Is Membership In The Kingdom Hard or Easy?

It is different; harder and easier. That may sound confusing but let me explain. Christ says “give me ALL. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work; I want YOU! I have not come to torment your ‘natural’ self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there. I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self. All the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked- the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself; my own will shall become yours.”

It is both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed that Christ sometimes describes His way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your Cross” – in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next He says, “my yoke is easy and my burden light.” He means both. And one can see why both are true.

For example, teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam; the lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands in a few minuets. Laziness means more work in the long run.

It is like that here. The hard thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions - to the Savior. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’; to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’. We are trying to let our mind and heart go their own way, centered on money or pleasure or ambition, and hoping, in spite of this to behave honestly and chastely and humble. And that is exactly what Christ warned us we could not do- serve two masters. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short, but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. It must be ploughed up and re-sown.

That is why the real problem of membership in this Church or Kingdom comes where we do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system because we are letting His spirit work at the right part of us. He never talked vague when he said, “Be perfect.” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard, but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder. In fact, it is impossible. It is hard for an egg to turn into a bird, but it is much harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And we cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

During our lives, we face this challenge of giving the Lord ‘all’ of us. This is the whole of Christ’s doctrine. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled and think that the Church has a lot of different objects such as education, buildings, holding meetings, etc., but the Church exists for nothing else but to draw us, and others, into Christ, to make us little Christs. If the Church is not doing that, it is a waste of time. It is not even doubtful that we were really created for any other purpose. We have been sown the plan only in so far as it concerns ourselves and our purpose for living. We have been told and shown how we can be drawn into Christ; how we can become part of that beautiful reward He wants to offer us. And, those strange, exciting hints and feelings given us by His spirit that it is all true may at times seem like a dream from which we will awake. And when we do, the trials will be over: it will be morning.

Taken from a paradigm written by Barlow L. Packer and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity

See.

Mosiah 3:19

Matt. 11:28-30