Jesus came to give us better. A better life, a better hope, and a better covenant. He established a new agreement with the world that revolutionized our relationship with God and with one another. It was an agreement, a covenant, founded upon one word: Grace. Grace doesn’t lower the standards. Jesus established the New Covenant and its one law: “Love one another as I have loved you.” This law is far more demanding than any contained in the Old Testament. But grace didn’t stop there; it also provided the power to follow this new law.

Jesus never sacrificed grace for the sake of truth or truth for the sake of grace. He was a perfect and balanced blend of both. But when people heard and saw Jesus, that isn’t what they saw. That isn’t what they walked away believing. As far as the religious leaders were concerned, Jesus was all about grace, and they hated him for it.

Jesus would do away with the religious system. He would fulfill the law and establish something better: a covenant, an agreement with the world, established by Jesus on the basis of grace. Jesus would create a new system which was free from the law, the rules, and the checklists of the Old Testament. Because of Jesus there are no laws to keep, only a love to give away.

For over 1400 years God’s people were defined by “the law” a rigid set of rules designed to set Israel apart as a holy nation and neatly sort people into categories of “clean” and “unclean.” When Jesus came on the scene, He established something new and something better. He came to fulfill the Old Covenant so He could establish a better covenant, an agreement between God and all mankind on the basis of Jesus’ obedience and sacrifice. This new, better covenant was a covenant defined by grace.

A little over fifty years ago, 97% of Americans professed a belief in God. Compare that to today, and you will find that we live in a vastly different world.

Today:

48% of Americans are considered post-Christian.One out of every four adults raised in church will walk away from faith.For every person who makes the decision to follow Jesus, four professing christians will make the decision to leave the faith.A growing number of Millennials and Generation Z view the Bible as a hostile book used to oppress the innocent and marginalized.The fastest growing religious group in the country is “The Nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, claiming no faith at all.It is estimated that by year 2020, over 50% of American’s will be post-Christian.

We live in a culture that is increasingly apathetic towards God and matters of faith. More and more people are looking at Christianity and walking away, looking at the church and finding a resistible group of people peddling a resistible presentation of God. There is an increasing number of people who believe that their lives will be better without faith.

Love is hard at times to define, but we always know it when we see it. Nothing is more powerful or moving that when we see love played out in front of us. No example of love is greater than God’s when He gave His only son for us, and Jesus when He chose to die for our sins.

Jesus always made it a point to be with people who believed and behaved differently than Him. Those far from God always seemed to be the ones who were most comfortable around Him. In churches today, we often find the opposite to be true. But this should not be the case. If we want to reach people, we have to be welcoming to them. We have to not just talk about them but talk to them. Who are you most often around? Who are you making feel welcomed and loved? Who is your One that you are praying for and influencing toward faith? These are things that we as Jesus followers must keep in the forefront of our minds if we truly want to be the Church.

The church offers a place to be known and loved. It is a place where it's okay not to be okay. It's a place where it should be okay to struggle out loud. The church helps keep us from becoming distracted in our faith, from wandering and drifting away from faith. It is the power of the circle.

Life is busy, complicated and full of any number of things on most days. Sometimes those things can edge out the truly important things as it relates to our faith. We get distracted, and we get sidetracked. However, when we fix our eyes on Jesus, not only does it inspire us to live the life that we want to live and are called to live, it also helps us see as God sees and begin to align our lives with his values.

Every season of life brings with it potential distractions of faith that can cause our faith to drift. A drifting faith sooner or later becomes an unbelieving faith, because we rarely drift in a healthy direction. There are two questions we each must wrestle with to make sure that this is not the story of our faith. First, what is preventing you from being the best version of yourself? And the second, what sin have you been holding on to that’s now holding you back? Once we know these answers, we must realign and refocus on Jesus so that we can revive our faith and run with perseverance the race set before us.