...But since he came up with the term, many times “cowardly Christians” will tell me that they are just trying to live an inoffensive life as we Christians are supposed to do. I don’t buy it for a second. I guarantee that if you give me 24 hours of observing you, watching your interactions with coworkers, viewing what you post online, reading your text messages, that we will discover together you are not making great strides to live “inoffensively.”
That’s not a criticism, but rather a humble observation of your human nature. For the most part, the same people who don’t want to offend someone with God’s views on sin have no problem whatsoever offending people when it comes to their favorite sports teams, the local annexation issue, or the presidential campaign. They lack the courage to warn someone away from Hell, but they aren’t about to let somebody think Andrew Luck is a better quarterback than Aaron Rodgers. They lack the guts to confront someone about a sin that will wreck their lives, but if you try to annex their house into the city, there’s going to be a fight.
We have the courage and willingness to offend others on far less significant issues than the fate of their soul. That tells me what we are lacking when it comes to our urgent purpose as Christians isn’t courage, but will.
Still others protest that it’s just not in their personality to speak truth. I heard this often from folks when I hosted my radio show. It would go something like this: “Peter, you do a radio program where you talk to people about this stuff regularly and are used to confrontation. I just wasn’t wired that way at all.” First of all, I completely agree that God gives each of us different strengths. He gifts us with different personality traits and blesses our character with a wide range of temperaments. That’s true not just in our time, of course, but throughout Scripture.
Go back and look at that list of Biblical faith heroes I offered up in the last chapter. Except let’s trade Esther in for Jesus – it gives us a woman for one thing. And putting Christ in the list might be viewed as cheating given His perfection and our…well, stunning imperfections. Now evaluate what we know of each of their personalities:
Noah was a humble man who lived quietly and peacefully in his time.
Moses was one conflicted dude. He had been like a prince in Egypt, raised in the palace. Yet he was haunted by his own ethnic origins and eventually snapped, committing murder. He fled to become a shepherd before reluctantly dragging himself back to Egypt where he had to enter the courts of Pharaoh himself.
Elijah was the very definition of a hothead. Unstable, perhaps. In one moment he wants to charge King Ahab and blow up the building, then he becomes suicidal, then he’s ready to call down fire amidst an epic performance of godly sarcasm on Mt. Carmel.
Queen Esther was a reserved woman who didn’t want the throne, was given the throne, didn’t want to make a scene, but made a scene to save her people.
John the Baptist was a rebel in every sense of the word. He didn’t care what people thought of him or said of him. He was a voice crying in the wilderness eating locust, growing long hair, and loving every minute of it.
So there you go – about every personality trait you can imagine in those five characters. But despite their different personalities and character descriptions, do you notice one thing in common? God called on all of them to speak truth. For Noah it was on the steps of the Ark. For Moses it was in the presence of “god on earth.” For Elijah it was a confrontation with hundreds of Baal’s evil prophets. For Esther it was in the spotlight of the King’s chambers. For John the Baptist it was in the wilderness to anyone passing by. No matter your personality, no matter your place, your calling is the same. Speak truth urgently as if souls depended on it. Because they do.
Be on guard also for an insidious lie that Satan tells loudly and often. It’s the lie that equates telling hard truths with being un-loving. Not long ago a friend of mine, Amanda McKinney, wrote an excellent blog post about what real Christian love is. It stuck with me because both Amanda and I are at the same point in our lives – raising children.
She points out that when you’re the parent of young children you are likely to hear (quite regularly) your kids scream at you how you’re a terrible parent and must hate them or something. I caught my oldest daughter Addie doing this on my cell phone camera once, and I use it in various speaking presentations to illustrate the point. Addie was misbehaving, breaking a rule that she knew not to break. My wife got on her about it and Addie crosses her arms, starts to pout and says in the most offended voice she can muster, “I guess you don’t love me anymore.” My wife, always the delicate one, responds with, “Addie, that’s just dumb.” But it wasn’t dumb to Addie. Since Jenny was telling her she couldn’t do something, there was really only one conclusion her 6-year-old mind could come to: “Mommy doesn’t love me.” After all, if Mommy did love her, she would obviously let her do whatever she wanted to do, right? The pinnacle of love is complete and utter permissiveness, is it not?
Amanda points out in her blog that if parents actually started believing their kids when they said that, if they started “loving” children the way the kids wanted to be loved rather than needed to be loved, there would truthfully be no loving parents anymore. Why? Because it’s patently obvious that love isn’t always affirming, it isn’t always condoning, it isn’t always saying “yes.”
Christians, we could do well to learn that lesson. The moment someone who isn’t a Christian says they don’t feel loved – or worse, they say they feel “judged – we immediately begin believing that we did something wrong. Or even if we don’t, we are soon buried beneath an avalanche of criticism from our Christian brethren rebuking us for “driving someone from the faith,” we are pummeled until we sheepishly issue some kind of apology for not showing the “love of Christ.”
Go back to that scene on my cell phone camera for a minute. What would have happened if instead of filming and chuckling to myself, I jumped up and took Addie’s side? What if the moment she proclaimed that Mommy doesn’t “love her anymore,” I flipped out on Jenny and said, “What have you done?!”
What if I bombarded Jenny in front of Addie and our other two kids, with reproach and scolding, belittling her and telling her how much she was damaging our relationship with our children. What message would that send to Jenny? Or worse, what kind of confused message would that send to our kids?
Welcome to the modern American church where believers can’t wait to tag the “judgmental Christians” as they proudly assume the mantle of “loving Christian.” It’s what Amanda calls, “Good Cop/Bad Cop Christianity.” She writes,
“For awhile, the Church tried to pull off a Good Cop/Bad Cop routine when someone sinned within the congregation – with people like me playing the bad cop, and the non-confrontational folks just waiting quietly for the uncomfortable stuff to be handled so they could go back to planning showers and pitch-ins.
But now, we’re to the point where the “good cop” Christians don’t want the “bad cops” to have a role at all.
In fact, now the former good-cops are sharing articles about why the police force should stop “policing” altogether. [i.e., “Don’t judge” Facebook posts]
…and the nonbelievers keep shrieking, ‘Why can’t you other Christians be more like these nice ones???’ It’s exactly what happens when the ‘fun’ parent throws the rule-enforcer under the bus.
Thanks for worrying about my reputation, “Good, Loving” Christians…But you and I are supposed to be on a team. You’re causing the anarchy…because you’d rather do away with tough love and avoid rocking the boat. You’re worried about upsetting children, so you’re letting them take over.”[i]
I really can’t imagine a more important parallel for all believers to read right now than the one McKinney just made. Just like children who don’t know any better, the lost among us feel “judged” and “unloved.” But if we Christians truly believe we do know better than them (we do believe that, right?), then why are we concerning ourselves with their opinion of us anymore than we fret over our kids declaring we don’t love them anymore? If the godless sinners among us have no moral compass, why are we listening to them to determine if we’re heading in the right direction?[ii]
