I am catching up on some blog reading that I’ve been putting off for several weeks. Every year it seems that the rush toward the holidays gets busier and busier. I’m not sure why, and perhaps it’s my own fault for overcommitting myself to work, church, and personal activities and projects. I haven’t had a lot of “think” time recently, so today I took some time off to just read.
And this quote struck me:
“Instead of demanding that our culture act more Christ-like, let’s start demanding that of ourselves.”
As my elder daughter would say… “Um, yeah…”
The quote comes from a posting on Collide magazine’s blog entitled ‘Tis the Season by Scott McClellan. The article talks about how we should act in the face of attacks on our belief in Christ and on Christmas. And it stopped me cold.
I was brought up in the Southern Baptist church. I loved the pastor, I loved my Sunday School teachers, and I loved Jesus enough to commit my life to him at age 11. I learned what was “Christian” and what wasn’t. I learned to run away from things that didn’t fit my belief system and, unfortunately, from people who didn’t fit my mold of what Christianity should be. And yet I knew, as do all Christians, that Jesus hung out with the very people I was taught to avoid.
In later years, as the conservative Christian movement started to grow, I started believing that the battle was between me and non-believers. Especially those non-believers who were stridently vocal about it (atheists, humanists, pagans, etc.). It cost me some friendships, and I became much more like the narrow-minded rabidly conservative pack that I care to admit. At the same time, I became much more conservative politically and in many ways typified the young Republican Christian that Ralph Reed came to represent.
Thankfully, God continued to love me even as I became more like Saul than Paul, more like the Pharisees than the disciples. He continued to place people in my path that were different from me, both politically and socially, and yet who were just as committed to the Kingdom as I said I was. He continued to bombard this good little Baptist boy with the message that “I gave my Son for everyone, not a select few, and certainly not just you.”
When we moved from the Dallas area to San Antonio almost five years ago, we visited a lot of churches (all of them Baptist naturally). And I found a couple of churches where I could have been perfectly happy attending. They were much like my previous churches, structured and conservative and staunchly Baptist. And then we attended our current church, Community Bible Church, which immediately put my concept of organized religion into a tail-spin. Yes, the place was full of people just like me. Yes, it’s what I would call an upscale mega-church. And yes, I’m sure that it has just as many flaws (maybe more) as the churches I left behind.
But in the midst of the mega-size and mega-choir and mega-everything, there was a realization that there were a lot of people there seeking Christ who were decidedly not like me. And I discovered that I was attending church with a significant number of people who had never been in a church before. And God was welcoming them and offering them the same salvation through His Son that I had received 30 years prior. And my faith was renewed.
My life has changed inexorably because I finally got the message, that it’s first and foremost about love. About God’s love for us, so huge and so incomprehensible that He came to us in human form to die on a cross, alone and in pain and suffering, so that we could be His forever. And Jesus commanded us to love others just as we love ourselves. Period.
To love others even if they dressed differently or attended different schools or listened to different music or lived in different neighborhoods. To love others if they read different books or watched different TV shows or had different skin color or voted for a different presidential candidate.
To love others even if they didn’t believe in Christ.
And so I’ve begun to live this out as loud as possible. I still have my moments where I judge and condemn and look askance at “those people”. I still slip into old habits like flipping on conservative talk radio occasionally. And I still struggle with how to embrace those who ridicule me for believing in God and salvation through his Son, Jesus Christ.
But I’m free. And with that freedom comes the enormous responsibility that I have to love every single person I come in contact with just as much as I love my wife, my kids, my friends, and myself. I have to show Christ’s love for me by loving those He loved, by helping those He helped, and by acting as He would act. With compassion and forgiveness and humility. And having a heart that is big enough and open enough to accept every single solitary person for exactly who they are.
And never forgetting that my hope is in the Lord. That my salvation is in Christ. That my future is secure not by what I think or do or own or consume or how I vote or dress. But my future is secure because Jesus gave His life up so that I could have mine and so that I could be Him for others.
Christ demands everything from me. How can I demand less from myself?
