There’s a song called “Center” that has been stuck in my head lately. I keep coming back to the first line of the song, “Maybe we’ve made this complicated.”

The more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder if we have.

Not necessarily the Gospel itself, but the way we sometimes present Christianity. We can take something Jesus made remarkably clear and surround it with so much noise that we lose sight of what matters most.

Jesus said, “Follow me.”

That invitation is simple. But somehow, we can make following Jesus feel like something that requires having every answer, understanding every theological debate, belonging to the right church, knowing all the right words and having our lives completely put together before we come to Him.

But Jesus never told people to get their lives together and then come to Him.

He told them to come.

Think about the people Jesus called. Fishermen. Tax collectors. Sinners. People with broken pasts and complicated lives. They didn’t have everything figured out. They didn’t have perfect theology. They didn’t have their lives cleaned up.

Jesus called them to Himself.

That doesn’t mean Christianity is shallow or that truth doesn’t matter. It does. What we believe about God matters. Scripture matters. Sound doctrine matters. There are deep truths in the Word of God that we could spend a lifetime studying and still never fully comprehend.

But the depth of Christianity doesn’t mean the invitation to Christ is complicated.

The Gospel is clear. We are sinners who cannot save ourselves. Jesus Christ came into the world, lived the perfect life we could never live, died on the cross for our sins, was buried and rose again. Salvation is by grace through faith in Him.

And then Jesus says, “Follow me.”

We sometimes make the Christian life about so many things that we forget Christ is at the center of it.

We can get caught up in arguments, personalities, traditions and preferences. We can spend so much time talking about Christianity that we forget to actually follow Christ.

But following Jesus isn’t about becoming an expert before you become a disciple.

It begins with surrender.

Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

The invitation is simple, but it isn’t easy.

Jesus doesn’t promise that following Him will cost us nothing. He asks us to deny ourselves. He asks us to surrender our plans, our pride, our sin and our desire to remain in control.

We don’t have to be worthy. We’ll never be worthy.

We simply have to come to Christ.

If you’ve spent years thinking Christianity was too complicated, maybe you’ve been looking at everything around Jesus instead of looking at Jesus Himself.

There is certainly more to learn. There is more to understand. There is more to discover about the depths of God’s Word and the character of our Savior.

But we don’t have to understand everything to take the first step.

Jesus is still calling people to Himself.

And maybe we’ve made it more complicated than it needs to be.

The Gospel is profound, but the invitation is simple – come to Christ, make Him Lord of your life, deny yourself and take up your cross daily, and follow Him.