Christ is the Gospel; Christians aren’t

About a year ago or more, I made my way over to an older woman in my church and tried to establish a relationship with her.  I began by asking her how she was doing.   All I can say is ,wow, did she ever tell me!  Her short answer was, “Not very well.”  The long answer she actually gave me is way, way too long to post here, but I’ll try to summarize: her husband was difficult to put up with and she didn’t know if she could stand him anymore, her health was bad, her finances were bad, her life was bad, she was depressed and bored and so on and so on…  And I am by no means able to do justice to the tone of voice and attitude in which she conveyed this to me.  I was totally shocked.  There was no reference to God in her conversation with respect to her circumstances at all.  How could this older woman, who had been a Christian for over thirty years talk like this?  I couldn’t believe it.  Well, she obviously took my gesture of friendship seriously, or she was simply desperate to vent her feelings to someone.  For after that, every Sunday she managed to make her way over to me and recite the same weary litany.  My shock soon turned to sarcasm.  Not out loud to her, of course, but inwardly I became very cynical.  Then I started to try to avoid her, though somehow that never seemed to work.   But this week, by God’s gracious working in my heart, I felt something I had not felt previously – genuine compassion.    As I listened to her this week, this thought ran through my mind:  “You too, Jessica, you too, are just like this.  Deep down in your soul, where no other person hears or sees, you grumble, you complain, and you act without reference to God a dozen times a day.   Maybe not in the obnoxious outward way this woman does, but what does that matter?  You are the same sinner that she is and have need of the same Savior that she needs.”   And I thought she was the only one being self-righteous, coming to church all these years  and then talking like she did!  How the ugly sin of self-righteousness subtly works in our hearts!   Thank God I am not like that, we say.   But we are all like that. Therefore, I could feel pity toward her sinful, fallen condition because mine was the same.

Michael Horton says in Christless Christianity: “We do not preach ourselves, but Christ.  The good news – not only for ourselves, but for a world (and church) in desperate need of good news -is that what we say preaches better than our lives, at least if what we are saying is Christ’s person and work rather than our own.  The more we talk about Christ as the Bible’s unfolding mystery and less about our own transformation, the more likely we are actually to be transformed rather than self-righteous or despairing.  As much as it goes against our grain, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation…  Yes, there is hypocrisy, and because Christians will always be simultaneously saint and sinner, there will always be hypocrisy in every Christian and in every church.  The good news is that Christ saves us from hypocrisy too.”

The woman in my church needs to hear the good news.  Fortunately, she is in a church that preaches it every Sunday.  I can only pray that the Spirit will do His work in her heart.  But she is not the only one who needs to hear the good news of the gospel.  I do too.  Christ is the good news.  He is the gospel.  Not the woman in my church.  And not me.