. I grew up in a “reverse Whac-A-Mole” world, feeling like the only mole in a family of mallets.

All the men in my family had significant issues. When I was 12, my dad left our family. He withheld both financial and emotional support, and he rejected or mocked conventional displays of affection. In Matthew 7:9, Jesus asks, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” Well, I have someone I can nominate.

But my dad wasn’t the only disaster in our family. When my grandfather was in his 60s, he decided he had cancer, so one day he jumped in front of a speeding train at a railroad crossing. His was not our family’s sole suicide. My brother suffered from schizophrenia and manic depression. After spending most of the last 20 years of his life in and out of mental hospitals, he hanged himself. My mother’s side didn’t escape dysfunction either. Her father had an emotional breakdown and spent several months in a hospital for indigents. There wasn’t a healthy man anywhere in sight.

Religion played almost no role in my family. But deep down I knew that something was wrong in my life, which led me to dabble in occult practices like astrology, séances, and white magic.

During my sophomore year of college, I stumbled into a campus Christian meeting and heard the gospel for the first time. As the presenter spoke, the Holy Spirit burned two realizations into my heart: that this “new thing” was 100 percent true, and that I would be a part of it. That night, even though I knew almost nothing about the theology of salvation, I brushed aside my intellectual skepticism and eagerly made a commitment to Jesus.

Over the next few months, I became increasingly involved with a couple of campus Christian groups. I was impressed by how “together” the members seemed and by the quality of their relationships. I also began applying my intellectual curiosity to questions surrounding the Bible’s reliability. I discovered far more support for the intellectual integrity of the Christian faith than I had ever supposed.

Years ago, I visited a counselor hoping to piece together the complexities of my background. After hearing parts of my story, he commented, “There is no explanation for you. In my professional opinion, someone with your background should be unemployable, divorced three times, abusive, an alcoholic, or some other kind of addict. The fact that you’re none of these things is a testimony to God’s incredible grace.”

In recent years, I’ve established one-on-one mentoring relationships with about two dozen younger men. I just try to understand their circumstances, communicate that I’m on their side, and point them to practical insights rooted in Scripture and tempered by real-life experience. Essentially, I’m offering these men something I never had. It’s just one way God continually uses what could have been a curse on my life to bring blessing to others

Editor’s Note: Glenn E. Pearson spent 19 years as executive vice president of the Georgia Hospital Association. He and his wife currently live outside Los Angeles.

In CT magazine, writer Dikkon Eberhart shares his personal testimony of progression from theological drifter to Orthodox Jew to a born-again experience with Jesus Christ:

I grew up in the Episcopal Church. But in my high teens and young twenties I drifted. At seminary in Berkeley, California, during the 1970s—I created my own religion. I called it Godianity. Certainly, I believed in the existence of God, hence the name of my religion. But I didn’t know much about that Son of God fellow, and the little I did know seemed impossibly weird.

Then something happened. I married a Jew who was an atheist. Then my wife became pregnant and nine months later, our first daughter squirmed in her mother’s arms. Here’s the sudden realization of an atheist: Such a perfect and beautiful creature must be the gift of God, not the product of some random swirl of atoms. My wife’s atheism bit the dust. Her new God belief was Jewish. My Godianity should have taken notice. “Listen up!” it ought to have heard. “You’re in trouble, too.”

That trouble came five years later. Our daughter and I were swinging in a hammock under a tree on a windy day. Normally an eager chatterer, our daughter fell silent and then said, “Daddy, I know there’s a God.” I was enchanted. “How, sweetie?” She pointed at the tree and its leaves. “You can’t see God. He’s like the wind. You can’t see the wind, but the wind makes the leaves move. You can’t see God, but you know he’s there, because he makes the people move, like the leaves.”

My heart swelled with love for this perceptive child, but then she crushed me. She continued, “Daddy, what do we believe?” Really, what she was asking was, “Mommy’s kind of Jewish. You’re kind of Christian. So what am I?” And despite my three advanced religious degrees and seminary employment, I couldn’t answer.

In that instant, I shucked my Godianity. Right away, my wife and I retreated into an urgent executive session. She was a Jew who was no longer an atheist. We resolved, we shall raise our children as Jews. And we did—as Reform Jews. Yet I still teetered on uneven ground, conscious of being an outsider. Then something else happened. During services on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to me: “If you should desire to come to me, my door is open to you.” Right away, I knew I needed to become a Jew myself, and three years later my conversion was complete.

For some time, my wife and I had noticed something: While Reform Judaism respects Torah, many Reform Jews themselves were selective in their adherence to its strictures. But we objected. We wanted a faith that wasn’t in the habit of accommodating itself to the surrounding culture.

Across our rural road, there happened to be a small Baptist church. Some of our neighbors had invited us to visit, in case we Jews should ever want to know more about Christ. We realized that—oddly—these neighbors seemed concerned for our souls.

More than a year later, desperate for direction, I crossed the road to the church one Sunday morning. That day, the pastor was preaching from 1 Timothy. I was astonished to hear a Baptist preacher using Old Testament references within his message—and with accurate Hebrew nuance. The pastor and I began meeting each week and my wife frequented the women’s Bible study. She and I began devouring book after book, faster and faster, thrilled by each new discovery of seemingly impossible truths that were actually true.

Even as a Jew, I knew the Passion story. But it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real—and if it were, then everything would need to change. Our Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as Godianity. Instead, we would give our souls to the personal love of the Incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us. We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament.

It took nine months, an appropriate duration for re-birth, before I committed myself to Jesus. My wife did the same three months later. Our younger two children followed soon thereafter. When God spoke to me in the synagogue all those years ago, inviting me through his open doorway, I had assumed he was summoning me into Judaism. Little did I know he was actually calling me to Christ.

In a recent issue of CT magazine, Fady Ghobrial tells his powerful story of immigrating to America from the Middle East, falling into the bondage of sex and drugs, and how he came to faith in Christ.

I was born to religious parents in Cairo. At 40 days old, I was baptized like every good Coptic Orthodox Christian. Growing up in this kind of religious atmosphere leaves its mark on your soul forever. I can still recall the much-dreaded confession times with the priest.

I remember finishing confession, being instructed to do some penance and then inevitably returning to my same old sins. My attitude toward God was that he was mean, like my teachers from Jesuit school who would physically punish me for falling short of their academic or behavioral standards.

In 2002, my family moved to America but my heart quickly soured on the church of my youth. By the time I reached high school, I was so disillusioned with the faith that I swung from being a “good religious kid” to the opposite extreme. High school afforded opportunities to hang out with new friends, experiment with dating and drugs. Before long, I had given myself over to a lifestyle of partying, fornication, and drug addiction.

I still recall arriving at home one night at around two in the morning. My mom was awake, crying to God and praying for Jesus to save me. Then my best friend, George with his brother Mark, started going to Arabic Baptist Church, so naturally I was apprehensive about a sudden invitation to visit the youth group. But Mark was relentless. Every Friday night, without fail, he would pick me up for the hourlong drive to the church. There I found a very different breed of Christian. The people there sincerely loved God. They were kind and not hypocritical. They actually loved and welcomed me. Wow, I thought, these Christians are having fun and enjoying their relationship with God.

Before my sophomore year in college, my dad forced me to attend the church’s annual Fourth of July conference. Dragging my feet, I went along. But I discovered that weekend that even the fiercest resistance or the coldest indifference is irrelevant once God decides to act in your life. I heard the gospel with new ears. I heard that God loves me so much that he sent Jesus to die for my sins. And I understood that by trusting in Jesus, all of my sins would be forgiven, and that I would be accepted by God and made right with him.

My life today is a testimony to God’s goodness and grace. This past July, I celebrated another year of walking with and serving Jesus Christ. I have been celebrating my spiritual birthday every Independence Day for the past 11 years, and the symbolic overlap isn’t lost on me.

Katherine Beim-Esche tells a moving story of meeting the living God after escaping the cult of Christian Science:

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world reeled in shock and disbelief. I did too—not only at the events themselves but also at the response I saw within my church. Raised a fourth-generation Christian Scientist, I lived within a Christian Science cocoon. In many ways, I acted like a Christian, reading my Bible every day, praying the Lord’s Prayer, and attending church twice a week.

Then everything exploded. Literally. The day after 9/11, hoping for comfort, I sought out the Wednesday night meeting at my Christian Science church. But what I heard left me feeling profoundly uneasy. Some congregants boldly declared that a tragedy like this never could have occurred in God’s perfect world. Others … subtly implied that the victims were to blame. How, I wondered, could they be so cavalier about the suffering we had witnessed? Little did I know that this terrible day would launch me on a journey to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

Not to be confused with Scientology, Christian Science was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the late 1800s. Its core teaching is influenced by gnostic, pantheistic, and metaphysical beliefs that portray sin, sickness, and death as illusions.

After 9/11, I could no longer deny the reality of evil. (Then) … by God’s providence, I overheard a coffee-shop conversation on faith. Something in my heart stirred. One of the men in that discussion invited me to his church and gave me a copy of Francis Schaeffer’s book The God Who Is There. Schaeffer said that the spiritual and physical world originated with a Creator God. I didn’t totally understand this, but it filled me with deep hope and a desire to learn more.

I visited Grace and Peace Fellowship, where I came face to face with the living God. In my Christian Science church, sin was never mentioned, but here it was freely confessed. I wept as I heard, for the first time, of God’s deep, sacrificial love for me. I was convicted of my sin and selfishness.

When I met with pastor Aaron Turner and he told me I was a sinner, I actually thanked him. After a lifetime of denying and repressing my very humanity, I was relieved to finally admit my brokenness. Then I met Jesus. Pastor Aaron introduced me to the Jesus of Scripture, who came to earth, took on flesh, and died and rose again to redeem his people and restore all creation. Praise God for untangling my heart and mind from the delusion of self-salvation—and for rescuing me into new life with Christ and his church.

In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller tells of a lecture delivered to students at a Christian college. He began by telling them that he was going to present the gospel, but leave out one very important element.

He described the rampant sin that plagued our culture: "homosexuality, abortion, drug use, song lyrics on the radio, newspaper headlines, and so on." He said that the wages of sin is death, talked about teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the supporting statistics. He described how the way sin separates us from God. He spoke of "the beauty of morality," telling stories, citing examples of how righteous living was better. He detailed greatness of heaven. He spoke of repentance and how their lives could be God-honoring and God-centered."

Describing what happened when he finished the lecture, Miller writes:

I rested my case and asked the class if they could tell me what it was I had left out of this gospel presentation. Not a single hand raised … I presented a gospel to Christian Bible college students and left out … Jesus. Nobody noticed.

To a culture that believes they “go to heaven” based on whether or not they are morally pure, or that they understand some theological ideas, or that they are very spiritual, Jesus is completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a technicality by which we become morally pure, or a subject of which we know, or a founding father of our woo-woo spirituality.

Michelangelo, the great Renaissance artist, is known for his statue of David and the incredible Sistine Chapel. But what many don’t know is that Michelangelo lived as the Reformation was sweeping through Europe and was influenced himself by Reformation ideas about justification by grace through faith.

Michelangelo was plagued throughout his life to live up to his own and others’ high demands for his artwork. But as he approached his death, a spiritual rebirth began to occur. One of his final works, intended to be his gravestone, was a statue of himself, in the guise of Nicodemus—the one who was “born again” (John 4)—holding the dead body of Jesus. You can see the statue at the Duomo Museum in Florence, Italy, where a poem by Michelangelo is printed on the opposite wall. In the poem, Michelangelo describes coming to the end of his life and seeing that his artwork was actually harmful to his soul because it became “my idol and my King.”

At the end of the day, his only hope was not in being a great artist or receiving acclaim from others, but rather, the “divine Love, who to embrace us, opened his arms upon the cross.”

Click here for a poem and photo of The Deposition statue.

In December of 2016, a ride at Knott's Berry Farm in California became stuck 148 feet in the air. There were 20 people on board, including seven children. Firefighters tried to reach the stranded passengers by using a massive ladder, but it was too short. Fire crews had no choice. They would have to lower each passenger from 148 feet in the air, harnessed to a single rope.

Fire Captain Larry Kurtz said, "It sounds scary, but … we have very, very strong ropes that have 9,000 pounds of breaking strength on them." He was building the faith of those who were trapped. He was giving them information that if believed would dissipate their fears. It was up to each person to believe what he said and place their trust in the firefighter.

Let's zero in on one of the youngsters, and say his name was Luke. He's seven years old—old enough to feel terror as he looks at the ground 148 feet below. The fire­fighter looks Luke in his eyes, and with a steadying voice says, "Trust me, Luke. I won't let you go. Your life is very precious to me, and I will have you down before you know it."

Luke listens to him and thinks about the "very, very strong rope." He believes the firefighter's reassuring words and trusts him completely. This is his only hope of getting to safety. If he doesn’t have faith, then he doesn't believe that the firefighter cares for him. He would then lose his only hope of reaching the ground. Faith, hope, and love are bound together.

Luke and all 20 passengers were lowered safely to the ground just before 10 p.m. that night.

In a skills article for Preaching Today, David Prince writes:

I know a family who adopted an older child from an unspeakably horrific orphanage in another country. When they brought her home one of the things they told her was that she was expected to clean her room every day. When she heard about that responsibility, she fixated on it and saw it as a way she would earn her family’s love. In other words, she isolated the responsibility and applied it to her existing frame of thinking that was shaped by life in the orphanage. Thus, every morning when her parents came in her room, it was immaculate and she would sit on the bed and would say, “My room is clean. Can I stay? Do you still love me?” Her words broke her new parents’ hearts.

Eventually, the girl learned to hear her parents’ words as their unconditionally beloved child who would never be forsaken, not as a visitor trying to earn her place in the family. After she knew that she was an inseparable part of the family story, even correction and discipline did not cause her to question her family’s love for her; she understood correction and discipline to be part of what it meant to be in the family.

As a young Christian, pastor and author Tim Keller said, "I found the Old Testament to be a confusing and off-putting part of the Bible." But while he was at a study center someone asked the great Bible scholar Alex Motyer a question about the seeming disjointedness between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Keller writes:

I will always remember his answer … [Dr. Motyer] insisted that we were all one people of God. Then he asked us to imagine how the Israelites under Moses would have given their "testimony" to someone who asked for it. They would have said something like this:

We were in a foreign land, in bondage, under the sentence of death. But our mediator—the one who stands between us and God—came to us with the promise of deliverance. We trusted in the promises of God, took shelter under the blood of the lamb, and he led us out. Now we are on the way to the Promised Land. We are not there yet, of course, but we have the law to guide us, and through blood sacrifice we also have his presence in our midst. So he will stay with us until we get to our true country, our everlasting home.
Then Dr. Motyer concluded: "Now think about it. A Christian today could say the same thing, almost word for word."

My young self was thunderstruck. I had held the vague, unexamined impression that in the Old Testament people were saved through obeying a host of detailed laws but that today we were freely forgiven and accepted by faith. This little thought experiment showed me, in a stroke, not only that the Israelites had been saved by grace and that God's salvation had been by costly atonement and grace all along, but also that the pursuit of holiness, pilgrimage, obedience, and deep community should characterize Christians as well.

The website Statistic Brain has tracked the "must-have Christmas gift" for the past few decades.

In 1983 everyone had to have a cabbage patch doll. In 1985 we just had to have an $18 Pound Puppy. In 1989 American households scrambled to get a new Game Boy, followed by the 1995 Beanie Baby craze, and the 1996 Tickle Me Elmo frenzy.

In the ensuing years American consumers knocked themselves out to buy the following top yearly must-have Christmas gifts: a new iPod (2002), A Wii (2006), a Kindle (2010), the Angry Birds Board Game (2011), the Doc McStuffins doll (2013), the Frozen Sing Along Elsa Doll (2015), in 2020 it was The Child (also known as Baby Yoda), and in 2023 the latest must have gift for boys was Legos and for girls it was Barbie.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Salvation, gift of—Getting these "must-have gifts" often required an enormous amount of scheming to obtain the limited supply of gifts. In sharp contrast, God's gift of salvation in Christ is free and available to all. (2) Consumerism - The items change every year, but the spirit of consumerism remains.

John Zahl writes in "A Gift (Certificate) That Never Expires”:

A few years ago, a friend and the owner of a local high-end department store gave me a very generous gift certificate. When I went to use the gift certificate he met me at the store, and walked with me as I selected a sports coat, a dress shirt, and a pair of shoes. I made sure to look at each of the price tags (on the sly) so I could overshoot the gift certificate enough and put some cash back into the store's register, thereby showing my gratitude for his generosity.

When I got to the register, I put my wallet on the counter and got out my credit card, but he placed the gift certificate in front of me and said, "Well, it looks like you've only spent a little more than half of your credit with us." I was shocked. In that moment I realized he had only been charging me half of the ticket price, which meant that I was still in his debt.

In a few weeks I returned to the store with my wife determined to show my appreciation by overspending the gift card. So this time we approached the counter as a unified front, and with a huge armload of clothing and accessories. I handed our friend the gift certificate, and got my wallet out. He took the gift certificate in hand and started entering the purchases into the register.

Finally, when the bags were full, he turned to us and said, "You're not going to believe this, but I've rung everything up, and the total comes to exactly zero." We started protesting: "That can't be right. The total should be well above what was left of our store credit."

Then he said, "I don't think you understand how this gift certificate works. No matter what you throw at it, the total will always read zero." We finally understood his arrangement. In our attempts to buy our way out of the debt, we had completely missed the value of the gift, which this generous man took such pleasure in bestowing upon us.

Comedian Jay Leno once conducted a "man-on-the-street" interview by asking random people to name one of the Ten Commandments. The most common response was something that wasn't even on God's original list—"God helps those who help themselves." That phrase, which is often used to emphasize a get-your-act-together approach to salvation, is often attributed to the Bible.

But the phrase is more closely tied to non-biblical sources. In a first century A.D. Greek fable, a wagon falls into a ravine, but when its driver appeals to Hercules for help, he is told to get to work himself. One of Aesop's fables has a similar theme. When a man calls on the goddess Athena for help during a shipwreck, she tells him to try swimming first. Both of these stories were probably created to illustrate an already existing proverb about helping yourself first.

A French author from the 1600s once said "Help yourself and Heaven will help you too." But it was the 17th century English thinker Algernon Sidney who has been credited with the now familiar wording, "God helps those who help themselves." Benjamin Franklin later used it in his Poor Richard's Almanack (1736) and it has been widely quoted ever since. A passage with similar sentiments can be found in the Quran, Chapter 13:11: "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."

But that phrase never appears in the Bible, and the way it's often used (as a self-help approach to salvation) is the exact opposite of the Bible's message of salvation by God's grace.

A Lowe's [Hardware] commercial shows a proud do-it-yourselfer installing a new ceiling fan in his family's living room. After he proudly gives the fan one last little turn, climbs off the aluminum ladder, and steps aside to turn on the switch. After he turns it on, he stands with his hands on his hips, satisfied with his brilliant, money-saving work. Within a second of the first rotation of the blades, the central motor sparks and the entire fan crashes to the floor, crushing a small table on its way down.

The scene cuts away to the outside of the house, looking at the clear bay window of the room where the man stands. It's quiet and bright outside. Suddenly, the ceiling fan comes flying through the picture window and lands in the yard, disrupting the peaceful moment. The words flash on the screen: "Need help?" An online version of the ad includes these words from Lowe's: "Installation can be tricky. Come to Lowe's. We've got all the tips and tools you need to get the job done right."

Possible Preaching Angles: Yes, some people are true do-it-yourself workers, but when it comes to salvation, all of us are like the guy in this video. The reality of our lives is that doing it ourselves never works. We are in desperate need of help. The Good News of Jesus is that he does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

Bryan Chapell tells a story about learning to use a crosscut saw with his father. As Bryan and his father were sawing through a log that had a rotten core, a piece of wood sheared off that looked just like a horse's head. So Bryan took it home and then later on gave it to his dad as a present. Chapell continues:

I attached a length of two-by-four board to that log head, attached a rope tail, and stuck on some sticks to act as legs. Then I halfway hammered in a dozen or so nails down the two-by-four body of that "horse," wrapped the whole thing in butcher block paper, put a bow on it, and presented it to my father. When he took off the wrapping, he smiled and said, "Thank you, it's wonderful … what is it?"

"It's a tie rack, Dad," I said. "See, you can put your ties on those nails going clown the side of the horse's body." My father smiled again and thanked me. Then he leaned the horse against his closet wall (because the stick legs could not keep it standing upright), and for years he used it as a tie rack.

Now, when I first gave my father that rotten-log-horse-head tie rack, I really thought it was "good." In my childish mind this creation was a work of art ready for the Metropolitan Museum. But as I matured, I realized that my work was not nearly as good as I had once thought. In fact, I understood ultimately that my father had received and used my gift not because of its goodness but out of his goodness. In a similar way our heavenly Father receives our gifts not so much because they deserve his love, but because he is love.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Christmas—This is a great way to illustrate the idea that Christmas is about God's gift to us, not our "gift" (i.e. religious efforts, performance, good deeds) to God; (2) God, grace of—The gospel is about trusting in God's gift to us in and through Christ, not offering our imperfect gifts to God.

The primary reason the majority of kids from Christian homes stray from the faith is that they never really heard it or had it to begin with …. Scratch the surface of the faith of the young people around you and you'll find a disturbing deficiency of understanding of even the most basic tenets of Christianity.

This is illustrated by a conversation I recently had with a young woman in her early twenties who had been raised in a Christian home and had attended church for most of her life. After assuring me that she was, indeed, saved, I asked her, "What does it mean to be a Christian?"

She replied, "It means that you ask Jesus into your heart."

"Yes, all right, but what does that mean?"

"It means that you ask Jesus to forgive you."

"Okay, but what do you ask him to forgive you for?"

"Bad things? I guess you ask him to forgive you for bad things, the sins you do."

"Like what?"

A deer in the headlights stared back at me. I thought I'd try a different tack.

"Why would Jesus forgive you?"

She fidgeted. "Um, because you ask him?"

[I asked], "What do you think God wants you to know?"

She beamed. "He wants me to know that I should love myself and that there's nothing I can't do if I think I can."

"And what does God want from you?" I asked.

"He wants me to do good stuff …. You know, be nice to others and don't hang around with bad people."

[Apparently], we've transformed the holy, terrifying, magnificent, and loving God of the Bible into Santa and his elves. And instead of transmitting the gloriously liberating and life-changing truths of the gospel, we have taught our children that what God wants from them is morality. We have told them that being good (at least outwardly) is the be-all and end-all of their faith. This isn't the gospel; we're not handing down Christianity.