But Not Hypocrites!

Yesterday I was sitting at Starbucks while waiting to meet with a NLer just down the street. As the time of the meeting was getting closer two guys came and sat down near me and began discussing politics. I couldn't help overhearing them... They were talking about how so and so is a total hypocrite. Then they moved on to a discussion of hypocrites in general. Interesting discussion, so I sort of casually listened while sending out a few emails. As I was getting up to leave I heard one of them summarizing their conversation by saying, "Yeah, they are just like those Christians who say they believe in God but all they care about is themselves, they don't ever help anyone." - True story.

Now I don't know the guy who said that. I don't know what his experience with the church has been. I don't know what prompted that comment from him. But as I got up to walk to my meeting I thought that is really sad. In fact I almost blew off my meeting just to go and sit with him and ask - if you saw a group of Christians who truly cared, a group of people through whom you could see the love of God at work in our world... would it change your mind? My bet is that it would.

The problem that we have as the church today is that people think of Christians as fakes. And to be honest there are some pretty good reasons for that, but we don't have time to go into that or really even think about that. Our mission today is to redeem the name of Jesus! I don't know about you but when people say Christian I want them to think about a group of people who have the love of God exploding out of them! I want people to think of a group of people who help the community and love people tangibly. I want people to say things like "I don't understand them but one thing you can say about Christians is that they are the real deal. They believe what they say they believe!"

And the truth is that starts with me every day... and it starts with us everyday! So my question for myself today and for each of you who reads this is - what are you doing today to be real? To be a follower of Jesus? Who do you need to serve? Who do you need to talk to?

People should be able to call Christians a lot of things but not hypocrites!

Josh Burnett, Centreville Campus Pastor