Better or alive? Yes.

Yesterday, as I was browsing the not-always-so-wonderful world of Twitter, I noticed a tweet that definitely caught my attention. First, I don’t know this person. Second, he’s probably a great guy. And third, since I don’t know him and can’t have a conversation, I’m just writing the thoughts and feelings I had in response here. Before I do, here’s the tweet that kicked off all the things you’ll read below it.

Posts like this always make me feel defensive initially, like I somehow need to defend the church, Christianity, and God all at one time. I think most of us feel that way when it seems something we love is being attacked, and yet it’s a good thing to push through that so we can really listen. Reading the comments to this post revealed how much we need to listen to people who have been hurt by churches and people in those churches who don’t seem to change.

But to be clear, if I were an atheist, my only argument would be the people in those churches who stopped loving the other people in those churches because they didn’t change fast enough or in ways that the first group of people expected.

As the old saying goes, the only army that shoots its wounded is the church. Seems as if that might be another argument an atheist would use.

But all that aside, what really struck me was this simple fact: Christianity isn’t about making bad people better. Christianity is about making dead people live. What my not-yet-but-maybe-someday friend did get right is this: how those people live is a big part of the discipleship life that the community of Jesus followers known as the church is called to. Some churches are better at it than others, and none would say they’re as good as they could be.

So church people not living better lives isn’t proof that there’s no God. It’s just proof that people in those churches either haven’t been raised to life, or they haven’t actually started living the new life they’ve been given. Neither of those is acceptable to God, to the one who posted the tweet, or to the majority of the people who commented on it.

And it can’t be acceptable to us. As Jesus followers, it’s time to move beyond just believing in His resurrection. It’s time to actually start living as those who have been resurrected with Him.

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