How to Live the Christian Life: After listening to the average sermon, one could almost conclude that what the world calls Christianity is chiefly a lifelong project of religious self-improvement. Pray more. Read more. Attend more faithfully. Witness more boldly. Serve more willingly. Avoid worldly influences. Guard your testimony. Confess your failures. Strengthen your family. Discipline your thoughts. Watch your words. Be more useful, more committed, more humble, and more “Christlike” in everything you do.
What would someone completely unfamiliar with Christianity conclude after listening to the majority of sermons manufactured in our day? He might conclude that Christianity is largely concerned with teaching people how to become better versions of themselves. By the time the dust settles, it can begin to resemble a school for religious manners. Something resembling the gospel may be presented as the doorway, but once we have entered, the attention turns almost entirely toward us. The emphasis quickly shifts from what God has accomplished in Christ to our growth, our conduct, and our spiritual progress.
The whole system is set up that way. The sermons, books, conferences, bulletins, Bible studies, and devotional programs all seem designed to turn us continually inward – to our progress, our failures, our habits, our usefulness, our testimony, and our appearance before others. Christ gets us through the door. After that, the real work apparently begins.
Religious self-improvement has a way of keeping us permanently occupied with ourselves. We can become so consumed with evaluating our humility, our self-denial, and even the sincerity of our gaze toward Christ that the whole Christian life turns back upon us. Whether the measure is doctrinal correctness or practical faithfulness, we can remain just as occupied with ourselves. In trying to make certain we are looking properly, we may scarcely look beyond ourselves at all. What begins as a call to growth can become a life of constant self-surveillance.
Every system has its finished product, and this one seems determined to produce the polished Christian. We learn what to wear, what not to watch, what not to listen to, how to witness, how to fellowship, who may safely be fellowshipped with, how to confess, how to appear humble, and how to remain visibly serious about the things of God. There is always another lesson, another warning, another discipline, another coat of polish.
By the time the dust settles, we may look exactly like everyone expects believers to look while scarcely knowing where our life, righteousness, and hope are truly found. We have been taught how to look like Christians. The question is whether anyone has truly directed us beyond ourselves to Christ.
This is not an argument against obedience, growth, discipline, or the practical exhortations of Scripture. It is an argument against making those things the center. Fruit matters, but fruit is not the root. Conduct matters, but conduct is not Christ. The believer is not kept by maintaining a polished appearance, but by the God of all grace, who has called him unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus.
Somehow, salvation has been reduced from God’s complete work in Christ to God’s gradual improvement of the sinner. Christianity is often presented as a kind of finishing school for sinners, where God takes rough people and gradually teaches them how to become more disciplined, respectable, and presentable. But is that salvation? Is the purpose of Christ merely to improve fallen man – to make him more religious, more useful, and more acceptable in the eyes of others? Did Christ come simply to produce a better version of Adam? Or is the gospel declaring something far greater: that our life, righteousness, wisdom, and acceptance are found entirely in Christ? MPJ