The United States has roughly 280 million Christians. The American Church is huge, and in light of recent disasters – the Las Vegas shooting, various hurricanes and fires all up the west coast – it needs to be proactive. The Church should be changing the world, not watching it.
Jesus provides us with an ability to stand out and live differently. If we make an effort to fit in and follow the crowd, what is the point of being a member of the Church at all? If He does not change us from the inside out, having Christ inside us is no better than denying Him. By fitting Him into our lives on our time in the way that we want Him to fit, we are robbing both ourselves and Jesus of a wonderful, life-giving relationship.
If we use Jesus as our tool to hide behind in hard times, we are limiting the ways that He can use us. If He is someone we call on in times of trial but then ignore when things are good, is that any better than ignoring him all the time? Simply knowing about Jesus is not enough. If Christ does not change the way we live, then we are wasting the greatest opportunity we could ever have.
The Church should stand out. We should be labeled as kind, loving, helpful and joyful. But instead the Church is labeled as judgmental, hypocritical and out-of-touch. The Church is looked at as an organization. Jesus has the ability to turn each one of us into a miraculous individual who can change the world, and yet we try to contain Him into a one-hour block of the week. This is wrong. We should be blown away by the beauty of Christ and by the fact that He pursues us, rather than tolerates us.
We love because He first loved us. But are we loving anymore? In John 17, Jesus prays that we could be safe from the evil one, but He also prays that we stay in the world. We are not called to hide from disasters. We are called to love through them and provide relief.
I know so many Christians that have Jesus buried so far beneath their calm, collected, normal exteriors that they may even forget He is there. This is not what Christ called us to do. Christ came and died to take away our sins so that we could share His radical love with the world, not so that we could blend in and watch with the rest of the world. If we as the Church cannot see this, we deserve Christ even less than nothing.
Being a Christian is not an achievement, and Jesus is not a trophy to put on a shelf. Jesus Christ is someone to lead us and to shape us. Christianity is not a label; it is a process. Jesus will not make us rich by earthly standards, and he will not ease every pain, and He will not make life easy. He will, however, make us more humble, joyful, compassionate, caring, and loving. But Christ cannot operate from the backseat. The Church needs to commit to Christ’s love fully. Jesus is not tame, but He is good. The Church needs to be the same.
