It is strange that people seem to abandon Jesus because Christians are not perfect people.
This seems odd. All people are flawed—including (gasp!) Christians. After all,
Christianity holds that men are fallen, imperfect, and sinful. Are there Christians who are
less than loving and kind and compassionate? Of course there are! These imperfect
people do not prove that Christianity is wrong—they verify it. The Christian faith holds
that men, in our current state, are sinful. At Romans 2:29-31, Paul describes men as
follows:
Being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness,
covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness;
they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors
of evil things, disobedient to parent, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving,
unforgiving, unmerciful…
He goes on, but you get the idea. The point is that Christian orthodoxy never claims that
Christians will be perfect people—or even half-way decent people. That is the reason we
need a Savior.
This all makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is why some people leave the church or
the faith because they discover that some Christians can be hypocritical, unloving,
malicious, etc. It seems to me a very poor excuse to give up on the church. My pastor
often reminds his congregation that the church is not a museum for saints, it is a hospital
for sinners.
All of this abandonment of Christianity because of the flaws of some Christians seems
rather a shabby excuse. Every institution, every single one, from government to
education to sports teams to wars to marriage to love to parenthood, all are flawed. All
have less than perfect histories. All have some scam artist pretending to represent that
particular cause, be it a sports team or a political party or your heart. And yet we do not,
because of that person’s sins, give up our sports or politics or love. We do not, I hope,
abandon the ideals of our country because of a flawed politician. We do not stop
enjoying Mexican food because we learned that there was a manager at the local Taco
Bell who stole cash from the register, do we? Why do we treat religion so differently?
Why do we think it is sensible to give up on religion because some minister in some
church, perhaps even in some other state, turned out to be a bad man?
Maybe because we are eager to find an excuse to bolt from the discipline and self-denial
that church asks of us? Maybe because the Devil knows how weak we are and how easy
we are to convince us to abandon anything that says, “You are not the center of the
universe.”
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