Christians: Giving Christ a Bad Name
This morning I received an e-mail from a friend complaining about the unauthentic lives she was frustrated seeing in so many Christians--how they could act one way on Sunday and yet so differently the other six days. Her frustration was so overwhelming that not even wanting to be associated with the name Christian was becoming a very real desire. Sadly however, her complaint is not a new one and it is certainly not without warrant. All of us, too often, give Christ a really bad name.
What is it that causes this to happen? Is it just that truly following Jesus is so hard that once we leave the safe confines of Christian community we revert to our old default mode within minutes of driving off the church parking lot (if we make it that far)?
It makes us sincerely want to ask, would the real person you are please stand up?! I mean, who are you? The jerk I see on Monday or the pasionate one looking so holy, lost in worship on Sunday . . . And yet, perhaps the dichotomy between the two is not as pronounced as it first seems. Perhaps being a phony Christian actually would mean only playing one side of this Jeckel-and-Hyde game. Perhaps the fact that we still exhibit both the sinful manifestations of the old self and flashes of the new is truer to Scripture (and reality) than we would like to admit.
Yesterday we celebrated communion together as a church. In the morning, I re-read the part of Paul's letter to the Romans where he talks about this internal battle of inconsistency that rages within us: "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. Now if I do not do what I want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:19-25 TNIV) Yeah, that about sums it up.
Perhaps authentic Christianity isn't so much the complete arrival of our new self in this lifetime (by the way, this belief was deemed heresy in the first century already) but admittance that we are being torn in two. That we are inconsistent when it comes to who we want to be and who we really are. Besides, whoever told the world that Christians are good people told a horrible lie. We are no better than anyone else. In fact, our track record proves we are often worse!
My dream for our little church is that we would be the place that never attempts to perpetuate this false sense of pride: that in any way we are better than anyone else. I hope our message is just simply this: "Hey, I'm stinking it up over here and need Jesus something fierce. If you've ever felt the same, hop on board. Let's be idiots together . . . idiots who recognize we need Jesus." Maybe then, we could stop giving Christ such a bad name.
