The Bad Trade of Christianity

I was inspired to write this blog entry after the sermon yesterday at Central Baptist from our pastor, Joel Lawrence. He was speaking on the power of the Holy Spirit, and about halfway through the sermon he spoke on the bad trade that Christians way too often make. This bad trade is results in our desire to control events and situations in our life, while so often neglecting the true power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The bad trade is that we trade the Resurrection for morality.

So what does this mean? Again, I am taking much of this from Pastor Joel, while adding a few of my own thoughts.  The first point is that Christianity is not merely a philosophy or a set of laws that inspire us to live better. It is not a set of rules. It is not there merely to help us live better lives. It is not there to help bad people turn into good people. It is not there to help bad people live better. The Bible, the Word of God, is not a story of morally bad people turning good, of bad people suddenly becoming better people.

To think of this another way, it is a mistake to think of the world as a continuum of bad to good, and those that who embrace Christianity will suddenly be able to move a little bit more along this continuum to the good.

The reason for this should be clear. People do not need Christianity to be good, moral people. There are plenty of good, moral people in the world. Perhaps I am a little naïve, but I generally think that most people are good and moral, and are striving to be better in general. Christianity is not needed for this, religion is not needed for this. There are great moral teachers, there are self-help gurus, there are all kinds of people and organizations that individuals can turn to if they want to improve themselves. Pretty much if someone obeys the laws of this country they will more or less be a good and moral person. This is not the goal of Christianity.

Pastor Joel quoted two tragic errors that come from this bad trade. Two tragic errors that come from trading Resurrection for morality.

The first is that the bad trade makes us as Christians terrible witnesses for Christ. The reason for this is tragically clear. If Christians decide that it is their job to be the moral arbitrators of society, and if they decide that morality is the most important aspect of Christianity, we are setting up ourselves for failure. None of us are perfect. One outcome is that we fall short of the moral standards we set and thus open ourselves up to either be ignored or ridiculed. The other possibility is that we demand a standard that we can’t maintain ourselves, which of course opens us up to the charge of hypocrisy.

These outcomes torpedo our ability to witness Jesus Christ, and our testimony is destroyed. I have touched on this before (and this is something that Pastor Joel rightly did not mention), but I see playing out in a significant way in our political system. When a certain set of laws/policies are fused with Christianity, there is a huge problem when the people who push for these laws don’t live up to them, or when the laws are seen to be counterproductive, or mean-spirited, or discredited in some way, then this reflects poorly on Christianity. Even when the law/policy is perfectly good, when people don’t live up to them it destroys credibility.

This is also true in the church in general, outside of the political realm. If there is a push for certain behaviors as a requirement to be a part of the church, to belong to the club, it results in similar problems. When the leaders, or other people pushing for certain moral behaviors as the key component of being a Christian fail to live up to those same standards, it destroys everything, the entire foundation of the faith. And the other aspect of this is that the moral behaviors that are pushed are the ones that (conveniently) most people don’t struggle with. It clearly is the sins of the others that must be sought out, exposed, and destroyed. Never mind the sins that people in the congregation currently struggle with.

The second consequence of the bad trade mentioned by Pastor Joel is engaging in this trade leads us, as Christians, to be followers that who live weak and anemic lives. We think that God is primarily concerned with us moving from bad to good, and we constantly judge ourselves by this paradigm. Our relationship with God is based primarily on our ability to move from bad to good. When we fail to do so (as we ultimately will), we will experience a crisis of faith, or perhaps we will try harder. And if we do happen to have some marginal improvement on the continuum of bad to good, this is not the power of God, and is fully divorced from the Spirit. Constantly fighting this battle makes our faith weak, and does not allow us to truly be strong in the power of God.

The last point I would make from this is that beyond these two tragic errors, it is impossible to do this anyways. To fully live up to the teachings of Christ is impossible. His teachings set a standard that no mortal human can achieve. When can be really good and still fall short of what Christ demands of us. And He does say that falling short will lead to death, as we have sinned against God. This is quite the burden. To push this yoke of fully living up to his teachings as the primary aspect of our faith sets us up for failure.

But the Gospel is in fact Good News. The Gospel is not making people better and more moral, the Gospel is about Resurrection. It is about making dead people alive. It is making us, as people who will always fall short of the morality required (if we were to live by the law) to have new life. We cannot read Jesus and think that we can become a good, moral person. We must read Jesus and know that we can be a person who is alive. That is why Christianity starts with and is the Resurrection. That is why we must not make the bad trade of Christianity.