You see, people are born with a desire to make wrong choices.  I never had to teach my children to be selfish, or lie, or be unkind to others.  I had to teach them to think of others, to be honest and to be fair.  In Christianity we call those wrong choices sin.  So, from the beginning, you have a human nature that is prone to wrong choices.  When you decide to follow Christ, you are given a new nature.  Your orginal human nature is not replaced, it just coexists with this new nature.  We call these two natures, the old man and the new man.  As you follow Christ, slowly with time, you learn to allow the new man to make more and more of your decisions.  The old man is never eliminated, you just chose to put the new man in control.  This choice happens every minute of every day.  I think that some non-Christians may believe that the old man is completely replaced with the new man and maybe that is why there appears to be so much hypocrisy in Christianity.  I think that Christians are more like recovering addicts.  Addicts will be addicts until they die.  Recovery is a lifelong pursuit that requires good choices to be made every minute of every day.  Just because you may witness someone relapse after rehab, doesn’t mean you give up on rehab all together.  “Why would I go into rehab, it’s filled with a lot of hypocrites?”  You see, it’s about the heart.  They desire to be clean the rest of their life.  Even if it doesn’t happen for them, they have that desire.  That’s why, when they fail, they try again.  That is what Christianity is like.  We fail and try again.  We are not perfect, nor will we ever be perfect in our lifetime.  We just aspire for something better. 

Think about this.  Have you ever noticed that when something becomes popular, people jump on the bandwagon just to belong.  Your favorite baseball team may have several terrible seasons, but when they begin to win, fans appear out of thin air.  During the bad seasons they wouldn’t go to a single game.  Now they are wearing team jerseys and flying team flags from their porch.  Some call them fair-weather fans or posers.  Well Christianity also has posers.  There are people who claim to be Christians and yet they do not act like it.  They go to church, sing really loud and praise the Lord on Sunday.  Come Monday, the old man is back lying, cheating and acting superior.  This display paints Christianity in a bad light and brings disgrace to God.  They treat Christianity as an insurance policy that they will try to cash in upon death just in case there is a God.  They think they can play both sides and fool everyone.  Fortunately, the God I worship knows everyone’s heart.  He knows those who are his children and those who merely pose as his children.  One day there will be an accounting for their actions and there will be a price to pay. 

So, Christianity is not about memorizing the bible, church attendance or following some rules.  It’s about a personal relationship between you and God.  He made you; he loves you and he desires for you to have a good life.  We memorize verses to encourage each other during hard times.  We attend church to help teach and strengthen each other.  He gave us this wonderful book, the bible, to help guide us to a better life.  We choose to love him because he first loved us.  All of this is free for the asking.  You just have to choose.