Pretending Christ
Not all put on Christ.
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Romans 13:14 NKJV
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.Galatians 3:27 NKJV
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
The preacher echoes the words of Paul weekly. “Put on Christ!” he shouts from the pulpit. I commonly heard this by the pastor of the church I attended at one point in my life. Many others also hear this message around the world.
To put on Christ has a couple meanings. To put on Christ means to:
- Positionally before God we have put on Christ
- Be like Christ before all humans
It’s important to understand these two aspects and how they affect our walks with God and humanity.
To walk with God is to know Him and be more like Him. I believe that any Christian who professes Christ and walks in His commandments is positionally clothed with Christ. To God, the person is covered by Christ. But putting on Christ does not stop there.
The other option to putting on Christ goes deeper than being properly positioned in front of God. It reaches out to humanity. One of my professors at CLI (not command-line interface for my techies), taught on directional relationships. Take the look of a cross. Vertical and horizontal lines. The vertical line symbolizes your relationship with God, while your horizontal line symbolizes your relationship with humanity.
It’s easy to have a relationship with God. It’s direct. But being on the same line with all the other humans, now that’s much harder. Humans, unlike God, can change their minds quickly or refuse to change their minds at all. Humans can be susceptible or stubborn. They tend to believe what they want, especially when they’ve grown up around their particular belief.
Jesus met with some humans who believed what they grew up learning. In the Bible, we read conversations between Jesus and the Pharisees. One incident in particular comes from the Gospel of Luke.
Luke 11:37–38 NKJV
And as He spoke, a certain Pharisee asked Him to dine with him. So He went in and sat down to eat. [38] When the Pharisee saw it, he marveled that He had not first washed before dinner.
Some people can’t stand it when you break traditions/religious traditions. In many parts of the world, people follow religious traditions and rituals because the prophets in those religions did the same. Jesus answered the Pharisee in the same way we must display a genuine relationship with God.
Luke 11:39 NKJV
Then the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness.
God doesn’t care about the outward appearance. He’s concerned with the inside. Anyone can put on an appearance, a show. But we cannot fool God. We can only fool ourselves and others around us. And we usually try to fool others, because they aren’t God. We think we can get away fooling others, when God asks us to be open with others.
Matthew 6:16 NKJV
“Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.
If we believe in God, we must accept the fact that our faith in Him must be equally proven in our walk with Him. To say we have faith in Him while we neglect our walk with Him, is hypocritical. Do we go home, do five prayers or maybe hold an hour long prayer time just because it’s expected? If so, we might be hypocrites. If you believe God mandated five prayers or an hour long prayer time, you’ve met the wrong God. God doesn’t care about how many times a day you pray or how long you pray to Him. He cares about connecting to you.
When you pretend to be someone, you do your best to pass off appearing as that person so that everyone else thinks you are that person. We can’t fool the potential Church, especially if they’ve had a glimpse of Christ. While certainly there are people who have made their own Christs, not all do so. We must not only put on Christ postionally toward God, but man also. In the face of all, Christians in persecuting countries put Christ on daily. Western culture has become infested with pointing fingers at everyone else. Sometimes we need to take a look at all the fingers pointing back at us.
Do we cry out for the persecuted Church? If not, then we have much crying out to do. Do our hearts bleed for those dying who we deem as unsaved or lost? If not, then we should have terrible feeling strring within us that shakes us from head to toe. Do we truly believe in the damnation of all those that never hear about let alone recieve Christ? If so, then we need to start reaching those people. I reject the idea that all people have heard the gospel. From my reseach, tens to hundreds of millions have yet to be reached at all. Human trafficking is at an all time high. Slavery is at an all time high. Do we not care about those souls as well?
Jesus cares, so should you and I.
