My wife and kids took a little trip with their grandparents a few weeks ago while I had to work, and my youngest clearly felt his daddy’s absence. He missed me so much that he would shout, “Daddy hat!” any time he saw someone wearing a red hat.
But it gets better. He apparently missed me so much that he would shout, “Daddy truck!” whenever he saw someone in a truck.
But it gets better still! My youngest child missed me so much that, upon hearing a country song, he would shout, “Daddy song!”
So according to my not-quite-two-year old, I am known for red hats, trucks, and country music. While not an altogether unfair summation of me, you could argue that he oversimplified me a little bit.
Look. The kid is little. He’ll be two in July, so I don’t take it personally. It’s quite adorable, frankly, that he thinks of me at all. But if he were much older and still only knew me for hats, trucks, and country music, I would have failed as a father.
Do you ever stop to consider the things you’re known for? If you had an observant toddler following you around, what might they say about you?
I want us to pause for a second today and consider what God says we should be known for. If you poll the culture as a whole, you might find some wildly varying opinions on Christians. Some people believe that we are judgmental, some people believe that we are cruel or hypocritical, some people believe that our actions are only for show. Still others believe that we are hateful and exclusive.
There are others, of course, who see Christians as generally benevolent and kind people, or what have you, and that’s nice, while some people have genuinely no opinion at all of Christians. Honestly, I can’t presume to speak for the world as a whole, but we can acknowledge that there are some truly unfortunate opinions about Christians floating around out there.
So where is the disconnect? Why is there such a broad misunderstanding of what Christianity should be?
Admittedly, some of it is by design. Take a look at what happened when Jesus and Nicodemus met up in secret in one of the most famous passages in the Bible.
There was a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee. After dark one evening, he came to speak with Jesus. “Rabbi,” he said, “we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.”
Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
John 3:1-3 (NLT)
For the longest time, this passage bugged me. I thought, “Wait a minute. If the Pharisees know that Jesus is from God, what’s the problem?”
Then one day recently it hit me. We tend to focus on Jesus’ comments on being “born again” here and the vital conversation that comes with it, but I think Jesus is also calling out the Pharisees and their misunderstanding of who Jesus is. He says that you cannot see the Kingdom of God if you are not born again. The Pharisees believe that Jesus is “from God,” but that’s not the whole truth. Jesus is not from God. Jesus is God. To say otherwise is to miss the most important part of the picture, and it’s the part that the Pharisees just won’t see because of their pride and their inability to trust who Jesus says He is.
So the difficult truth is that we cannot understand the Gospel if we are not in Christ. That seems paradoxical, though, because how can someone come to Christ if they can’t understand the Gospel without being in Christ? To put it simply, we come to Christ by being humble, recognizing our own sinfulness, and recognizing God’s grace and greatness in sending His son Jesus for us. It starts with recognizing that Jesus is God, we are not, and He is the only one who can help us. None of that requires a deeper understanding of the Gospel. It just requires humility.
But back to my main point. There is some misunderstanding of Christianity that should be expected because people just can’t understand it without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That is Biblical truth.
Beyond that, though, most of our problems are created by us.
“I clearly stated in sub-point A, appendix B, that…” (Image Property of XKCD.Com)
Most people have a skewed perspective of Christianity because, as Christians, we do a terrible job of communicating what Christianity is. One of my favorite webcomics has a great panel about how communication is a two-way street and most of us aren’t good at it.
It is very possible that we just aren’t communicating our faith well, and that’s an issue we have to address. So how do we do that? How do we learn to communicate our faith better?
First, we have to make sure we know our faith well enough to communicate it in the first place. You can’t teach what you don’t know. After that, we have to be patient and listen, trying to figure out where the miscommunication is coming from. I cannot tell you how many times my friends and I in college would get into these big verbal arguments about absurd academic topics only to realize that we were arguing the same point. But we got so in-depth into arguing our own stance that we didn’t really hear the other person, so we didn’t realize that we were arguing against someone who agreed with us.
It’s also crucial that we don’t use a lot of “Church” words when we talk about our faith. For instance, if you start telling someone about “propitiation,” they are going to stare at you like you have a third eye growing off a strand of hair like Alfalfa’s little peak. Just don’t say “propitiation”…ever.
That’s not to say that people are stupid. It’s just an acknowledgement that we tend to use a lot of jargon in the Church that makes no sense to anyone else. I consider myself an intelligent person, but if a bunch of electricians sit down and start talking shop, I’m gonna get lost in their words pretty darn fast.
All of this gets us down to the most important issue of all, though, and that’s the fact that our best way to communicate our faith is to live it out.
To use an especially churchy phrase (I know…hypocrite), let me direct your attention to 1 Corinthians 10.
Phew! That’s a lot of rules. Rules, rules, rules, rules. Do we like rules? No! And we especially don’t like to talk about them in Christianity because that’s one of the main things people say against our faith: “Oh, you just have so many rules to follow!”
It’s passages like 1 Corinthians 10 that make our communication of our faith so important, and so necessary to fall in line with our concept of “living out” our faith. We have to be able to live holy lives that honor God, this is true, but we also have to communicate the deepest truth of our faith: Holiness is neither possible, nor good enough.
First, Christ said, “You did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings or burnt offerings or other offerings for sin, nor were you pleased with them” (though they are required by the law of Moses). Then he said, “Look, I have come to do your will.” He cancels the first covenant in order to put the second into effect. For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.
Under the old covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins. But our High Priest offered himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then he sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand. There he waits until his enemies are humbled and made a footstool under his feet. For by that one offering he forever made perfect those who are being made holy.
And the Holy Spirit also testifies that this is so. For he says,
“This is the new covenant I will make
with my people on that day, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.”Then he says,
“I will never again remember
their sins and lawless deeds.”And when sins have been forgiven, there is no need to offer any more sacrifices.
Hebrews 10:8-18 (NLT)
Towards the end of this segment, the writer is quoting passages from Jeremiah 33 (v. 33 and 34) and I love the almost contradictory message in them. First, the Lord says, “I will make a new covenant with them and put my law on their heart.” And then God says, “I will forget all the sinful things they’ve done.”
If the law is written on our heart, why would God need to forget our sinfulness?
A big part of God’s new covenant is the fact that we can’t keep up our end of the bargain. We are expected to do what is right, but we are also forgiven under God’s mercy.
And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.
Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.
Hebrews 10:19-25 (NLT)
So immediately after talking about the juxtaposition of holiness and grace, the writer of Hebrews goes into a great discourse on some other things Christians should be known for. What examples do you see here? I see confidence, I see hope, I see encouraging. I also see a reminder that we should be people who are known for gathering together.
There’s also a very obvious call to doing good works. I recently read a book by David Platt called Something Needs to Change. In his book, Platt talks about the need for Christians to do good works, but not at the expense of sharing the Gospel. We cannot prioritize good works and social responsibilities over the Gospel because there is no amount of good food or clean water that will save someone’s soul and spare them from an eternity apart from God. Only the Gospel can do that. However, spreading the Gospel does not mean we can’t also meet physical and social needs.
“Here you go! That…that should cover you for a while, right?” (Photo by viswanath muddada on Unsplash)
Both are essential functions of Christianity. Helping people meet earthly physical needs matters, but it does not matter more than meeting their eternal spiritual needs.
I worked at a church a while back where we talked about ways to go out into the community and someone suggested going to a park and handing out water bottles that said, “Jesus loves you!” But they were adamant that these water bottles not say anything about our specific church because they didn’t want to appear like we were promoting ourselves rather than Jesus.
I heartily disagreed then, and I still do now. Giving people water is great, but if we do so without telling them where they can get living water, then we have missed the mark. Not to mention, people might read something about Jesus and get the notion to try and find a church, but there’s no promise that they’ll find a good one. They might end up at a predatory church that is only interested in taking their money or teaching them a neutered Gospel.
When we share the Gospel, we should do so confidently, believing that we have a message that people in this world need to hear.
I just have two more passages from Scripture to share with y’all here, and one of them is so stupidly obvious that I would deserve to be slapped if I failed to include it.
As soon as Judas left the room, Jesus said, “The time has come for the Son of Man to enter into his glory, and God will be glorified because of him. And since God receives glory because of the Son, he will give his own glory to the Son, and he will do so at once. Dear children, I will be with you only a little longer. And as I told the Jewish leaders, you will search for me, but you can’t come where I am going. So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”
John 13:31-35 (NLT)
In any conversation about what Christians should be known for, the word “Love” should take the forefront. Mind you, Jesus specifically says to love each other like He loves us. This means all the warm stuff like fellowship and encouragement, but also the hard stuff like conviction and sacrifice. We are called to love one another like Jesus loves.
And that brings me to the last thing I want to say. When I told you to gloss over 1 Corinthians 10, I left out the best part.
And you should imitate me, just as I imitate Christ.
1 Corinthians 11:1 (NLT)
Paul makes one of the boldest declarations we can make as Christians: “I am living like Jesus, so you should live like me.” I am going to step back here and admit that I am not comfortable telling people this. I know myself far too well to tell anyone that they should live like me.
And yet, this is what we are called to as Christians. If we sum up everything that we’ve seen here about what we should be known for, whether we’re talking about encouragement or fellowship or hope or confidence or love, it can all come down to this impossibly bold statement. We should be known for living and loving like Christ.
This is obviously not my class ring. This is my Infinity Gauntlet ring. I actually lost my class ring. Please don’t tell my parents. Since they paid for it.
When I was in high school, I had a class ring with a massive blue “gemstone” that had a cross engraved underneath it. In school, that cross served as a reminder to me that I should honor Christ with my daily life.
When I graduated from high school, though, I participated in the “Turning of the Ring” tradition where I took my ring off and turned it around to face out. Now, the whole world could read that I had graduated from Dacula High School…and nobody cared. More importantly, though, the whole world could see the large cross on my finger.
Now, that cross pointed out. In much the same way, my life should be an image of the cross for others. I should be an image of Jesus for others. Let this be your “Ring Turning” ceremony. Make the decision right now to live your life in such a way that you are an image of the Cross for this world to see. People need us to live like Christ. People need the Gospel. More than ever.
“And you should imitate me, just as I imitate Christ.”