Saying “Jesus died for your sins” is a lot like saying Martin Luther King Jr. died for civil rights. It’s true that King died advancing civil rights for all Americans, but it would be absurd to claim you have to believe in him to enjoy those rights. Same idea here. Jesus died while delivering his message, but somewhere along the way that turned into the claim that believing he died for you is enough to receive everything his life’s work was pointing toward. The focus moved from practicing what he taught to simply “believing in him” which was never part of the instructions for how to live in order to experience the Kingdom of God within us he taught us to access.
When I talk about Jesus’ teachings, I mean his core teachings. Not the expansions, additions, and doctrinal changes that came after his death, many of which made it into the New Testament after the gospels.
What we have in much of Christianity today is the idea that believing Jesus died for you is enough to secure heaven as a reward after you die. But Jesus kept returning to something else: a change in how people lived, how they treated each other, and how they related to God. He taught a path that uncovers the Kingdom of Heaven within, a move past ego that wakes us up to our unity with each other and with God. He never once presented belief in his death as the condition for reaching that state. What he offered instead was a hard set of teachings meant to be lived.
As those teachings were altered and reinterpreted after his death, a version of Christianity emerged that asks for little or no change in how a person actually lives. Under that framework, someone can stay hateful, judgmental, or cruel and still believe heaven is guaranteed, because they profess belief in Jesus.
That helps explain how movements built on hostility and resentment end up wrapped in Christianity. If you think you’re heaven-bound no matter how you treat people, as long as you’ve accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then how you treat people stops mattering.
So for anyone who identifies as Christian, a simple question: where does Jesus explicitly tell his followers that declaring him Lord and Savior is the requirement for salvation? Go look for it. It’s remarkably hard to find, because it isn’t there. Yet that has become the central requirement in much of modern Christianity, while what Jesus actually spent his time teaching gets treated as optional.
For those looking the pinpoint the exact moment in Christianity where there was a shift from practicing the teachings of Jesus shifted to simply believing in him, I’ve dedicated an article to this here:
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