Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord… These words rang out in four-part harmony as my cousins and I sang in front of the church. We were dressed in matching clothes. We spent hours and hours sitting in my aunt’s living room practicing songs over and over until they were perfect.
My aunt was a very strange lady with a peculiar outlook on life. She was constantly worried about keeping herself holy, not being subjected to worldly things, and expecting all those around her to adhere to her beliefs in her presence. If ever I spoke a wrong word in front of her, she would call me out, even as an adult.
Meanwhile, her husband, a Baptist preacher, abused her and her kids in her little holy world. It was an extremely confusing thing. So, spending all that time in her living room probably scarred me a little bit. We did have some good times together, and my aunt did teach me how to sing harmony. But looking back, it feels like we were robots doing what we thought was the holy thing to do. I think it’s where I learned the most about how to be a holier-than-thou judgmental person, a person that I don’t ever want to be again.
I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with boys who do…We held ourselves to a high standard.
We expected people to respect us as Christians. We couldn’t be around cursing, short shorts, bikinis, dancing, drinking…. There were standards. STANDARDS people. Can’t you hear what I’m saying? As Christians, we needed people to not only respect our standards, but when you were around us, we expected you to uphold those standards as well.
Can someone please tell me where in the Bible it says that? Where does it say that people should respect our beliefs and act a certain way around us?
But shouldn’t we be different? Shouldn’t people be able to look at us and tell that we are Christians by our actions, words, and dress…
I ask this because last night, after spending a day at a bar promoting an alcoholic product, I had one of the deepest conversations about Jesus with an unbeliever that I’ve ever had. And do you know how he started the conversation? He said he had noticed something different about my husband and me all day. He couldn’t figure out what it was, but he wanted to talk to us about it if it was ok. Wait, there was something different about us in a bar, with alcoholic drinks, with curse words? How could this be? By many people’s standards, we had acted like anything but Christians the entire day. Can you really be filled with the Spirit in a bar?
We openly talked about our faith with this man, and soon he invited another man to come to speak with us too. They were afraid to say things that might offend us when they explained why they didn’t believe the same way we did. I just blurted out that God doesn’t need me to defend Him, He’s big enough to handle that on His own, and they were blown away. I didn’t ask them to change one thing. I welcomed them to share their doubts and their unbelief, all the while they were dropping F-bombs and drinking alcohol. And I wasn’t offended one time; I never once asked them to change their behavior in my presence. In fact, I was drinking with them (I hear the collective gasp of all the holy ones). I wasn’t offended (and I’m sure many will crucify me for this) because I don’t think that alcohol is bad (the Bible teaches that drunkenness is). I also don’t believe the F-bomb is the end-all.
First of all, Jesus drank alcohol. He even made some; remember the good stuff at the wedding? The F-bomb is a man-made word that’s an acronym for Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge. It’s definitely not the best thing but didn’t Jesus speak to this? John 8:7 “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” Matthew 7:3-5 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your eye”? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ when all the time there is a plank in your eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Curse words are another discussion, and alcohol… It’s several posts on its own. But the point I’m trying to make is this…we need to meet people where they are! We need to stop crying that other people need to respect us. Why?
Why do they owe us that? How arrogant are we that we think the Christian label offers us preferential treatment from people, the government, and on and on?
One of these men told me that they didn’t want to go to heaven because someone had said to him that his son would go to hell because he had never been baptized. He said that if his son was now doomed to hell then he wanted to go there with him. How sad is this? What holier than thou “Christian” told this poor man that?
And, in turn, how can you expect him to want to believe if that’s what he now thinks? So, someone who decided that they were a better person than this guy because they had been baptized in some bathwater and in their pride and arrogance, they pushed another one away…
These two men had been pushed away from Christianity by “Christians,” by the church, by religion… The organization formed to bring people to Christ pushed them away. How ironic is this? How sad is this? Would it be flippant to ask, What Would Jesus Do? I’m sure this isn’t what He intended for His followers to do.
We’ve let our religious status define us, and we’ve forgotten that without Jesus, we are nothing…
We’ve forgotten that Jesus meets people where they are; He calls them to salvation. He really doesn’t even need us. He just lets us have a part.
It’s sad when we let this amazing salvation that we didn’t earn in any way, shape, or form cause us to become judgmental hypocrites.
I’m far from perfect. I make mistake after mistake. But at that moment, at that picnic table talking to these two men who have been destroyed by religion, it was so freeing to share Jesus with them. No pressure, no prayer, no holy words, just open, honest discussion that I hope will plant a seed in their heart. It was an organic, natural “Gospel Conversation.”
Maybe being so “separate” in the way we’ve been taught is just being fake, and maybe fake isn’t approachable, and Jesus wasn’t fake.
Let’s reconsider what holy really means. Because I’m pretty sure it isn’t singing four-part harmony in matching clothes, traveling from church to church to sing to people who think just like us, asking people not to cuss or drink around us, or pretending that we are better than other people… I think that’s just called judgmental.
Until Next Time,
Whitney