devotionTEN - Simple, but not easy!

Sometimes I get hung up in my Christian walk, either because I complicate matters, or else I’m tempted to look for easy answers. Neither of those really have any place in the gospel or in my life as a disciple of Jesus. You see, the gospel is profound in its simplicity, and yet resists every effort to make it easy. This isn’t a contradiction in terms, even though it definitely seems that way at first glance.

But at second glance, it makes sense. It reminds me of a time in my life when the simple and the easy abruptly became polar opposites. I was about four years old, and my two-year-old brother had done something to annoy me, so I expressed my displeasure by chomping rather forcefully on his arm. He naturally started screaming his poor little head off, and my dad came in to see what was wrong.

Thinking quickly, I tried for the easy way out of certain punishment: “He bit himself.” My dad, wanting to believe me (I think this was my first lie!), tried to see if the teeth marks on my brother’s arm would match up to his mouth.

Unfortunately, I had grabbed the part of his arm that was easiest for me to reach—the outside of his upper arm—and there was physically no way that he could have bit himself. As young as I was, I remember thinking with a sinking feeling that I should have bit the other side (I was so wonderfully remorseful!).

The lie was the easiest thing to do, and in fact, if I had bitten him in a more plausible place, my dad might have believed me. But it wasn’t the simple thing to do. The lie could easily have become complicated had I bitten him somewhere that he could possibly have bitten himself. Then I would have had to come up with a whole believable narrative that would end in my younger brother choosing to inflict pain on himself.

The requirements of the gospel are remarkable simple, but not easy to do. We find this illustrated in an exchange between Jesus and a Jewish leader:

One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” Jesus replied, “ ‘You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments”(Matthew 22:35-40).

How many of us love our neighbor anywhere near as much as ourselves? The leader was looking for something complex, perhaps an exposition on the finer points of the law of Moses, but Jesus cut straight to the heart of it. Later, he turned to an entire crowd of people who had been following him and laid out exactly what it means to follow him, saying:

“If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it” (Luke 9:23-24).

How often do we set down our cross and pick up our life simply because this is the easiest thing to do? Trying to follow Jesus and take up our cross sometimes seems hard. In fact, it is hard, it’s just not complicated.