Four types of Christians to be or not to be

Every day (well, nearly every day anyway) I read My Utmost for His Highest. This is an awesome daily devotional, and I highly recommend it for every Christian. As I read the devotional for January 31st, I had a thought go through my mind. I got to thinking about this theme:

"Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be proclaimers of the Gospel of God... Paul had not a hypersensitive interest in his own character. As long as our eyes are upon our own personal whiteness we shall never get near the reality of Redemption."

As I thought about it, I had to admit that there are indeed those who are more concerned about their personal holiness than about the salvation of others. I myself have been subject to this temptation from time to time in my walk as a Christian. However, as I reflected further, this is far from the only (or perhaps even biggest) problem in the church today.

So much ink (and so many electrons) have been spilled in condemning those who, like Chambers's targets, are more concerned about their own self-righteousness than the salvation of their neighbors. We should certainly strive not to be like this. However, that made me think about two other kinds of Christians that we should strive not to be like, and the kind that we should.

The first kind we should strive not to be is the polar opposite (who we'll call the "emergents"), those who say they are concerned about the salvation of others at the expense of their own personal righteousness. These blind guides, which I have elsewhere called "Cursing Christians," are lauded by Dallas Willard and in books like "Blue Like Jazz." They seem to believe that only by forsaking personal righteousness, by (misapplying Paul) being like all the sinful things done by all people, they are somehow making the Gospel more acceptable to them. I have at least two problems with these emergents. First, the absolute best I can say about these people (as a fairly recently reformed sinner myself) is that this is totally naïve. If somebody had come up to me cursing up a blue streak and then attempted to tell me about the love of Jesus, I would have laughed in his face. I would have said "oh yeah, you talk a good game, but when it comes down to it you are just as bad as I am." It was men who didn't judge me but still showed me great personal holiness who made me consider Christianity and the love of God, not men who made me feel comfortable in my sin. And second, anybody who thinks that once God saves us from our sins He is totally content with leaving us wallowing in their presence (that He takes away the penalty but does not expect us to change our voluntary indulgence in them) has not read the Bible very carefully. When God saves us, it's for a purpose, and that purpose should include personal holiness.

The second kind of person we should try to avoid being are those who change the "Gospel of God" to make it supposedly more palatable to non-Christians (these we'll call "the seeker sensitives"). The SS's do (in my experience) exhibit personal holiness, but present only part of the true Gospel of God. I heard a church service awhile back where the speaker steadfastly refused to call a sin a sin; any bad things the hearer may have done were passed off as mistakes, as "dumb stuff." This kind of presentation of the Gospel does not convict anybody of sin, and if anything is abundantly clear in the Bible as regards soteriology, it should be that true repentance is needed to be saved.

Given a total of three types of Christians we should not be, what kind should we be? First, God wants us to be very concerned about the salvation of others. But let's not imagine that God is like us, that He can only do one thing at a time ("ok, he's witnessing to somebody now; I can't manage to make him holy too, so I guess that'll have to slide"). No, if God wants us to share the Gospel with people, He can figure out a way to do it while we're exhibiting personal holiness. And second, if God wants to save somebody (since all Christians should agree it's God who saves), He will do it through a full presentation of the Gospel; He doesn't need some watered-down, "user-friendly" Gospel-lite to do it for Him.

I think it's obvious. God wants us to follow what we know is right as regards holiness, and present the full Gospel to people at the same time. As long as we strive not to be personally condemning but to preach the truth, God will use that to save some. For others - for what Christian can doubt there are multitudes who will not be saved, though it pains us? - the proclamation of the full Gospel will merely add to their wrath.

One of the most personally haunting things I can think of is a person who can honestly go to God and say "Sure, You sent Gary to me to preach the Gospel; but he never gave it to me." Heaven help me if I do not preach the full Gospel.

Cursing Christians

How can you say I shouldn't use "curse words"? To be “relevant” to people don't you have to use their language? You wouldn’t go to Aborigines speaking the King’s English - you’d speak their own language. We have to use profanity to reach them!

I have heard that argument many times, and I'm sure you have, too. It's so compelling, so sensitive ... and yet, so wrong. It is true, you must approach Aborigines speaking Aboriginal languages. But we’re dealing with something altogether different here. Aboriginal languages are neither better nor worse than English - they’re just different. But profanity is different: everybody KNOWS inside that it’s wrong, in fact most people use it primarily because they know that.

How do I know? Well, I have a whole lot of years of experience with profanity - around 20, from about age 15 to 35 - and I can tell you two things I've learned. First, all that time I used profanity freely although, and partly because, it was wrong. Inside, I think I was expressing rebellion against those mean ol’ church people. Of course, I didn't say to myself "I wish to rebel against the church and God and so I think I will use many curse words today": I never examined my attitudes, I just did it.

But once God saved me from my sins, I had a complete change in attitude. I knew immediately - I had always known inside, and so do you - that profanity was wrong and God hated it. It was really not any new knowledge God was bringing to me. 1 John 2:7-8 (NIV) expresses very well what we all go through:

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.

It was an old command I had always known inside. Yet it was a new one as well: I hadn't cared that my speech was dishonoring to God, but now I did. Suddenly, in a moment, it appeared to me as a new command, and one that I knew that I both had to and wanted to follow. This is one of the many reasons I believe the monergists/Calvinists have it right: God took out my uncaring heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh against my will, yet once He did it, it was my will. Before, I freely wanted to keep on sinning and resist God; after, I freely wanted to follow Him. So I stopped it almost immediately, knowing it wasn't something that God wanted me to do.

The second thing I can tell you is that if somebody had come up to me cursing up a blue streak and then said: “but enough about that: let me tell you about Jesus” I’d have immediately sensed the contradiction, the hypocrisy of it all. Although, like most people, I couldn't put into words exactly what “hypocrisy” was, I would have known inside that it was being one thing and acting like another; and the hypocrisy of the cursing Christians would have been evident. It would have been yet another roadblock to faith I threw up.

In fact, what started to bring me around was a couple of guys that I worked with who did not use profanity. They didn't hold it over the rest of us, they didn't treat us like they thought they were better; they just didn't swear. In fact, they were strangely silent when we would profane God's name and use disgusting synonyms for sexual acts and human body parts and excretions. I vividly remember an occasion when I used a particularly vile expression in talking to one of the guys. I had made up that exact expression, and I was rather proud of myself; it pains me to think about now. Anyway, he was rather quiet, and then said softly, "you know, that's kind of disgusting if you think about it." That was nearly 20 years ago, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was not born again until almost 10 years later, but it had a definite impact on me. It was a chink appearing in my self-built armor against God.

So, you know what the really sad part is? These cursing Christians - who I have no doubt have deluded themselves that they're cursing for the Kingdom - don’t know that those poor precious unbelieving souls are laughing at them inside and using their profanity as yet another defense that they toss up in their desperate attempt to avoid God. In their "caring" and becoming all things to all men (a verse taken out of context if ever there was one), they are helping the people they say they care about be sped on their way to Hell. It’s truly heart-wrenching.