Christian Hypocrisy: Part 2

This is the sequel to a post I write a while back titles “Christian Hypocrisy.” In that article I discussed how most folks aren’t bothered by Jesus the man or what he stood for, but his followers drive them nuts. I gave several reasons why Christians don’t walk the way they talk. Let me give another big one—and this one explains why whole denominations get so whacky.

Two qualifiers: I was introduced to this idea several years ago and I really struggled with it, but I’ve come to believe it completely. I’m going to state it a couple different ways, one that we can easily agree with and one that is quite challenging.

The Hard way: When someone shares the Gospel with another person, they also share the spiritual wrinkles they have. If they believe that Love is over all, but it’s okay to hate some sinners—well then they will likely pass that on to the people they save. Legalistic Christians run about making more legalistic Christians. Christians that believe God doesn’t require you to grow in faith produce more baby Christians. Christians that don’t know how to push deeply into worship make more of those. Christians that believe in God but don’t think he still talks directly to us replicate that. And so on.  

The Friendly Way: God so completely trusts us with his story and reputation that he doesn’t require us to become perfect before we begin working for him.

The answer is clearly to seek God with all our hearts to a point that our hearts beet in rhythm with his before we share him with the world. We should introduce someone to God and then get out of the way. We need to spend more time encouraging others in their journey and less creating “sound bite answers.” If we really understood the degree to which we start new converts off on the wrong track we’d spend a lot less time doing certain things. We’d be less critical of how sinners live when they have no understanding of Christ’s love. We’d spend more time sharpening each other. We’d spend 90% of our evangelistic effort focusing on God’s goodness and almost save the lost on accident. It should be a bi-product of living each day with God, not a specific endeavor we “take up” on God’s behalf.

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