The ‘hardest’ 

Yesterday we talked about Christianity as the ‘easiest religion in the world.  Now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason.  The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous.  We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing – it is a complete denial of being autonomous.  Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness – not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall.  That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow.   

People are living against the revelation of themselves.  They are denying the revelation of God that they themselves and all reality ‘are’.  They are denying it and yet they have to live with it.  When the person comes to see that there are good sufficient reasons, then he or she is faced with a problem; either they bow before those good and sufficient reasons, and bow to the Person behind the reasons, or they refuse to bow.   

It is not that the answers are not good, adequate and sufficient.  Unless one gives up one’s autonomy, one cannot accept the answers. 

Thoughts developed and/or taken from the works of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy – The God Who Is There