Christianity has long been taught as a self help program. Now, most versions of this don't insist that you have to earn your way into heaven - salvation is a free gift, right - but rather, they insist that once you have Christ in your heart, you must work in order to ensure that you stay saved.
Saved by Grace. Maintained by works.
But that's not the truth that we see in the Scripture. In fact, that mode of thinking is antithetical to Christ and His cause.
Throughout Jesus' entire ministry, we see that He was far less interested in a life change (by which I mean where a person's behaviors and actions change) than He was in a heart change.
Look at the story of the woman at the well. Jesus needed to go through Samaria, and while He is there, He sends his disciples away to go buy food. When they're gone, He meets a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day. To us this might not seem odd, but it's notable because this is when the weather was the hottest, and you don't come to the well in the middle of the day unless you're an outcast in society - this tells us immediately of this woman's stature in society. She doesn't come to the well when the other woman did in the morning, and we can instantly tell that she is an outcast.
Jesus begins to talk with her and we find, eventually, the reason why she draws water in the middle of the day is because she has been married and divorced five times, and the person that she is living with now isn't her husband. (John 4:16-19).
Now, this is where the religious people typically jump in and explain to the woman that it's time for her to get married, stop running around, and things like that. But Jesus doesn't react in this way. He doesn't condemn, demean, or dismiss her, but rather, continues to talk to her and tell her of the truth of following God and worshipping Him.
She instantly goes into the city and tells people that this Jesus she met could very well be the Christ. Because of her testimony, many Samaritans heard Jesus' teaching and many of them came to believe in Jesus as the Savior of the world (John 4:42).
Not once in this entire discourse do we see Jesus engaging with this woman in a manner that suggested that she had to clean up her life in order to come to Christ. His focus the entire time was on her heart, on changing her mind about who He was so that she would recognize that He was not just some foreigner, but that He was in fact the Christ.
What we see then is that this change of heart leads to true Biblical repentance - which is not a term used to just refer to "repenting of our sin", but rather a change of mind that leads to a change of action.
We see Paul addressing the Corinthian Church along these same lines. When he sees them struggling with out of control behavior with regards to how they treat each other, he informs them that they're being natural and behaving like unsaved people. He doesn't tell them they're in danger of losing their salvation and it's time they start acting the right way. He reminds them of who they are. (1 Corinthians 3)
Even when confronted with the issue of the man who was sleeping with his own stepmother (1 Corinthians 5), Paul didn't say that this person had lost their salvation, but rather, there were consequences for his action - namely that he was put out of the Church. Paul's focus, however, was not on changing the man's action but rather his heart.
Time after time, the scripture doesn't tell us to focus on actions, that we're saved by works, or saved by grace and we maintain by works. Our call is to believe.
God's not after a change in our lives. God's not after a change in our behavior. God's not after a change in lifestyle. God's not after a change in our morals. God is after a change in our hearts.
Once the heart is changed, the rest of the life follows.
By Grace,
Dave