Help from above
Among many people, Christians don’t have the greatest reputation. A cross-section of the church would likely reveal the same about people as a cross-section of society would. In the church there are slanderers, gossips, liars, perverts, drunkards, hypocrites, and worse, just as there are outside of the church. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, as Christianity takes all, accepts all. It should not anger or upset people to see that there are bad Christians out there, because we aren’t an exclusive club that takes only the very perfect. God will take you how you are, where you are. There is no line level of holiness that one needs to meet, no criteria that must be fulfilled in order to be a part of the church. In Jesus’ own words: “Healthy people don’t need a doctor–sick people do.” (Matt 9:12).
But for some reason people do get angry that people in the church are exactly the same as people outside of it. Christians are, and arguably should be, held to a greater standard than those who do not know Christ. But how you see this standard, and it being enforced on the Christian, can make matters better or worse. Go into most any church and you will hear a salvation message akin to what I said earlier: “God will take you how you are, where you are.” Whether you are evil, or just plain stupid, God loves you and accepts you. Respond to that message, and become a Christian, and in most any church you will then hear a message akin to “you aren’t good enough! Watch out or you will lose your salvation!” This is nothing new, as Paul timidly puts in Galatians 3:3: “How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort?” I like the wording of the God’s Word translation: “Are you that stupid?” It’s the old bait and switch. You’re promised an easy yoke and a light burden (Matthew 11:30), but instead what you receive are high standards and expectations. If you were at all like me, then all through school you were told that you ‘weren’t living up to your potential’, do you really want to keep having that curse upon you? That you just aren’t good enough and you have to keep trying, trying and trying? Let it go!
In my own life, as I became more and more convinced of Christ, I lost some friends. Some of my friends, who were mainly non-Christians, thought that I was far too “Christian” to be friends with, and so rejected me. Then many of the Christians who I’d encounter thought that I was far too “heathen”, and so rejected me. So there I was, not rejected by all, but enough that it stuck with me. In honesty, sure, I was rough around the edges, much like I am now. If you just judged me by a quick encounter with me you might think “this guy isn’t going to make it” (as if it was a race). And so some of my Christian peers tried to ‘help’ me, telling me what to do, and, from an objective standpoint, bullying me in an effort to conform.
Take for example, worship music. For the benefit of anyone who is not familiar with church, a church service often runs like a tv show. You have the intro music, the show, and then the shorter outro music. This intro and outro music is worship music, where people sing and dance to whatever extent depending on their church background, as worship to God. The aim of it is for the individual to get a close connection to God. Sounds good (and it is), but I’m not a little fella, and I’m very blokey bloke. Back then I was even less little, and so I just did not sing and dance. I felt stupid doing it, and the more movement I made the more those around me would get knocked about. You can say “get over yourself, it is about God”, but that’s a waste of words, and is ignorance trying to masquerade as piousness. The point was, I felt stupid doing it, and therefore it did not get me close to God, it only got me red in the face. Instead, I would feel closer to God by studying about God. By reading the Bible, reading theological books. But this was not enough for others, who would make me feel inadequate, almost to the extent of not being a real Christian, because I would not jiggle around for Jesus. So I would try to mimic them, and feel stupid. I’d try to ‘worship’, and would be even more focused on what I looked like. So while their intentions may have been good, the more they pushed me, the further I stepped away, and it became an inward struggle of “if being a good Christian is being like you, then I’d rather not.” And so, when the music played, I stood there, thinking about ways to skip to the end of it.
Fast forward to today. Do I sing and dance like the rest of them? No, but I do it to the best of my ability for where I am right now, and I do it from the heart. What changed? I stopped struggling. I stopped trying to conform. Practically speaking, I focused on Jesus. I listened to preaching that excited me, preaching about miracles, about healings, about salvations. I read books about the character of Jesus, about the heart, the love of God, and one day I noticed that I was engaging in worship music, and had been for some time, and loved it! This is grace!
Many people confuse grace with mercy. Mercy is what God gives us in response to our sins, but grace is the power that He gives us to live, and to change. We become ‘good Christians’, not by our own effort, but by God’s power within us. And it happens without us even knowing about it.
I ride a motorbike. One of the extra things that you have to pay attention to in Thailand are the roads, specifically, pot holes. If I see a pot hole, I have to actually look away from it. I have to force myself to do this because by looking at it, by focusing on it, I move towards it, and I hit it. The same thing applies to becoming a good Christian. Now, this term, ‘good Christian’, is, I admit, a useless term. But what I want you to read it as is becoming like Christ. How do we do that? The same way I miss the pot hole. We focus on where we want to go. We focus on Jesus. We focus on His love. We focus on what He has done for us. We focus on how great He is, and, hey! Look at that! We have just moved closer towards being like Him!
The church is always going to be full of people who are unlike Christ. Because God will take you how you are. But He gives us His grace, which is not a lack of right and wrong, but is His power that will take us further than we are now. Those people who made me feel inadequate early in my journey should have known that it was their role to encourage me, not to change me, to tell me more about Jesus and His greatness, not more about me and my failings. But just as I had my shortcomings, so too did they. It is not my role to change them either, but it is the role of the Holy Spirit.
The Christian life is effortless. It really is. Sure, you may be called on to do some hard things, make some hard decisions, struggle sometimes, but it is a journey built upon relationship. As you fall deeper and deeper into that relationship, that relationship will change you, until one day you too are surprised at something you can suddenly do. Simple, isn’t it?
