THE CLAIM AND THE TRUTH

Claiming to be a Christian isn’t the same as being a Christian. Let’s not get this wrong. Claiming to be Christian is really easy, but being a Christ-follower looks very specific from the outside looking in. This isn’t new news. The same way a hypocrite looks and sounds a specific way, so does someone who follows Jesus without compromising Scripture.

SHIFTED OUT OF WHAT IS ORDINARY

This is why people say, “I could sense something different about you,” to Christians who speak and behave in a certain way. Our behaviors, attitudes and word choices are selective and shifted out of what is ordinary to the world. True Christ-following people, while still imperfect, are actively practicing self-discipline through their words choices, their use of time, and their responses to people and situations. While we’re not perfect, we’re aware that our words, actions, and thoughts have eternal consequences, and that people are watching because we are the example of Christ in a world where Jesus has not yet returned.

INTENTION-DRIVEN IN A SCRUTINIZING WORLD

Even more serious is our understanding that as we claim to be Christians, the scrutiny of the world rests on us. The secular world is looking for mistakes to point out. Since we claim to be “reborn” in the spirit, if we acting or speak out of place, we become hypocrites faster than anyone else. Consequently, that becomes the face of Christianity: hypocrisy. We know this, which is why we have to be intentional about our display of faith in every regard, careful not to become so spiritually domineering in our approach to unbelievers that we become arrogant towards the hardened of hearts.

2 Timothy 2:25 encourages us to be gentle in our instruction towards opposition for a reason, that God may grant repentance. When we are so spiritually confident that our knowledge is more important than God’s work in an unbeliever, we have sacrificed their repentance for our ego. That isn’t the work of the Holy Spirit, and it can be devastating.

THE STARKNESS OF CHRISTIANITY

Being a Christian is controversial. We pray when others don’t. We don’t believe in gay marriage or homosexual behavior because it’s against the will of God for a man to lay with another man (Leviticus 18:22), or for a woman to lay with another woman (Romans 1:26). We don’t condone abortion because we see the act the same way God sees it: murder. We see free will as a gift from God that isn’t meant to be abused by the choice to take matters into our own hands; rather, we view life as a gift from God meant to give back to Him in thanksgiving for His grace upon us in Christ. In other words, we view life no longer as our own, but His to operate through us. This is counter-worldly-ideology for every person who believes free will is meant to be used for our own good, and not for the good will of our God in heaven.

FEAR OF GOD

Christ-followers understand that the only fear relevant to our life is the fear of displeasing the God of heaven. Christians believe in following the Ten Commandments, and that disobedience is more disappointing to God than our attempts to make our lives look pretty. Sin can never be made to look pretty to God, and any Christ-follower who’s repented understands why. We can’t shine up our sin to make it less detestable. Sin is punishable by death, for the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and if we do not take this seriously, then the fruit of this belief is that we do not honor God with our lives.

To be humbled before the Lord is to recognize how sin takes us from a Holy God who has given us the gift of salvation through faith, that whoever confesses with their mouth and believes in their heart that Christ is risen will have eternal life, despite their sins (Romans 10:9).

CAN’T OUTRUN THE RACE OF SIN

Being a Christian means that in order to accept the nature of sin as irreversible by humans means, we accept that Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross wasn’t just a historical event, but a fulfilled prophecy, and the construction of the only pathway to God we would ever be given by His grace. That means we can’t work hard enough to outweigh our sins with good deeds, thoughts, or words. We can’t outrun the race of our sin, it’s humanly impossible.

We can’t outrun the shame of our sin, we can only die in it by not being saved through faith. If we stay in our sin and our shame, we die again (spiritually) after we die here; we die for eternity in the fires of hell, apart from God and all His goodness. But, we don’t have to. We can die now in Christ and live again with the Holy Spirit, reborn without shame and free from the wages of sin.

GOD IS OUR ONLY LIFELINE

Being Christian means talking about these subjects and not shying away from the truth. It means believing in an objective truth and objective morality, created by God for the purpose of directing us back to Him. It means receiving the truth that apart from Him, we are nothing, have nothing, and we have no power to gain anything without Him. He is our entire lifeline, and there is no other. Christ-followers receive this truth and are humbled by its absoluteness because we understand it means we are loved by God, and He wants us to thrive. He’s not trying to terrify us, He’s trying to refine us and help us to be more than conquerors in a corrupt world (Romans 8:37).

ANSWERS ONLY GOD COULD GIVE

Christ-followers know that the eyes of the blind can’t see that the world is a creation of God, and not a random product from nothingness. We know when others turn to the world seeking answers only a transcendent God could give, they not only misunderstand this method of search is, in itself misplaced—ironically, their very desire for an answer is a clue to something outside their limited means of understanding.

Christians know that the reason we have this curiosity is because God placed eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), that we desire to understand why this life feels incomplete, why it doesn’t make any sense… without Him. To understand the answer to our search, Christians understand something unbelievers have yet to accept: we must search for the answer from the God they find too terrifying to consider.

DEADLINESS OF THE TEMPTATION OF SIN

The only reason the idea of God is so terrifying for some people is very simply because they are holding back the sins they don’t want to let go of. They don’t want to be changed. They don’t want to say goodbye to their worldly pleasures. They’re still stuck in the deadliness of the temptation of the sin that has dug deep into their spirit, and they aren’t ready to surrender.

If there is a God, truly, then every great argument for Him must be wrong according to these people, because continuing in sin is, to them, more real than departing from the very thing keeping them from the life they were created to have. They continue to die spiritually, even unknowingly, because they can’t seem to grasp the reality that they are needlessly suffering as a result of remaining inside choices separating them from their spiritual lifeline in eternity.

PURPOSE OF SUFFERING IN A CORRUPT WORLD

Christ-followers who have found God, understand the purpose of suffering, and we have learned to accept that suffering exists in a fallen world for a reason. Pain is not complicated as much as it is natural, the same way bleeding is with an open wound. We expect to see blood leaking from a fresh wound. But we have a hard time accepting the idea of suffering within a corrupt world. We have a hard time accepting how our free will led to the sin that is the cause of suffering, not a careless, naive God who didn’t see it coming.

PURSUIT OF GOD

There are many people who claim to be Christian simply because they attend church services. There are people who say they are Christians because they believe there is a God. But belief in God by itself, just as much as mere church attendance by itself, have little impact on our lives whatsoever, particularly when they’re without a pursuit.

When we attend church out of habit, we aren’t worshipping God, we’re just driving to a building and walking in. When we believe there’s a God but we don’t know that God personally, then it’s an empty relationship. Christians knows this, but the ones in disbelief are blind to this very real picture of truth: relationship is the only purpose of faith that actually matters! Otherwise, it’s empty belief we’re drudging around; mere religion. Being a Christian has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with a reborn lifestyle founded on faith in Jesus Christ.

A CHRIST-FOLLOWER IS CONTINUALLY BEING REFINED

Need I remind us that there are nice atheists in our world? That’s living proof there are people without faith who may embody very similar characteristics to Christians. This is why it’s so critical that we understand being loving isn’t automatically synonymous with being a Christian; a Christian is a follower. We are not our own god. We are following God in Christ! We aren’t just believing, we’re changing for God. We’re being refined. Each day we’re being matured. It’s a process. It takes time, and if we’re not taking the time for that purpose, then we don’t have a relationship, and that is what leads to hell.

AN ATHEIST’S LOVE CAN BE SHINIER THAN A LUKEWARM CHRISTIAN

There are some nice atheists in our world who are closer to God than people who claim to be Christians, because at least they’re loving without the assumption that their belief automatically means they’re saved. They’re nice because they want to be, and they’re loving because that’s the fruit they want to live by; however, the deception of their sin lies in how their love is empty of the relationship that is ultimately eternity-dependent, which is also a byproduct of the sin of rebellion that they refuse to repent of.

Without faith in Christ and a relationship to God through it, albeit happy atheists are at least authentic in that they aren’t biased about their performance of the rituals of their own beliefs, they’re also empty of the reason they are the way they are, even if the way they are is more Christ-like than actual Christians. Read that again if it didn’t land, it’s important! 

OUR LOVE COMES FROM GOD

Let’s be clear now: atheists get their love from God, but they say there is no God. Jesus never knew them (if they never repent). Remember Matthew 7:21-23? It doesn’t matter how loving we are, if we live under the impression or belief that our capacity to love comes from ourselves, we’re living under a lie from satan who wants us to remain deceived that we didn’t get anything from God, that we’re just a good person regardless. But that’s impossible, because only God is good (for God is love: 1 John 4:8), and only God gives us what is good about us and in us. Without Him, we are without worth, and absent of all goodness.

THE LUKEWARM CHRISTIAN TEST-DRIVE

Christianity isn’t a choice we take for a test-drive. When someone says, “I’ll try Jesus,” they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. There’s no such thing as “trying” God or Jesus as a belief. It’s not something we can demo. Christianity requires our full heart and true repentance to even begin to have a relationship. To test drive Christianity would be to forfeit the journey before taking the first step.

If we don’t intend to reach the destination, we aren’t going to be willing to move anywhere in the direction of that goal since every aspect of the Christian walk is permeated with the denial of ourselves, surrendering our free will and our perspectives of the world, and embracing what God has to say, think, and desire through us. We can’t even begin to do that with a “kind of” mentality. Jesus will spit partial (or lukewarm) Christianity out of His mouth (Revelation 3:16).

WHAT MAKES THE RELATIONSHIP REAL

We shed ourselves of our desires and put on Christ in spirit. The person who “believes” but doesn’t place their faith in Christ has not understood what it means to die to oneself. Faith is believing without seeing. Belief without faith is an empty promise. We haven’t received God’s free gift when we haven’t placed faith in the power of His Son, and what Jesus did for us, and why. Faith comes as a response to God’s grace in us. We can’t see the reality of who Jesus is without God’s grace. But in seeing it, faith is what makes the relationship real.

To put a little punch into these words, it’s that we’re no longer just interested in church, we’re interested in the pursuit of God, Himself.

EQUIPPED FOR CHRISTIANITY

Those who seek the kingdom of God first will have His desires added to them (Matthew 6:33). They will no longer want the same things, and they will learn not to miss their old desires. This is surrender, and this is Christianity. Not just church on Sundays, not just the sermon. Not just tithing. Not merely Christian music in the car on the freeway. But the heart change. The letting go. The wearing of Jesus’s spirit in place of our own. Accepting His substitute for our wages.

Christians aren’t really equipped Christians if we don’t understand this, otherwise we look and sound like everyone else—and at that point, we are. Christians, in authenticity, aren’t like loving atheists, and we aren’t like those who don’t crave to turn from their old life and give up old desires. The light in us is the Holy Spirit, and the impact we have isn’t ours, but His, through us. That’s what Christianity is all about.

We are vessels for Christ, alive to share in relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, ready to display His glory and compel others to see the truth of Christ in this reality, before it’s too late.

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Photo by Rebekah Dummer on Unsplash