110 - Unveiling the Truth: Debunking Christianity Myths

00:00:00 Welcome everybody. Welcome back to the Motivate Grind Succeed podcast, where our goal is to help you improve your life in the four foundational cornerstones of faith, fellowship, fitness and finance. With each and every episode and in each and every episode, I promise to give you practical tips and takeaways. If you like what you hear, don't be afraid to leave a rating and a review, as it really does help to go a long way. Also sign up for the email list below where you can access new episode releases, merch drops, upcoming events, and much, much more.

00:00:32 Finally, if you are so inclined to want to support the show, I appreciate you greatly and you can support me on fourth wall. Link is down in this episode description and more information that comes about that at the end of this episode. Again, as always, all the links to everything I'm describing today are going to be down in the episode's description, so be sure to check that out for all the necessary information. So with all that in mind, guys, what are we going to be talking about today? Today we are going to be debunking the myths about Christianity.

00:01:05 I want to keep it to the big top three that end up finding were some of the big hard hitters here. So with that in mind, we're just going to jump right into it and we're going to start off with myth number one, and that is that Christianity is intolerant and it is a religion of hate. So that is a myth. Here's the fact of the matter. The fact actually is that Christ instructed us to love people.

00:01:30 So let's go to the Bible and look at some references. Right, as usual, we're going to be going to the NLT translation. So we're going to be looking at Matthew 22 37 through 40. It states, jesus replied, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.

00:01:53 A second is equally important. Love your neighbor as yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments. So right there, plain as day, it instructs us in 37 to love the Lord your God. And then in 39, it instructs us to love your neighbor.

00:02:14 Nowhere in there did I hear it say to hate anybody. Remember from the past episode, episode 109 when we said that Christianity was a religion about love and spreading the love of God to other people? Well, here we go again. It's just about spreading the love. And if that's not enough for you, let's go a little bit further on.

00:02:33 Right, we're going to look at one John four seven through twelve. That one says, Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. There's another example of loving.

00:02:52 But we're not done yet. We're not done yet. We're not done yet. Let's keep going to the rest of the verses. Verse nine.

00:02:56 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends I'm still reading by the way. Verse eleven.

00:03:16 Now dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. Verse twelve. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us and his love is brought to full expression in us. So what does all this mean? This means Christianity as a whole is teaching that all people are created in the image of God and should be treated with love and respect, right?

00:03:46 As we said last week, the central message of Christianity is that it is one of love and it is one of compassion for all people, regardless of their backgrounds or beliefs. Now, does that mean you agree with everything that they do? No, that does not mean that. What this means is that we to love each other as people. As individuals, we care for these people.

00:04:10 And what happens when you care for somebody? You look out for them. We cannot mix up the two things here, right? You cannot mix up the two things here. When we say to love people, we love them as people.

00:04:24 That's it. We love them as people. We love them as individuals. As everybody was created by God, does that mean we love what they do? No, we don't have to love what they do.

00:04:34 We have to love the person. Last point I want to make on this part is that if you love yourself, you'll love others. And generally speaking, we love ourselves from us. I know me. I love myself some me.

00:04:45 And so based on that, I should love other people as much as I love myself. If I want to buy myself a nice thing, I should be thinking, who else can I buy this nice thing for? If I want to buy myself a nice piece of jewelry, can I buy somebody else a nice piece of jewelry? If I want to buy myself a car, should I buy somebody? Okay, maybe not that far, but you get the idea, right?

00:05:03 So that's myth number one is that Christianity is intolerant a religion of hate. It is not. Many times in the Bible it says that we are to love one another. In fact, that is what we are called to do. Saying that it is a religion of hate simply goes directly against everything that Christianity stands for.

00:05:18 Myth number two. Myth number three is going to be really fun. Can't wait to get down before we get to that. Myth number two. Christianity is just a set of rules and regulations with no freedom.

00:05:29 Fact of the matter is, within reason, air quotes, you can kind of do whatever you want. That doesn't mean do whatever you want, because there's a big caveat to that, right? So Christians, they're often perceived as a group of people who follow very strict rules and regulations, but the reality is a lot more complex than that. At the heart of Christianity is a belief in the grace and love of God and a desire to live a life that reflects that love. Christians believe that they are saved by grace through faith, and that good works are just a natural outgrowth of that faith, not what saves you, okay?

00:06:11 Good works simply come as a natural outgrowth of the faith that you already have. It is not what saves you once we get that clear. So generally speaking, there are rules, air quotes, to follow, and the goal of life is to try to break them less and less and less as you progress in your faith, aka. Getting closer, to be more like Christ. But Jesus knew we were going to break these rules.

00:06:41 People broke the rules when he was walking on earth. People break the rules today, people will break the rules in the future. Hence why he came and died, right? That was to cover all of people's rule breaking. So here's the caveat, right?

00:06:58 Here's the caveat. This whole thing of technically, you can do whatever you want air quotes. This is not an excuse for you to go out and break every single rule and then ask for forgiveness later. That is not what this is. That is not the point.

00:07:13 Because think about it. Okay, let's take it to a higher level for a second here. If you do something wrong, just legally, right, you get in trouble. And let's say somebody says, okay, we're just going to give you a little pat on the wrist and say, don't do it again. Try to really truthfully not do it again.

00:07:32 And you say, yes, sir. Yes, ma'am, whatever. And you try not to do it again. If you go and do the exact same thing again, were you truly sorry? I don't think so.

00:07:41 You weren't truly sorry. You're just happy that you got out of the potential consequence, whatever that might have been. You aren't truly sorry. It's the same exact thing this way, okay? That's why I said it's not an excuse to go out and break every single rule and say, God forgive me.

00:07:56 And he says, okay, I forgive you, and you go out and do the same thing again, in my opinion. Why did you ask for forgiveness in the first place? Because if you ask for forgiveness, that means you're trying not to do it again. But if you go and do it again without a second thought without even skipping a beat, you're not truly sorry. So the goal is to not do that sinful behavior anymore, or at the very least, strive towards not doing it anymore.

00:08:23 We will never get to the point where we will no longer do wrong things ever. Period. So if you think you're going to get to that stage, you will not. You're never going to get to that stage. People never have.

00:08:32 People never will. Period, point blank, done. Closing envelope, we're done. You will never be perfect, ever. There will always be something to work on.

00:08:39 That is the joy of life. There is always something to work on, always something to improve. That's what keeps us growing. That's what keeps us striving. Myth number three.

00:08:49 My favorite one, if you stuck this far, oh boy, you're going to enjoy this one. So myth number three is that Christianity is just a cop out of hardship. It's for weak minded, feeble people who can't think for themselves. Christianity is just for the uneducated. Oh boy, here we go.

00:09:12 So here's the fact of the matter on this one, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen. Christians realize that they don't know everything and that there is always someone that they can lean on for guidance. Let me give you some examples here. When you're going to school, you lean on teachers for wisdom in the subject of which they are instructing, do we not? When we need some financial advice, we turn to financial advisors.

00:09:46 Oh, but Rasean, I am a financial advisor. Well, someone had to teach you how to be a financial advisor, so you leaned on that financial advisor to become a financial advisor. So we lean on financial advisors to help us for our finances. We lean to realtors for their expertise. When we want to get a house, we turn to whoever is deemed to be the expert for advice on something that we don't know.

00:10:13 Why? Because we don't know. It's that simple. We turn to someone who has this knowledge because we don't know and we need to know. Turning to God is no different.

00:10:27 If anything, religion is for the educated. Socrates said it best. Okay, like I said in the last episode, we're not going to stick straight to Bible. We're not going to pound Jesus down your throat here. So let's look at Socrates.

00:10:39 Socrates himself said, I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. Socrates himself just admitted that literally. The reason why he is so wise is because he's always learning. He's always trying to get information from other people. He's always trying to figure out, okay, I don't know this.

00:11:03 Who knows it? So I can become wiser in this area. Okay, there are four different types of people. I wrote these down. There are people who don't know that they know they have knowledge in something, but they claim that they don't have any knowledge in it.

00:11:21 Either they just haven't truthfully seen it yet, or what I nicknamed this person, as is the humble person. They probably have a wealth of knowledge about something, but they don't go around boasting and sharing and going crazy. And sometimes they don't even know that they know. And they always feel inferior to everybody else. That's usually the humble person.

00:11:39 The second person is the person that doesn't know that they don't know. This one I nicknamed the arrogant Ignoramus because this is the person that walks around cocky as I don't even know what acts like they know everything when they really don't know anything. They're just blowing smoke, that's it. They want to sound like they know what they're talking about. They want to sound all like this.

00:12:00 They want to sound all educated, but they have no idea what it is they're talking about it. Anybody who has experience or expertise in what is it they're talking about can call them out in the blink of an eye, snap of a finger. They can call them out on it. But that's usually how they end up being. They don't know that.

00:12:13 They don't know, so they act like they do. Then you have the people who know that they know. They're confident, right? Think about it. If you're somebody who knows how to drive, you just got to hop in the car and drive.

00:12:29 You're not going to see that as I'm confident in my driving abilities. Chances are you're not going to think about that consciously. But that's what you getting in the car, starting it and going to where you have to go exhibits confidence. You're confident that you can drive to wherever you need to get to. And you have faith in yourself subconsciously that you can get to where you need to get to without getting into an accident.

00:12:48 That's confidence in what you're doing. Then you have my favorite kind of people, people like Socrates, the ones that know that they don't know. These people are the teachable ones. These are the best people to work with, in my opinion, because these are the people that are already in that mode of I see a weakness or I see some spot that I'm lacking in information and therefore I need to get more knowledge in that, I need some help in that. And that going.

00:13:21 Bringing this back full circle is where Christians should operate, right? They should operate in the I know that I don't know. Which is why we have God to help us, because God knows. And so naturally, if we are in that mode of being teachable now, what does that mean? We are in a teachable spirit.

00:13:40 We are in a teachable mode. We go to God and say, God, we need help. In the words of Socrates, we're being very wise. So if anything, this is not a cop out of hardship, but rather an acceptance of that we don't know everything and we are not ashamed to admit that we need some help. So that's why that's my favorite myth, because I was like, guys, I don't know where that one came up from, but during my research and asking around and things, I find a lot of people think that Christianity is a cop out religion.

00:14:08 And I was like, if anything, it's the exact opposite. We as Christians, if anything, we know that we need help and we get our help from God. You could get your help from a self help book. You can get your help from whoever you want to get your help from. But I just used to get my help from somewhere else.

00:14:27 That's it. So those are the three myths that I wanted to go through today. So again, we'll run through them really, really fast. Myth number one is that Christianity is intolerant and is a religion of hate when the fact of the matter is Christ instructed us to love people. Myth number two is that Christianity is just a set of rules and regulations and y'all ain't got no freedom.

00:14:49 The fact of the matter is, within reason, you can do whatever you want. Again, within reason. Remember, if you forgot the caveat, go back a few minutes and listen to the caveat that I explained. And myth number three is that Christianity is just a cop out of hardship for weak minded, feeble people who can't think for themselves. If anything is the exact opposite.

00:15:08 Christians actually realize that they don't know everything and there's always someone that they can lean on for guidance when they need it. Guys, that is the end of this episode. But before we go ahead and do our typical close out here, I want to remind you guys of two quick things here. Number one, I'm always accepting questions on the website as well as voicemails. If you want to leave a voicemail about anything, you want to leave a comment on an episode, you want to leave a thank you note, you want to leave anything that you want to leave, you got 45 seconds to do so.

00:15:35 Head to Motivate Grind Succeed, and then go ahead and click on the little tab on the right that says Open me. You're going to see a little tab there. Click on that, open it up and then leave your voicemail message. If it's a good question that can be asked on the show, we'll go ahead and ask that on the show. You can hear your voice live and we can go ahead and answer that question here on the show.

00:15:55 If it's something about some constructive criticism, then no, we probably won't air it on the show or anything. That'll just be for me and everything else. And lastly, again, if you're listening to this episode, chances are the fourth wall site is still under construction. So if you head there, you're still going to see a Coming Soon page. But if you enter your email on that page, though, you will be the first to be notified when the site goes live.

00:16:19 And on top of that, if you sign up with your email when the site opens, I will give every single person who signs up on that subscriber list personally, I will send you an email with a discount code to whatever it is that you purchase on that website. Discount code that does end. The best part is the discount code will not expire, so you can have a permanent discount as just a thank you for signing up for the email and just waiting in great anticipation. So those are two announcements that I had and with that guys, that's what I have for you this week. Thank you so much for listening.

00:16:57 And before you go, don't forget to leave a rating and review. As I said before, it goes a really, really long way to helping out the show. I said already as well, there's also an email list. You can check that out in this episode's description. You can get access to new episode releases, merch drops, upcoming events, and much, much more.

00:17:14 And of course you already know about Fourth Wall because I just explained it. But again, if you're so inclined to support, be sure to head on over there, enter in your email and you'll be notified once that website opens up. All the links to everything that I mentioned are going to be down in this episode's description. So go ahead and check that out. Guys, take care of yourselves and I will see you all next time.