Harder To Believe Than Not To

This video from Steve Taylor begins with the hauntingly beautiful "Vocalise" from Sergei Rachmaninoff. Steve's hairstyle in the vid is unfortunate, but the song is powerful.

From the album's liner notes:
"The song takes its title from a line found in the collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, a critically acclaimed fiction writer from the Deep South. Her literary friends in New York City had a hard time believing that a writer of her caliber could be something as common and unfashionable as a follower of Jesus. She reacts in her letter to a criticism that Christianity's primary function is as a crutch for the weak-spirited. She writes how they just don't understand the cost involved in Christianity, that 'It's much harder to believe than not to believe.'"

Christianity demands things from us that we don't naturally want to give.

Pastor, teacher and theologian John MacArthur speaks against a "designer gospel...tweaked to overcome consumer resistance...The idea is to make Christianity easy to believe. But the unvarnished, untweaked, unmodified, unavoidable truth is that the gospel is actually hard to believe. In fact, if the the sinner is left to himself, it is absolutely impossible." (page 20, Hard to Believe)

Any sugar-coated sermon flavored to make "deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me" more palatable is not the Gospel at all.

"So you want to follow Jesus, do you? It'll cost you absolutely everything." (John MacArthur)