An End to Faking It

Jesus followers are well aware of the world’s favorite criticism of them; hypocrite. We know that are our ranks are filled with phony baloney believers who say that they’ve accepted Jesus and are going to heaven but they live like hell all the way there. Did you know that God actually has a plan and a process to knock that phoniness out of us?

In Romans 5:3 Paul says, “We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.” Here is where God reveals the plan; he uses suffering to help us develop endurance, and endurance produces character and character produces hope. It’s the producing of character that intrigues me. Character can be defined as authentic, genuine, proven - the real deal. Character is when our faith is no longer limited to a patchwork of clichés, a few memorized Bible verses that we quote randomly and a benign “I’m praying for you.” In this instance character is when we have moved from understanding the promises of God to standing under the promises of God. That’s a big difference.

Character is what is developed when we are driven to our knees by difficulty and we become intimately acquainted with God. God is highly interested in moving us from people who attend church to people who are on a mission, from people who know something to people who believe something, from people who own a Bible to people who love the Bible and from people who pray to people whose prayers move mountains. God is moving you from a faith that is based on the testimonies of others to a place where you have a testimony of your own. True Christian character moves us from the shallow end of the pool to the deeper end.

I don’t know about everybody else’s struggle with hypocrisy but I know that God has been at work to knock hypocrisy out of me. He will not permit me to be that phony baloney kind of Christian who says the right things but doesn’t really believe them. God’s work is to make be what I say I am, a follower of Jesus. A follower who is persuaded all the way down to my socks!