Believing and Behaving
According to Jesus, identifying those people who truly believed was easy. The ones who kept His word were the ones who believed His word. Jesus constantly challenged those who wanted to be casual followers. Talk was cheap. If you loved Jesus, you obeyed His teachings. A true disciple listened to Jesus and then lived according to the truths Jesus was teaching. “Why do you call me Lord,” Jesus asked, “if you don’t do what I tell you to do?”
If that was Jesus’ question in the first century, I don’t like to think about what Jesus would say to His church in post-Christian America. It might be something along the lines of, “Do you people know me at all?”
Our loose theology of sanctification has made us very comfortable with sin and disobedience. In most evangelical churches, the emphasis is on coming to know Christ. We give emotional invitations for the congregants to “give their lives to Christ.” This is justification. It’s the first step of the salvation process. If you keep hanging around these evangelical churches, you’ll hear a lot of sermons about heaven. One day soon, Jesus will return and all will be well. This, of course, is glorification, the last step of the salvation process.
What you won’t hear in most evangelical churches is the middle part of the salvation experience – sanctification. Sanctification is the daily process of being shaped more and more into the image of Christ. John the Baptist said, “He must increase. I must decrease.” When we first read those words, we thought John the Baptist was talking about public awareness of their respective ministries. Now, we understand John was talking about the daily process of dying to ourselves and coming alive in Christ. This process requires daily attention and spiritual effort. We must ruthlessly confront those things in our lives that aren’t of Christ – Paul says we must put them to death – and intentionally replace those things with the things of Christ such as love, joy, peace, etc.
Ignoring the process of sanctification has led to a casualness toward sin that ultimately defeats our efforts to live a Christ-centered life. If we fail, we shrug and say, “No problem. Nobody is perfect.” Then, we nonchalantly assume the forgiveness of Jesus. The writer of Hebrews takes the early church to task for this behavior. Living like this, the writer says, takes the cross of Jesus for granted.
It does something else as well. The absence of sanctification in the local church makes evangelism almost impossible. We were embarrassed to find out several years ago that there was no qualitative difference in the lives of those who attended church and those who didn’t attend church. The number of divorces, extra-marital affairs, addictions and so forth were the same for those in the church as for those outside the church. Add to that the moral failings of several high-profile leaders and the world starts pointing out that Christians are really no different than anyone else.
Our critics have a point.
For Jesus, there’s an unbreakable linkage between our beliefs and our behavior. If we believe in Jesus, we behave according to His word. If we don’t behave according to His teachings, then we don’t believe. It’s that simple. It’s that hard.
We live in a world that is filled with words. There are so many words coming at us from every direction, most of us have simply stopped listening. We don’t listen to the news. We don’t listen to our leaders. We don’t listen…well, to anyone.
But we do watch. We watch what other people do. We watch how others behave. We watch how they handle stress. We watch how they tend to their priorities. Then, when we find someone who is living well, we’re curious.
It’s not just Jesus who’s watching. Our neighbors are watching too. My guess is if we had more Christians behaving, more of our neighbors would be believing.
This essay was first posted in Scot McKnight’s newsletter.
