Excuse me? A very difficult life? What's difficult about accept Christ as Lord and Savior? What's difficult about accepting Christ's love into your heart and living a good and Godly life?
I don't live each day feeling as though it's difficult - that my faith makes my life some kind of ordeal I have to get through. I live each day with joy and gratitude to our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Savior part is perfectly easy, but the Lord part is a bit tougher.
For the first part, Jesus said the following:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples." - Luke 14:26-33.
Christ exhorts people, before they come to him, to seriously consider whether or not they have what it takes to be a disciple. He compares it to a man who begins building a tower, but did not consider whether or not he could finish it; and when all is said and done, he gives up, and people laugh at him and make fun of his failure. The other part is that of army that is coming to wipe out his own, representing the demands of the Gospel. The king realizes that he must either fight and be defeated, or he must somehow make peace with his enemy; in the same way, coming to Christ is not just a mental assent to that other army's superiority, but a
surrender to it. This suppose two things: 1.) For some reason, that you and God are not currently at peace, but the two of you are at emnity with each other, and 2.) you do not have the resources to overcome Him.
And here are the terms of peace that Christ has set down:
Whoever loves their father, mother, brothers, sisters, spouse, or even his own life, more than Christ, he is not a Christian. If he is not willing to leave all his relations behind in order to obey Christ in everything, he cannot be saved. If he will allow his family to draw him away from obedience, and on their account he is willing to be a half-Christian, not having a resolute dedication to follow Christ and turn from all sin, he is not a Christian. Of course, Christ never promised peace with our relatives, but He did promise there would be ugly division in households over the Gospel (Matthew 10:34-37). It is possible for your own children or your own spouse to become the greatest enemy to the Gospel that you know, yet you must set your face like flint and press forward anyways.
If you do not pick up your cross every day, you cannot be His disciple. The man who was crucified was considered the lowest of society. His name was a reproach, and the sentence of death weighed on his mind. The Christian is commanded to live with the mindset that he may possibly lose his own life, and he must be willing to lose it. And even if he does not physically die, he must live with the mindset that the world will hate him, and they will not be afraid to show it, not only for what he believes, but they will also hate him for his holy life, for the very things that the Bible calls good and wholesome, and also for the fact that the Christ hates what the world does. Jesus said that the one who is blessed is the one who is persecuted (Matthew 5:11).
He must give up everything. Everything. If Christ is not worth the selling of your property, the giving up of every sin, the dying to your own pleasures daily, sacrificing even your civil rights for the sake of being godly, everything, you cannot be a Christian. And you may very well be called on to do it some day. You have no right to disbelieve any verse of Scripture, no right to disbelieve a single doctrine taught, no right to overlook a single positive or negative command at the risk of losing his soul if he persists in his defiance (Matthew 5:19). Christ is good, He is kind, and will not treat ayn wrongly; yet to be with Him, you must be divorced from the world and all that is in it, because the world hates him, and He will not take divided love.
Christ never offered an easy life, but the promises are that it will be difficult. All twelve apostles died the deaths of martyrs; the early church was subject to heavy persecution; and if you go to other nations where Christianity is hated, you know that a profession is real for the fact that a person knows if he is to become a Christian, he will be hated by his family and will probably be killed for it; and yet they know too that if they refuse the offer of the Gospel, despite their endangered life, they might save their bodies but they will lose their souls, fear being no excuse. If you read through the book of Acts, no sooner had the Holy Spirit come than a violent persecutor arose with an intense desire to kill off all who professed the name of Christ. You read Paul's accounts of his own missionary journey, he faced death constantly, faced hunger, nakedness, was often persecuted by unbelievers, by professing followers of God, and was put to death in the end. And who is to say that the same thing will never happen in America?
In short, the one who wants to keep his own life will be lost, but the one who loses his earthly life will be saved.
You asked me, "What's difficult about living a godly life?" It's this right here, that American Christianity resembles almost nothing of true Christianity. A great number of people believe they are saved because they were baptized, they prayed a prayer, that they made a profession, and they emphatically and happily declare that they are Christians, and yet most aspects of the Gospel are unappealing to them. They believe in going to church (if they have time), but if you propose the idea of meeting every Sunday (or at least making a strong attempt to meet with other brothers and sisters), they complain that you demand they spend all their time in church. You talk about separation from the world, they say that you are proposing we all live in a cave. You touch their favorite movies and music, you are called a legalist. If you propose the idea of self-examination to make sure you have truly come into the faith, they say that you are being too introspective and you're sinning by doubting the promises of God (despite that it's an explicit command of 2 Corinthians 13:5). They will say that we need to be moderate in religion, that we should not try and be too holy, and yet Christ said it'd be better you cut off your hands, feet or gouge out your eyes than indulge the least of sin (not that the Christian becomes perfect in this life, but the Christian is called on to continuously die to sin), or that to disregard the least of the commandments of God, and to teach others to do the same, is to your peril. Of course none will ever be perfect, and by faith we are justified, yet the implication is that daily you will die to sin and seek grace to overcome sins, even the small ones, that you will seek to better please God and will be more desirous to part from sin, but this also is undesirable to many, because many still secretly love their sins. I need not get into the aspects of false versions of the Gospel, such as in the Word of Faith which tells you that lack of healing is from a lack of faith (among many other things), the appealing works-righteousness of the JW and the Mormon cults or the Catholic church. But also, American professors of the faith are dreadfully indifferent to other religions, imagining that so long as one believes in
a god that they are saved, when Christ said that there is only one way.
This is my intention with the OP: A person might decide to take up a profession of faith on the basis that the doctrine is high, the Bible is infallible, it stands far above every other religion on Earth, and that the historical or evidential testimony is high and indisputible, but if these are the reasons that the person comes to Christ, he has come for an entirely unbiblical reason. These will not save you, and many are lost despite believing these things. It is not assent to doctrine, not assent to beliefs, or the Bible's conformity with science, that is reason to be a Christian, but the reason that the man realizes that he is a sinner, God proclaims he is so, and he must repent and turn from his sin and trust in Christ to save him if he wants to live. If he does not come for this reason, he does not come at all. If it's just about a change of lifestye, or it seems like a good move, you have to ask yourself why you would even
want to be a Christian, because nothing about it is pleasing to an unsaved man (it's the greatest of pleasure for the saved, but not for the unsaved). If he doesn't come because he is a sinner in need of pardon, he doesn't come at all. It would be better that he never took up a profession of faith than take one up and not follow through. That is my point: If you come for the wrong reasons, you are only making a suicide dash into a war zone that you are not equipped to face.
To the OP: I'm still willing to have these theological discussions with you, though I think by necessity our discussions should begin with particular topics. I by no means want to discourage you from becoming a Christian, because in Jesus Christ there is pardon from every sin, a new heart and life imparted that hates sin, and a great love for Christ that is above the love of any person. To be a Christian is a tremendous honor, and stands above the honors of being a king. I have brought up a lot of difficulties in this post with the Christian life, by the power of God they can all be overcome, but if you come for a simple change of lifestyle, you must know that your enemy is too great for you, and you will fail. If you will come accepting the terms of peace as they are laid down in Scripture--that is, knowing you are a sinner, that your sin is detestable and worthy of damnation, that you have pardon nowhere else but in Christ, that you must be born again and be made into an entirely different man, and that by faith in Christ you can be saved--you will be saved, most certainly, and you will be brought through every difficulty without fail.
