“Cleared once, Catholic priest faces new sex abuse allegations.” “NE Pennsylvania Pastor charged with killing wife in 2008.” “South LA Pastor arrested in teen sex case.” All you have to do is look at the news to realize the church is far from perfect. And no doubt, many people have been disappointed, deceived, and sometimes severely harmed, by professing Christians they have known.
All this is enough to turn many people off of Christianity completely. “Why should I believe in Jesus when his followers do such awful things?” they ask. It's a perfectly legitimate question. But I think the answer to this question requires some careful thinking.
First of all, it is important to remember that some of these “hypocritical” Christians are not genuine Christians at all, but merely people who claim to believe a set of doctrines but who have no real love for Christ.
1 John 3:18-20a says, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us.”
What John is getting at is that it is our actions that demonstrate whether our faith is genuine. Protestant Christians do not believe that people must perform good works in order to be saved, but good works are the sign that a person has been truly converted. True faith is always accompanied by good works.
Luke 6:43 says, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.” Here, people are compared to trees. Just as a good tree does not bear deformed or sour fruit, so also a genuine Christian should not be habitually doing things that the Bible condemns as wrong. If a person is habitually lying, stealing, hurting others, shirking his or her responsibilities at home or at work, etc., and does not see these things as wrong nor repent of them, it is doubtful whether this person is a Christian. Real Christians sometimes do experience periods of backsliding, but they will always eventually be convicted in their hearts and repent.
That being said, the second point to consider is that Christianity sees people as essentially sinful - that is, all people are born with a tendency to do what is wrong and not to do what is right. Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Ever since Adam and Even ate the forbidden fruit in Eden, the inclination of people's hearts is continually towards what is evil and not what is good. Take children as an example. Everybody talks about how children are so innocent, but then why is that we have to train children to be good, and we never have to train them to misbehave? Children misbehave naturally, and they must be trained to behave well.
You may say, “Well, what about people who spend their lives doing lots of good things and giving to charity?” While giving to charity is certainly a much better thing than living a life of dissipation, if it is not done for the glory of God, it won't get you to heaven. Furthermore, Scripture says that anyone who transgresses one commandment in the law is guilty of breaking the whole law. So even if you were able to go through your life only breaking the law once (perhaps by telling one lie or stealing one item from a convenience store,) you would still be guilty of breaking the whole law, and liable to punishment.
This seems harsh to us, because we are always comparing ourselves to other people, and since all people are sinful, it's easy to find others who are “worse” than we are. We tend to think of life like a scale, with our good works on one side, and bad works on the other. As long as the good outweighs the bad, we should be fine right? But this is not the way that God's standards work. God's standards are not like ours. God is perfect in every way, and his standard is perfection. It is an impossible standard for us to meet, which is why it was necessary for Jesus to die for our sins, thus paying the penalty that we would have had to endure.
The point I'm getting at is that because from a Christian standpoint, all people are naturally sinful, it should not be surprising when you see people, even Christians, sinning. Once you become a Christian, it does not mean that you will stop sinning altogether, but rather that you are able to fight against sin and you ought to be sinning less and less. We will never be perfect in this life, but we should be becoming more and more like Christ.
Even the Apostle Paul talks about struggling with sin. In Romans 7:21-25, he says, “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Paul's point is this: Even those who are Christians are tempted to sin, and often fall. Thankfully, we are able to repent of our sins and ask for God's forgiveness, which he willingly grants us because of our faith in his son Jesus.
So what do we make of professing Christians who fall into great sins? First, we should ask whether they appear to be repentant. Have they acknowledged that what they did is wrong and are they seeking to make amends and change for the better? If the answer is “no,” it seems doubtful that they are truly Christians, though as I mentioned earlier, sometimes true believers do go through periods of backsliding where they may even deny the faith that they once claimed. But if they are true believers, they will eventually repent. Second, it is wise to learn from others' mistakes. Often, Christians fall into big sins because they have been neglecting reading the Bible and praying regularly, they have avoided being held accountable by others, they are not regularly sitting under the preaching of the Word and taking it to heart. Christians need to be careful to be regularly making use of the “means of grace” (prayer, Bible reading, sacraments, and preaching) and living transparently and in accountability to others.
Going back to the question of whether Christians who fall into great sins should be a cause for people not to believe, I would say that whether Christianity stands or falls is not dependent on the lives of Christians and whether they seem to be living up to certain moral standards. This is not a completely irrelevant point, but it is also not the only crucial point to consider. The main question that must be resolved is, “Who is Jesus?” If Jesus is who he claimed to be – the eternal, perfect Son of God, who is just but also merciful and compassionate – then we ought to believe in him, regardless of whether his people experience periods of backsliding. Jesus recognized that his followers were not going to be perfect – his own disciples abandoned him as he hung on the cross – but he nevertheless promised to love them and be faithful to them to the end. And it is His words and his person in which we should place our confidence, and not in the good (or bad) behavior of his followers.
N.B. I realize this post focuses more on an apologetic question rather than a question of Christian living, which is what the rest of this blog has focused on, but I do think this is an important issue to consider, and I thought people might be interested in an essay on the topic.
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