LIE: How I live doesn’t matter as long as I’m saved

Lie:      How I live doesn’t matter as long as I’m saved.

Truth: Our lifestyle reflects what we really believe.

The greatest source of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyles. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable. — Brennan Manning

As Brennan Manning says, it’s probably the biggest problem in the church today – this disconnect between what we say we believe and how we actually live. More than anything else, this systemic hypocrisy keeps the world from giving Christ a second thought.

Most Christians today are muddled and compromised. We paper over our guilty consciences, hoping that God, who we know to be merciful, will wink at our sin. Consequently our sins pile up and we end up believing the lie that some sins must be unconquerable, justifying ourselves by comparing our lifestyles to those we deem to be our ‘inferiors.’

Because we lack true community living, we tend to live anonymously, more easily pretending and projecting the appearance of a godly lifestyle while actually living a near-double life, even in our own homes. We pray faithless platitudes with no real turning from our sins. We sense deep down that something is amiss; we lack power in our prayers and our children yawn at our earnest exhortations. They instinctively see through the thin layers of our hypocrisy. Perhaps they see a veneer of conviction too, but only on Sundays.

But where does this entrenched hypocrisy come from? How did this lackluster Christianity become so prevalent and acceptable?

Several factors contribute to this malaise:

1  In his book Cost of Discipleship, Detrick Bonhoeffer traces ‘cheap grace’ back to the church’s establishment of the monastic system:

It is highly significant that the Church was astute enough to find room for the monastic movement, and to prevent it from lapsing into schism. Here on the outer fringe of the Church was a place where the older vision was kept alive. Here men still remembered that grace costs, that grace means following Christ. Here they left all they had for Christ’s sake, and endeavored daily to practice his rigorous commands. Thus monasticism became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity and the cheapening of grace. But the Church was wise enough to tolerate this protest, and to prevent it from developing to its logical conclusion. . . . Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard — a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience.[i]

This was only the beginning of a long history of the church’s conscious and unconscious stratification and classification of people in the church.

2  Related to that in our own day is the clergy-laity structure in most of our churches. Though it doesn’t have to be the case, often pastors and clerical staff, end up subtly ‘lording it over the flock,’ even unintentionally. This two-tiered Christianity is all the excuse many Christians need to accept their standing as a second-class citizen of the kingdom. Unconsciously they’ve resigned and relieved themselves to live inferior Christian lives.

3  Affluence is also a major factor in how Christians see themselves. “The love of money is the root of all evil,” and when money is in abundant supply, people “pierce themselves through with many sorrows” and are choked out by the thorns and thistles — the deceitfulness of riches and the desire for material things that choke out the message of Christ. Consequently we become unfruitful.

The corollary to affluence is privation, suffering and persecutions. Hear Richard Wurmbrand in his own words, from Tortured for Christ:

I have seen Christians in Communist prisons with fifty pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers, in whose throats spoonfuls of salt had been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold – and praying with fervor for the Communists. This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was poured out in our hearts.

Peter echoed Wurmbrand:

Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. — I Peter 4:1-2

But in our zeal to reconcile our beliefs to our lifestyle, we must be careful not to set up soul-killing laws or pile on man-made rules and expectations on ourselves or other believers. This is where so many of God’s people have gone astray, and in their zeal, have made things worse. It’s how cults get started. It’s not our job to tell people specifically what kind of lifestyle is expected or acceptable. Rather, we demonstrate by a living example, what it means to live with God’s grace and power, to peel back the layers of deception that keep us from believing in a God who is truly worthy of our whole lives.

Don’t just curse the darkness, turn on a light. Discipleship takes time, but we will eventually see the fruit of our labors if we’re faithful over time. Many will not see it and will choose to go their own way, but some will choose to go the way of Christ, following him and taking up their cross.

By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. — John 13:35

See also the introduction to this category: Lies about sin.

[i] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship, Revised Edition, MacMillan, New York 1963.