On Being Good . . . and Letting Others Know the Difference

When coming of age as a teen, a friend of mine struggled with the faith passed onto her by her mother and her desire to just be herself. She was made to feel uncomfortable with desiring the few simple pleasures enjoyed in a small southern town. If she went to the movies with me, she had to lie to her mother about it. It caused her to finally rebel and throw out the beliefs that I had hungered for my non-Christian family to embrace. But I felt bad about the strife between her and her mother and she had a strange jealousy for mine. Of course, I had no rules or boundaries, could stay up as late as I wanted, see a movie, be it bloody or sensual. But I secretly yearned for the healthy boundaries that my mentally ill parents could never pass on.

There was a young man our age who hung out with us and saw our spiritual struggles as something he was glad to avoid. He said to my friend one day, “You’re never going to be good, so you might as well give up.” But that is how he viewed the faith of my friend as well as my newly embraced faith, as a list of dos and don’ts handed to us by a religious establishment. He was right, because that was how religion was perceived by us too so that’s how our lives were read by others. But my precious friend thought that there was something special about me because I didn’t worry about whether or not I could be good. While she struggled with guilt I struggled with believing God really loved me. I grew up avoiding abuse, learning the codified language I needed to survive. Being good was my salvation. But in the end it was not enough to sustain my rootless faith into adulthood. I was headed for a train wreck and didn’t know it. But just as bad, the friends who we might have influenced as teens wanted nothing to do with our spiritual journeys. Our Christology had little do with Christ. We could have been Muslims for all of our striving to “be perfect.”

I’ve tried many different methods for conveying my faith. I’ve been bold and aggressive, trying to throw faith over people like the "man's" harness thrown over me. I’ve used the post-modern method, becoming so much like others that my testimony was without any savor or substance. But when I finally found that Christ-central surrender, I was finally able to bear fruit and see that first person come to Christ through my influence, a person who is still living for the Lord today.

Ravi Zacharias explains this balance in “The Wisdom to Distinguish,” a CT article this week about faith in the workplace. He’s very comfortable with his boundaries because he is very comfortable with his oneness in Christ. It’s the kind of comfort I’ve found I’d never want to live without again.

“For the LORD takes pleasure in His people; He will beautify the afflicted ones with salvation.”
Psalm 149:4

Witness

The term witness is used by the apostles to talk about the disciples that witnessed Jesus’ acts, his teachings, his execution, and then his resurrection. Before Christ died, the term crops up in the Bible under false witness, when lies were told about him. In the Book of Acts, Peter led the apostles to select a replacement for Judas, a guy named Matthias who had been around with them all and knew Christ, witnessing his resurrection. It was important, Peter thought, that God’s first road crew testify about having seen the Lord and witnessed the fact that there was no doubt that he really was God’s Son. It was like a massive whisper campaign that, over time, suffered change under the imperfect messengers.

When I first said yes to living for Jesus, the term witness meant that you needed to go out and “witness” to your friends. The word was not a noun but a verb, a bit of Christianese spread over the salvation message; to a new believer, though, an intimidating obligation. Classes sprang up teaching Christians how to “witness” (rather than “be a witness”).
But it was such a filter for me. A leader says to me, “You need to ‘witness’ to the lost, to the unsaved, as if faith requires an initiation and an awkwardly harnessed new initiate.

The apostles were such a super-charged bunch. They were the original twelve, the eyewitness gang of the birth of redemption. They performed acts of faith, (thusly named the Book of Acts) sharing what they had with others, telling how they lived before Christ changed them, raising people from the dead, laying hands on the sick to see God heal them, and telling their stories to others.

But how do I succeed like the early church believers in sharing faith without hooks and device? It all boils down to the relationships they sought. They went out of their way to meet people that were different from them, the tattooed and pierced folks, the drinkers, the loose women and perverse men, the banker and the CEO. They started by crossing the threshold of the next door neighbor and then progressed to more distant boundaries. Then they engaged others in what was considered a new philosophy, listening even if they didn’t agree. They started using terms like “brother” and “sister” because that is how they felt about the people they were meeting, people who were once strangers, divided by differences, and now brought together by a shared love of Jesus. It was like finding new family members all resonating the same inward call. While the Book of Acts is story in a hurry, we have to remember that for the apostles to start calling people brother and sister meant that a relationship had formed. And that took time.

Being a witness is a noun. It is a state of being, the butterfly out of the cocoon. A natural birth. Love is the verb. We start with something like food and a get-together so that neighbors start trusting us and seeing us as something besides that woman that gets up at a ridiculous hour on Sundays hauling a twenty-pound Bible out to her car. It’s not me lording my will and words over another, but a shared mutuality. We arrange play dates with our kids, bowling nights, or that insane game called Bunco. We laugh together and when tragedy strikes, share tears and support. Then they begin to see us as a human that is touching them in meaningful ways. And we start to really, really, really love them. We invite them to come to our small group to meet new friends and they think about it because a relationship has formed. They’re a little suspicious perhaps, but they’ve seen so much else through a filter. It could be that it’s going to take time for them to trust a person of faith and to know that you’re not trying to sell them something. Without a canned speech or a heavy-handed close, we’ve been a witness of God’s relational power in our lives that has taught us our need for others.