March 3

Day 264: Since the Day You Met Him

When asked about Christianity, Gandhi said, "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians." He observed the hypocrisy in Christ's followers, and chose not to join.

He had concluded that Christ's followers were not any different than anyone else. And he concluded that His followers did not accurately reflect Jesus. And to some degree, he would be right.

The older I get, the more bothered I am with my own hypocrisy. What I say and what I do are not always matching. Like the apostle Paul once wrote, "I do the things I don't want to do; and I don't do the things I want to do. I am such a wretch."

It's sad when observers reject Jesus because they reject His followers. Leo Tolstoy once wrote, "If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side?"

To be fair, I am not what I have been in the past. To be fair, I am different than I would be otherwise disconnected from Jesus. God's grace to me.

A growing Christian is this: someone who sees and owns his/her own failed self-reformation projects. It is in recognizing that we are so unlike our Christ that Christ begins to increasingly change us into His image.

A wretch begins not to be so wretched when they finally admit they are wretched. But then what?

It begins with belonging to Jesus. Being washed from our sins, sanctified and justified. But it then continues by being with Jesus.

I have often said, because I think it true, "People like me better when Deb is in the room." I don't say that to be witty. I don't say it to flatter my wife (well, maybe.) I say it because it is true. I am a better man because of her.

It's in being with Jesus that makes me better. Because of Jesus we are no longer hopelessly and terminally stuck in our hypocrisy. In fact, Jesus loves to save humbled hypocrites from themselves.

I can be salvaged from my own hypocrisy, not through the grip I have on Jesus, but by the grip He has on me. And this gives me freedom.

I won't change and grow without Him. I cannot. I can't fix myself. My track record proves as much. I am and will only be free from my own hypocrisy by His doing.

The freedom He gives me is evidenced in my increasing capacity to be honest about my sins, my inconsistencies, my hypocrisy. We are called to be a "confessional people." This is not limited to reciting the creeds, the confessionals on a Sunday morning.

Being a confessional people includes confessing our own inconsistencies, knowing we have been, are, and will be forgiven.

In that is the source and means of beginning on the trail away from hypocrisy.

For those of us struggling with our own hypocrisy, we must preoccupy ourselves less with trying to be like Him, and more with simply being with Him. We will not be able to avoid being more like Him the more we are with Him.

Because the closer we are to Him, the more His light exposes and then redeems us from selfishness and sin. The more we are with Jesus, the more His truth and beauty will be discernible and recognizable in us.

Wouldn't it be amazing if someone someday said to me, "I have grown to love the person you have become since the day you met Him?"