(May 8, 2018 at 8:10 am)SteveII Wrote:(May 7, 2018 at 8:55 pm)Chad32 Wrote: I hear this from time to time. Grace is a free gift. All you have to do is accept Jesus into your heart. Except accepting Jesus into your heart usually means changing your life by abiding by a set of rules. When someone says "You need Jesus", they're implying you're living your life wrong. But if becoming a christian means making a drastic change in your lifestyle, then it's not really a free gift. You can't just tell Jesus you'll take the gift, and keep living in "sin", so why do people call it free?
You are confusing two things: 1. Accepting Jesus in your life and the reasons you might want to do that and 2) the change of heart that follows that makes you want to live like Jesus. It is not how you characterized it:
IF I accept Jesus
THEN I must change
it is more like
IF I accept Jesus and pursue the relationship
THEN I will want to be more like him
Most everyone can agree being more like Jesus is a good thing.
Why sure. What could be better than a world in which everyone sets aside whatever it is that makes them distinctive in order to create a world of perfect sameness.[/sarcasm]
