Before I came to know God, before I accepted Christ, and
before I found Him for myself, I had this far-off notion that Christians were
perfect. I thought they were happy,
spoiled people who looked down upon others for what others didn’t have.
Years down the road and much research later, I’ve learned
that while there are pseudo-Christians vastly scattered across the earth, there
are others that represent a truer image of Christ and what it looks like to
walk with Him.
The truth is, Christians aren’t perfect. Christians who know Christ know this. They know they will never, ever be or come
across a Christian who is perfect. Even
after accepting Christ, we will continue to hurt people and be hurt. Not necessarily because we are purposefully doing so (though sometimes we do—hello, selfish desires!), but
because we’re all sinners in a broken world in a war with our flesh. And sometimes, as much as we want to follow
Christ, our fleshly desires and emotions win out. This is where grace comes in—and it’s due to
come in repeatedly. Grace to give and
grace to be given.
The second truth is that Christians are not above anyone
else in the “have” department. We are
not magically cured of all the world’s ailments. We are not suddenly rich, or wealthy, or
healthy, or prosperous. That’s not the
definition of Christianity. The only
thing we come to “have” is the joy gained from releasing our lives from our
hands and leaving it in God’s hands.
Now, there’s so much more to it than that—there’s the dying to yourself
daily, making choices that God would want you to make, the giving up of being
part of a world that you’ve come to feel so natural in—it’s a complete
life-style change, because it’s a complete heart change. JB says it best when he says, “I’m just a
beggar, telling another beggar where to find bread.” We are still level on the playing field of
life, still susceptible to whatever life may hand us, whether it be lemons or
really juicy watermelon, but our joy is not dependent upon what we receive or
do not receive, for our joy is in Heaven.
We are promised a life beyond this.
Christians are not mini-gods running around thinking we
deserve praise. (And if you’ve met a Christian
like that, run away.) We still lose our
jobs, break our bones, have grandmas who get Cancer, have cars whose engines
completely die out of nowhere, can’t pay bills, have brothers, mothers, sons,
daughters, wives and husbands that pass away before their time, have boyfriends
break up with us and engagements end…
We lose just like everyone else.
But what we have—what we’ve gained is the knowledge that
there is something out there greater than our loss.
It’s the God that formed us, the God that loves us and
upholds us when the loss is so great and the hurt so deep that there is no
strength left in us to stand on our own.
He is our strength. Whether we
have nothing or everything, we have Him.
The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am
helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. The LORD is the strength of his people, a
fortress of salvation for his anointed one (Psalm 28:7-8).
