"Christians are such hypocrites!" "The church is full of hypocrites!" As a pastor I've heard those two statements quite a bit over the years. Maybe you've said them or at least thought them. I confess I've always wondered why people have said that when Christians have never claimed to be anything but flawed, failed and fallen people. Our platform of belief begins with a foundational stone of our own sinfulness and wickedness. However, the other day I had an 'a-ha' moment and I now think I understand why so many think of us as hypocrites.As followers of Jesus we teach that we should submit to God's will. We believe that God reveals His nature, character and will in the Bible so we seek to surrender ourselves to what God desires of us. In other words, when Jesus called us to follow Him we believe He meant for us to live like Him, and more specifically, we believe it meant for us to follow the morality that God has delineated in the Scriptures. We truly want to live the morality the Bible lays out for us.
But what I just said is really the second half of our message-- the outflow of the first and primary piece. The central message of a Christian's faith is that he or she is selfish and thus a sinful person. We are all morally flawed and thus rightly and consequently under the judgment of a righteous God. You may manage to be more moral than me, but you still fall short of moral perfection-- especially morality as God delineates in His Bible. Moral failure includes selfishness as lived out in lying, stealing, bitterness, lust and murder. We tend to compare ourselves and say, "As long as I'm better than most, God will accept me, forgive me, because he obviously grades on a curve." Unfortunately He doesn't grade on a curve; just one sin is enough to condemn us before this perfect, righteous, loving God.
So the Christian good news begins by understanding the bad-- I need help. I can't earn God's forgiveness by being better than others. You may have heard the old joke of the two friends who come upon a grizzly bear and one starts to put on his tennis shoes. "You can't outrun that bear!" says one friend. "I don't have to", replies the other. "All I have to do is outrun you!" That's not how God's justice works. The 'grizzly bear' of God's justice will run us all down-- we need a Savior.
The good news the Christian puts his hope in is that God so loved him (and all of us) that He sent a Savior-- Himself. Jesus as God came and lived a morally perfect life and then gave up that morally perfect life in exchange for my morally sinful and flawed life. In dying for me, both physically and spiritually, Jesus became my Savior! Because of Jesus all my sin is forgiven. Not by my merit. Not because now I'm perfect but because I trust in Him to be my substitute. By faith I rely upon His love and His work for me.
Why would anyone believe that? Really for one reason only. Because the testimony of many a man and woman is that Jesus proved it by rising from the dead. They killed him by hanging him on a cross and they buried Him and thought that was that, but history says it wasn't. On Friday afternoon He dies and on Sunday morning He walks out of the grave. The resurrection of Jesus, that truth and that reality, changed history without coercion and force. That truth is still changing men and women's lives today.
We're back full circle to where I started from. Because Jesus is now my Savior, I want to follow Him. I want to live as God desires me to live. I still fall woefully short. I'm still capable, and even struggle with, wanting to be just as selfish as I ever was. But nonetheless, God has given me a new heart and His Spirit to help me-- there will be a change. Not a perfect change, but a change. I will be more like Jesus.
But here's where I had the 'a-ha' moment-- people outside the church hear us talking about this change and our desire to follow Jesus and be Biblically moral men and women, and without understanding the primary piece, they think that being a Christian simply means seeking to live as moral people. That conception is reinforced in their minds as they see Christians fight vociferously and politically for Biblical morality. And then-- then they see us fail. They watch us fail morally in about every way a person can fail. They even see those Christians who have been most vocal about God's declared morality fail, or maybe I should say they especially see those who are most vocal fail. And because they believe the Christian life is merely about living morally-- they see us as hypocrites. Think about it for a minute; if you thought Christianity was simply about following a moral code, and you saw people who preach and promote that code fail often and openly, wouldn't you think we are all hypocrites too?
So I conclude this note with two challenges. To the Christ follower I want to urge you to do your best to help people understand the heart of our Christian faith. It's not about being moral. We can't be moral so as to earn God's forgiveness or eternal life. Jesus died to give us what we need-- He rose from the dead to prove He had succeeded. Be careful not to confuse the message.
Finally, to the one who might be reading this and thinks all Christians are hypocrites, I want you to know that we all agree with you. We live hypocritically of the morality that we believe God desires of us. Even now as we follow Jesus we still fail. We all too often lie, cheat, steal, lust and live selfishly even as we know that is not what God desires of us. But please understand that is not our central message. The primal truth we cling to is that in our moral sinfulness, Jesus died for our sins that He might give us freely, by grace through faith, the forgiveness we need. It's not earned by living to some degree of moral perfection-- its simply received with a grateful heart. If you've not understood the bedrock truth of the Christian faith, dig in until you do. You may still reject it, but don't confuse it with mere moralism.
