The word is nearer than we think

 This week's verses are Romans 10:8-13:

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we preach), because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and thus has righteousness and with the mouth one confesses and thus has salvation. For the scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, who richly blesses all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

People try to make salvation complicated. We naturally do it because we can't imagine that it could be so straightforward. And we hate the fact that we didn't do it all by ourselves. So we add things we think are necessary.

We make the short path to becoming a Christian impossibly long because we confuse it with the path to perfection. One of the things the Apostle Paul had to deal with were Jewish Christians who wanted to add the entire Old Testament law and traditions to the prerequisites for becoming Christians. "Wear tassels, and observe the Sabbath ritual, and only eat Kosher, memorize the Torah, and do church services in a dialect of Hebrew that nobody speaks, and then maybe you can call yourself a Christian." It seems ridiculous to us, but are our demands any less stringent?

We ask people to become "good" before we accept them as Christians. We want them to quit drinking so much, dress nicer, show up to church consistently, start tithing, take the Sunday school discipleship courses, do the ministry internship, maybe even start exploring a call to missionary work in the most uninviting place in the world, and maybe then we will accept them as converts. There is always something more. We put salvation at the end of a long stick and jerk it around like we're playing with a cat.

But Paul stops in the middle of the long doctrinal death march that is the book of Romans to remind us that it is not all that complicated to encounter Christ, to make the introduction, to start following. He is not telling us the entire lifelong journey of spiritual growth and character formation. He is telling us how to sign up: Believe that Jesus is Lord, and admit it openly. In other words, if you want to be a Christian, be a Christian. Simple. If you believe Jesus and are open about it, you will be saved.

He then goes on to unravel our confusion. He says everyone who believes in Jesus will not be put to shame. In other words, this is not a trick. He will not let us down. Jesus' offer to us is not the insincere promise of some smooth talker who says he'll totally help you move, because he doesn't want to disappoint you to your face, and then goes to the movies instead, because that's what he planned to do all along. Jesus' offer is genuine. We will not be put to shame for standing on that truth because he will deliver us. We will not be stuck dragging our junk alone up countless flights of stairs.

Then he reminds us that there is no distinction between the Jew and the Greek. The Jew, who has thousands of years of cultural connection, who has spent most of them badly curating the Old Testament laws and traditions, who has suffered for God's name throughout the generations, the Jew is no better off than the Greek who lived all of those years in depraved separation and ignorance that there even was such a God. Your past does not matter. Your family does not matter. This morning does not matter. The only thing that matters is that you believe.

There was a lot of backlash over that. People wanted to believe that all of the stuff their ancestors had suffered had put them in a better place. We want to believe that our Bible school, and the books we've read, and all those conferences and Christian YouTube videos, and our perfect church attendance puts us in some better position than the guy who staggers up to you on the street and says "I want Jesus." But it doesn't. It may help us to work through our Christian journey, but it doesn't add rank and distinction. We hate to hear that.

The same God is God of everyone because that God accepts all who believe in him. He will richly bless any of us who call on him and he allows us to follow him all the way to the cross. There is no long packing list of prerequisites to join him. There are no hierarchical badges to be earned and special names and emblems to distinguish us from one another. We don't need to pay a fee or buy a t-shirt.

With the path to salvation being so accessible, I don't know why anyone would not choose to be a Christian. Is it possible that we've misrepresented the gospel as something more complicated than it is? We shouldn't be trying to bring people to the place we feel we've reached ourselves before we call it salvation. The goal should be to get them to encounter Jesus, who will work with them as he has worked with us.