Awhile back I watched the movie “Funny People” with Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan. It was a good movie, not what I expected, but a good movie. A certain scene between the two stars stuck out in my mind and has continued to haunt me even though it addressed a specific topic; I feel that it addresses an entire spectrum of issues that I among many others face in a day to day life. So to set the scene Adam Sandler is an extremely popular comedian at the end of his career. He takes Seth Rogan, an amateur comedian trying to make it in the real world, under his wing teaching him the ropes. Adam Sandler rekindles an old flame with his ‘one true love’ that happens to be married to another man with two children. Rogan confronts Sandler on the fact that he did cheat on her ending the relationship and deserved everything he got in returns. He raises the argument of how can you cheat on your self professed ‘one true love’ with another woman? It’s just stupid and ignorant not to say no and to stay faithful. Sandler smirks and shoots back that Rogan has never had hundreds of beautiful women banging on his door begging to have sex with him night after countless night.
Scene change.
This specific scene has troubled and convicted me in many areas greatly over the past few months and I can not take it building up in my mind any longer. So I’m going to flesh this out in the most coherent manner possible. Here we go…
Okay, mostly through observation, I have noticed a lot of issues within the church as a body of believers. I am not condescending being that I am equally responsible as I am a member of the body of Christ. One of these issues is that of evangelism (fancy church term for telling people about Christ). I’ll go ahead and bluntly say that if you claim to be the bride of Christ and you are not investing in a nonbeliever’s life right now there is something terribly wrong with your theology and your understanding of scripture. You have missed out on dare I say the most important part of the gospel that you’ve claimed to hold so dear. I think here in Bowling Green Kentucky it is extremely easy to do quite a bit of lip service to this ideal of sharing the gospel. We have no lack in this. Yet we have a huge lack in people actually doing the work of the Father. A recent blog posting by Jason Pettus, I feel, makes this point very clear through a story about fishermen. “Are you a fisherman if you’ve never fished? What if you have only fished once?” Talk is cheap and does not mean anything if nothing is ever done. Therefore, go read the post and I will not waste my breath any longer on this issue.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at Western Kentucky University, Christianity is the major religion and the minority lifestyle. I will also dare to say that most people on this campus, if not everyone, has heard of the name of Jesus and could give you a very limited description of who He was and what He stood for. Granted we have a lot of international students who and I won’t apply this hasty generalization. Ok, so the overwhelming majority of people have heard of the name Jesus, and claim Christianity. So what am I getting at? Why this emphasis on sharing the gospel if the majority are ‘saved by grace.’ Would it be accurate to say that many people are cultural Christians? What I mean by this is that they were raised in a ‘Christian’ household, went to church most Sundays (even if they haven’t been in quite some time). They are cultural Christians because if they were raised in the Middle East they would be cultural Muslims, or whatever religion the culture they grew up in was, and they would raise no questions. Religion is a cloak picked up at the church/mosque/temple doors, left on the doormat on the way out, and is dirtier and more tattered than when first taken up. That is why I utterly despise religion. It is a joke. Its followers, which are so many in numbers, destroy what the original meaning was.
We are surrounded by cultural Christians. Many of us don’t know that that is what we are.
Am I a cultural Christian?
In many ways I feel that I grew up believing things that I have been taught, just because someone older and wiser told me that was what truth was and I accepted it as absolute, no questions asked. There is one problem with that. People are not perfect. Don’t take anything anybody says as absolute truth without referring to an absolute truth giver (Bible) or you will get caught up in this mess. So in perspective of this, I have many qualities of a cultural Christian, to which I try to put to death day by day as these are dug up. I am in the search for Christianity. Jesus centered Christianity. They type of Christianity that God would look down and say “Well done my good and faithful servant.” Is that such a wrong goal? I want to be just like my Jesus. I want to live my life just the way that he lived His in complete and utter submission to the Father. I am far from this, I’ll admit, and the more I learn the further away I get.
This brings me back to the point of telling people about Jesus. Telling is an action. We must get off our butts, stop talking and actually do it. I don’t care if you have a better way of sharing it, smarter, more attuned to the audience; if you are not sharing it, all your preparation is useless. All a believer needs to know is what happened in your life when your heart transformed from stone to flesh to share the gospel. Makes all seminary, bible studies, and whatever seem kind of useless and stupid doesn’t it? But they are very uselful and far from stupid. What I’m trying to say is that nobody has all the answers and will eventually be stumped on a question. We are human and don’t know everything. Some know more, some know less. But all you need is the story. God does the rest. “You plant the seed and I’ll make it grow”-God (paraphrased). Now every seed won’t grow just because you plant it. This is fact in both agriculture and ‘soul’iculture. It’s not for us to worry about. It’s our job to plant the seed and to give it all of our efforts for it to grow. But the actual growing, we have nothing to do with.
Now we realize that sharing the gospel is extremely important. I can’t reiterate this enough. How do you think Jesus would respond if you were solely around Christians 99.9% of the time? Okay with my extremely accurate statistics of the condition of WKU’s soul condition this would be quite impossible so let me step back for a second. What if you solely talked to Christians 99.9% of the time about Christian stuff? The .1% would go to the “God bless you’s” when people sneeze or the “I’m not going to this party because I’m a Christian and I don’t want people to get the wrong ideas.” I’ll even give people the benefit of the doubt and throw the campus wide outreaches of talking to people about whatever and then leaving them with a bible tract towards the .1% of non-Christian Christian talk.
What would Jesus have to say about this? Well first of all He would say “I bless you” instead of “God bless you.” Get it? Jesus IS God so it would be weird for him to speak in the third person. Get it!! Haha
A few years ago I planned in advance to attend a party that was going to have (God forbid) alcohol involved. I decided with one of my friends that we would go and attempt to share the gospel with people that attended. Our logic, there is always a DD, and they are always easy to point out because they are not drinking (in excess). So we would search for them unlucky sonaguns and then strike up a conversation. There was also going to be boxing and I thought it would be fun to fight a drunken person. But this held NO weight in my deciding to go to the party. Okay maybe a little bit. Anywhoo, I was called out by a respected spiritual member of our community to not go to this sinner party. That in going I would be in sin. Many people today hold this perspective. So was I in sin in going to a party where there would be wild drunks, fights, adultery, and who knows what else was going on? What if I told you that Jesus hung out with sinners? WHAT! He was often in places where sinning was taking place. And Jesus lived without sin. WHAT! Craziness! I know it probably blows your mind.
So second part of the argument. What will it look like if you attended this party? What if people that you know are there, that know you are Christian, and see you? What if there like hey he’s a Christian, but he’s here. Something doesn’t add up. Hmmm. What if they assume? What if they assume that I am a drunk. What if they assume I am an adulterer? What if they assume everything about me that isn’t true? What if people that hear I was there assume?
Well you know what people say about people that assume…
I’m sick and tired of this pointless argument. I’m also going to grant you the knowledge that people assumed so many things about Jesus. People even took it step further and created rumors about Him that had no factual basis, hurt his reputation, and eventually these rumors (lies) gave grounds for his execution. People spread things like Jesus was a drunk crazy man. People created rumors about His disciples as well.
This is just going to happen.
Get over it. There is nothing good that could come from hanging out in these environments.
I call BS
Ever since I have turned 21 I have been able to get into bars. I’ve determined that I like going to bars. I really like the environment even though I don't participate in much of the activity. Its fun. But apparently going makes me and everyone who goes into terrible people worthy of damnation.
So its story time......:
First bar I went to. Tidballs. John Perry, Matt Shultz, and myself. After the band stopped playing we went and sat in the bed of John’s truck. It was probably 1-2am in the morning at this point. We are talking about Jesus. Many people walk by, some getting in the conversation, others leaving after us telling them to come join and talk. One guy in particular joined. About four hours later we left drying the tears out of our eyes. The three of us were Christians, and had never met Joey (Matt knew him) until that conversation. But we shared the gospel to Joey until about 430 in the morning. We held hands praying, we cried, we embraced.
RIGHT OUTSIDE OF A BAR!
I could bore you to death with many of these stories but I won’t. I want you to tell me I was in sin. I don’t want you to comment because that’s a spineless way of doing confronting the situation. I want you to find me, look me in the eye, and tell me I was in sin. While you are at it go find John and Matt and tell them the same thing.
So many Christians have their heads so far up their butts they don’t know how to act around a nonbeliever.
Sorry but one more quick story. I went to church earlier this summer. I woke up late and was a little sick. My hair was a bit longer then and I had a severe case of bed head. No time for a shower. So I put on a hat and went to church. I have to admit that part of me just wanted to see if anybody would say anything and how people would react to me wearing a hat. Someone did say something. A kid my age. Without going into a lot of detail he basically told me to not come back wearing the hat. That in wearing the hat, it was a terrible thing to do at church and very disrespectful. That it really hurt him in a serious way. I’ll be honest it ticked me off. It took everything in my power not to backhand him and ask him where it says not to wear a hat in the Bible. And it doesn’t, I’ve looked. But this relates perfectly to what I’m talking about. What if I wasn’t a Christian? What if that was my first time at Living Hope? What if I did smack him of his high and mighty stool? Many Christians don’t know how to act around people who go against the norm of cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity says that you can’t wear a hat in church when in fact there is no biblical evidence supporting this. Sure these people know how to talk about the gospel, talk about love, talk talk talk, but they don’t do do do anything, and when they do they often come off as arrogant pricks. That is why Christianity has a terrible label of being so condescending, so judgmental. Situations where Jesus felt most comfortable and places Jesus commands us to go.
What’s wrong with us?
So want you to take a look at your life and take a look at Jesus’ life as I have recently started. If you had to put all of your friends in two groups, Christians vs. non-Christians, how would the numbers fall? 50/50? 60/40? 95/5? Sadly most people would probably fall with most of there friends being Christians. Look at Jesus. Look at Paul. Look at Peter. Where do you think their percentages would fall? 50/50? 40/60? 5/95? I would lean towards that they had many more non-Christian friends than Christian, by an overwhelming majority. Now I’m not saying that it is wrong to have Christian friends. I am just saying you are sorely misunderstanding the gospel if all you have are Christian friends. Jesus had a close knit group of disciples in which he shared everything. Paul was on missionary journey a lot and spent most of his time with nonbelievers living the gospel. But they all had a core group of friends that were Christians. A core group that strengthened, encouraged, kept accountable to. This is very important. If you do not have this core group you will fall every time when you keep complete company with nonbelievers.
So back to the story of Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan. Granted, what Sandler did was very wrong, but he made a very wise statement. I think a lot of times we see ourselves as very puffed up, very strong in our faith. This is an incredibly prideful way of thinking, one that I fall into constantly. You can spend countless hours preparing for battle, strategizing and such and never having fought one. The second you do fight, you realize that you have severely undershot the skill level of your opponent and of yourself, and you will fall to the ground in fiery flames of embarrassment. = bible belt Christian culture living. How do you know that you are as strong as you think you are unless you go out and fight? I might add that you are commanded to go out and fight. Go be among unbelievers. Be IN this world but not of it. Rogan is incredibly ignorant to what real professional comedians go through. He feels it to be incredibly easy to stay faithful to his lady friend. He puts himself in a position looking down on Sandler and his past actions. But in fact he has never faced the pressure and temptation that Sandler said no to for so long, but eventually fell too. As Christians we are not called to stay in our special bubble where nothing bad can happen, where we are never uncomfortable. We are called to the front lines to fight for what we believe, to spread the gospel. Funny thing in wars. People on the front lines often get hit. Is Jesus worth enough for you to take a hit? To put yourself out there knowing that without God by your side you are nothing? To possibly die? I think He is. Sexual temptation is the only thing that God says to flee from. Everything else I’m going to say that we should go out and fight against. The more battles you fight the more you honor God and are conformed to His image. Which is what he calls us to do.
I guess all I am trying to say is to be a Christian. Don’t be lukewarm. If you say you are a Christian be a Christian. I am talking to myself as well. If you have not crossed the line into warm or scalding hot and you profess Jesus as Lord, do us all a favor and get off the fence. Go one way or the other. Learn how Jesus truly lived; question everything, read the Bible and read it the way it was meant to be received. And last of all, live.
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