I don’t get Christians who are afraid to fly.

People who claim to know and to love and to trust Jesus, but who are nevertheless afraid of airplanes. Bold, finger-pointing, pulpit-thumping prophets who shriek and holler at you, telling you how to live and chew gum, who absolutely will not board an aircraft under any circumstances. This puzzles me, Christian who are afraid to die. Dying is the entire essence, the whole point, of Christianity. In order to be a Christian, we must first die to sin. We must first give up our lives, our family, our friends, our security. The big problem with modern Christianity is this doctrine of inclusion, wherein we practice Christianity without sacrifice. We keep the same friends, maintain the same habits, go the same places, all within the context of grace. Which is a distortion of that doctrine. Grace is not a free pass to do what we please. Grace is about the shed blood of an innocent man Who took the hit for us. Grace means Jesus took the punishment we deserved. Our flagrant, habitual, ongoing practice of sin dishonors that sacrifice.
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Conversion is about death.
It is about killing off old behaviors, old possessions, the old lifestyle. It is about moving out of the familiar and into the unknown. About making a determined right turn on the road of life, leaving everything and everyone we knew behind to follow Christ. This is rarely preached nowadays. Could we face the literal cross, as Christ prepared to do in John Chapter 12? Many of us can’t even face the most minimal, the most trivial pressure. We’ll stand around and laugh with people cussing up a storm, smoking dope, drinking. We let degrading and oppressive shows blare from our TV sets. Could we face the cross? We can’t even face the cable guy.

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