(By Nate Irvine) – Like it or not, if you call yourself a Christian, most people that don’t go to church or have a relationship with God are going to look at your life for their answers. Anything you do or say may be a response to something they’ve been dealing with. Or, any action they witness may be taken as a license or a granted permission for something they’ve been trying to discern secretly. In other words, when they see you, they think, or hope, they’ll see Jesus.
Earlier today, I was researching what seems to be a great organization called the Marin Foundation. It’s a foundation that works with the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender community in Chicago (located minutes from the Salvation Army’s College for Officer’s Training). I was reading the founder’s blog (his name is Andrew Marin), scrolling through some past posts, when I came across a quote he posted from a professor he studied under:
“The world doesn’t read the Bible, they read Christians.”
I’ve been very interested in this comment ever since I’ve let it digest, mostly because I know that it’s so true. I assume that anytime anyone finds out that I’m a Christian, they automatically assign me to a moral standard, expecting me to uphold it. No of course, they will probably never tell me that they watch what I do, or give extra thought to what I say, but I like to think it still happens.
And even if it doesn’t, it won’t change the fact that I am supposed to be a symbol of Jesus, that I’m supposed to embody the teachings of Christ, and that I am supposed stand for that which God stands for.
Being inspired by the Holy Spirit, the author of the book of James wrote about this quite perfectly:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
If it’s true that most non-Christ followers don’t read the Bible, then I need to make sure that I try to look a lot more like Jesus and a lot less like the world everyday.