Several weeks back I had a post asking what keeps people away from Christianity. Enough thoughts came out of the discussions around that post to keep this blog going for years to come. A lot of people pointed to the judgmental nature of people inside the church as a primary reason for staying away from not just the church, but Christianity altogether. They claim the church is full of nothing but hypocrites.
The Bible gives us a set of laws to follow. Most Christians do their best to follow those laws. Then, after trying to follow those laws, many begin to feel like they have the whole Christianity thing figured out. Once they have it “figured out”, it becomes awful easy to see how everyone else is messing up. And, other people’s mess ups always seem more destructive than our own mess ups.
But here’s the thing, those laws are not meant to be a condition of salvation. There’s only one condition that salvation depends upon. That’s the belief that Jesus is who he said he was. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). It doesn’t say believes and follows all the rules. It doesn’t say believes and never cusses. It doesn’t say believes and never has a beer. It simply says believes. So the laws are simply there for our benefit. We are given the gift of the law so that we will know how to have a better life. It would parallel the reasons why we place rules upon our children. We give our children rules for their own benefit and when they break those rules, we don’t love them any less. God’s law is the same. It is not there to keep us out of heaven or to be used to judge others.
And here’s one more “but here’s the thing” thought. The Bible also says “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Every single one of us has and does sin. None of us are capable of perfectly keeping the law. So yeah, those within the church that look down their noses at the sins of others are certainly hypocrites. But I prefer to consider them what we all are. We’re all sinners. Their sins just happen to be a little different than my sins. Again, we are all sinners. And there are not enough rules to follow or good deeds to do to fix that. The only thing that fixes that is the belief that Jesus paid the price for all of our sins.
