Plagiarized Grace
How Life Mechanics missed the point…
Through Life Mechanics you will turn a corner in your life, take control of the wheel of the most powerful car on earth (yourself) and live happily ever after — at least, according to the BBC’s soap Neighbours. Life Mechanics claims to have plagiarized the ‘best bits’ of religions throughout the world to turn around the lives of its followers. So why are we not all Life Mechanics members? With regard to their own membership, religions throughout the world have asked the same question. Islam is a modern derivative of Christianity, Christianity is a Judaism with another testament tagged on. So why is Christianity the biggest religion in the world (two billion to Islam’s 1.3 billion members), why is it arguably the fastest growing religion, why do so many believe this instead of the more modern Islam or Life Mechanics, why not the more fundamental Judaism? The answer, I believe, can be found in the only factor unique to Christianity, God’s relentless Grace.
Jews believe that God loves his chosen people, Buddhism has an eightfold path to liberation, Islam has its Shari’ah, a book of rules for worship; social, political and economic interaction; punishments and oaths; only through obeying this book can you gain the grace of God. Christianity is the only religion that proclaims God’s love for everyone irrespective of their sins. Or in the words of Will Campbell [1], “we’re all bastards but God loves us anyway”.
What does this mean for us? Christian or not, murderer or exam cheat, God loves you. Like the perfect father, whatever our faults we will be welcome in his home. What’s more, because God created us in his own image, and is intent on being with us every step on our journey through life, we are closer to God in the company of the world’s worst sinners than we will ever be in front of a beautiful sunset or fantastic waterfall; in sunsets we can see God’s fingerprint, where he has created something wonderful; in people we can see God himself.
Having been given the ‘get to heaven free’ card, why shouldn’t Christians sin for the rest of their time on earth? Sin is, by definition, the antithesis of God’s ideals. Or, in Life Mechanics terminology, by sinning you’ve taken the wrong road without a map. God still loves you, God still wants to guide you back on to the right road, but for some reason you are not listening or accepting God’s love.
This grace concept is inherent to the past, present and future of Christianity. What better, more fundamental message is there to spread than ‘someone loves you’? That’s the sort of news that travels fastest on gossip networks, the sort of message the world is so eager to encourage but only fails at while God only succeeds. In 1949 the Communist party of China took power and started to persecute the seventy-five thousand Christians living there. Fifty years on, there are approximately three and a half million Christians living in China [2]. Whilst their government hated them and the rest of the world ignored them, Christians in China spread the unconditional love of God and the religion flourished. God’s love proved more powerful than the People’s Republic of China.
Grace is also a message we need to convey ourselves. In a world of ungrace where everything costs something, the unconditional love a Christian is priceless. Over ten thousand people starve to death each day [3], and most of us don’t give a shit [4]. However, what is more worrying is that, as Christians, we are more likely to object to my use of the word shit in this article than we are about the fact that ten thousand people are going to die today. How can we share this ‘no-questions asked’ love if we, as Christians, are so intent on creating a society of legalism, concerned not with liberating the world but instead with putting a price tag on God’s Grace?