Let me start by saying that I did not grow up in a Christian home, have hated church for much of my life, have sinned more than I could possibly admit, am still not married, have called out Christians for their hypocrisy while being a hypocrite, do not have a seminary degree, and am completely unqualified to lead a church or give you advice in a blog…but I have met Jesus and I want other people to.
If you’re still reading, then you are probably the type of person that believes God can use the least-likely people to accomplish His purposes—and in fact, prefers it. He likes to “show off” and there is no better way for Him to do so than by using ordinary people to do extraordinary things. God constantly “shows off” just by the fact that He saved a guy like me AND still has used me for His purposes (and for that matter, wants to use you). This simple fact, keeps me both in a state of perpetual awe and humble recognition of who HE is and who I am. I am thankful for the fact that it is all about HIM and not about me. Why do I say that? Because life is hard and it is heavy and when we live life for “US”, we tend to make it even harder. All of this ends up making me wonder sometimes, “what is the point of all this?” I read the Bible and find myself longing for something that I think seems to be oftentimes missing in our modern version of Christianity. To put it simply, I think Christians tend to talk a lot about doing things differently, but aren’t so good at actually changing things. We want closeness to God, but we don’t want to really change anything with ourselves—we just want to change everyone else around us. I think we’d rather be the world’s savior, than tell them about The Savior.
Asking these types of questions and challenging the way we do things in the church tends to make people feel uncomfortable and starts to make them ask (like maybe you are as you read this)—“Who does this guy think He is?” That’s the rub though, I don’t think I am “anybody” but I do think God has and does want to see His people living in the Truth of who He is and acting out of that relationship in a world that desperately needs that Truth. I believe He wants to see His Church fulfill her potential and become His face to this world. I believe He wants to stop seeing His people living in shallow community when He has repeatedly told us that we need each other in a much more intimate and powerful way than 2 hours a week on a Sunday morning can or will ever fulfill. I believe He wants us to stop living in fear and start abiding in grace. I believe He wants us to act like Christ instead of talking like Him. I believe He wants to see a fundamental, life-altering change in His people and through that to see a powerful, world-altering Church.
That’s what this “Christian” thing is all about. It’s about a God that has pursued His creation since the beginning. It’s about a God that came not just to die on a cross for our sins so that we could feel good about our mistakes but who died to restore relationship. It’s about “messed up” people, dropping the façade of “having it all together” and following the example given by Jesus Christ. So, follow they must, empowered by a Holy and Living Spirit, all the while advancing His Kingdom, sometimes an inch at a time, in purposeful living and hopeful expectation of the day that He comes back and “fixes” all the hurt and mess we’ve created through thousands of years of doing “life” on our own.
That is what it means to be a Christian.
It’s not what kind of music we sing, clothes we wear, how many times we dunk a person before they’re “officially” baptized, or spending our time trying to earn something that we can never repay. It’s about God, after watching us turn our back on Him over and over, invading this Earth in the form of a man—Jesus Christ—and dying a horrible physical and spiritual death to give us a chance to be with Him again. It’s about God, little by little, day by day, healing our hearts and showing us who we REALLY are. It’s about God, while constantly healing us, still using us to tell people about Jesus Christ and how we can live again through Him. It’s about God loving us and wanting us to love each other. It’s that simple.
How is it that we’ve made it so complicated? Complications come anytime we add something to The Gospel. It’s a hard pill to swallow but in our attempt to be “better” to be “worthy” and to show Him to a world, we add rules and we fill in perceived gaps in His Word with our own solutions, instead of going back and applying Jesus to these “gaps”.
I know some of that sounds overly philosophical and “rage against the establishment” jargon—you know, the twenty-something tendency to see flaws in anything and everything that is traditional or old. Please believe me when I say, that is not the case. In fact, I think my point is the opposite—we’ve gotten away from the “roots” of our faith, from the traditions and ideas that started it all. Maybe in our attempts to serve Jesus….we sometimes forget Jesus.
And without Jesus, none of this Christianity “thing” makes sense and it will inevitably go off-track. So it stands to reason, that only Jesus can gets us back on track. This blog post isn’t about bashing Christians. It’s not about creating more division—between the people who “really get it” and those that don’t. It’s about asking questions. It’s about searching for what matters…so we can show this broken, dying, dark world the kind of hope that only Jesus Christ can offer it.
It is about Jesus.
It always has been.