We all know them, and it can be hard to make it through a day without tripping over several of them. Let’s face it, Christians are the absolute worse. They are vile, hypocritical things. Drinking and whoring Saturday nights and claiming they are saved on Sundays. They’re holding you to a standard, while they make excuses for why they don’t hold themselves to the same. They smile to your face and act the part of the righteous church-goer, while behind your back they gossip and spread drama. We have all known the drunkard and perverted pastor, the whore who was his daughter, and the back-biter who was his wife, along with all the nasty men and women who make up his congregation. The list goes on, doesn’t it? It is difficult to disagree with the statement, ‘The only good Christian is a dead Christian.’ They might as well keel over and do us all a favor.
Worldly bait
Now, what would be your response if I told you that this statement was actually true, specifically, that the only good Christian is a dead Christian?
No doubt many good Christians are sitting and reading this now and experiencing any number of things, likely anger, disgust, even hate. I have no doubt that some of you are directing much of that at me for suggesting such a thing. And, I am sure many are feeling the smug warmth of self-righteous satisfaction as they read over the opening paragraph and pat themselves on the back because neither they nor their congregation fits the bill. Further still, you may even be thinking you’re surely a better man and, more importantly, a better Christian than myself.
The condemnation you no doubt felt towards myself, or even the people you know fit the opening description, is called judgment. The feeling of self-righteousness within you is hubris, better known as pride. Both are as damaging to your salvation and your ability to aid others in their journey to salvation as anything else mentioned in this article. The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 6, tells us do not judge and you will not be judged, do not condemn and you will not be condemned, forgive and you will be forgiven, for your standard of measure is the standard by which you will be measured. And, in all the arguments about “judge not or judging righteously,” this tidbit tends to get forgotten. We tend to forget that we all fail by virtually any measure we use.
The Scripture describes sinning as falling short of God (Romans 3), and this is something we all do. I certainly have done it and will not pretend otherwise. Nor will I pretend I have done it significantly less than anyone reading this. If anything, I would not be surprised if the sin of my lifetime far surpassed your own, for as St. Paul the Apostle said, “Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.” I have led a terrible life of sin and at times outright evil, and it is through the Grace of God that I am able to look back on the man I once was and give thanks that I am him no longer. But even then, as others reading this no doubt do, I still have to struggle to remind myself not to look down upon others too harshly, even though I know that I have done worse.
You may be sitting down saying to yourself, “But wait, this sounds like some hippy nonsense the liberal churches push, that we have no right to judge others. I have to love everyone and can’t have a problem with what others are doing.“
To those, I would ask that you simply be patient, because this is not the point at hand. There is no issue with righteously judging for the purpose of censuring ungodly behavior (1 Corinthians 5), that is, to express disapproval of it. This should be carried out with the intention of helping others find their way to genuine repentance and never as condemnation – because there truly lies a great spiritual danger in prideful judgment, no matter how righteous you think you are, and no matter how much you think you hold up to the standard you judge by.
The common danger from such behavior is such a mentality of judging others, and looking down upon them, leads to us ignoring our own faults. It changes us and we then train ourselves to sit upon our high horse and tell ourselves, “I am not as bad as all that.” In doing so, we turn a blind eye to our own sin. This is the danger expressly warned about in Scripture, when we are told that we will be held to the standard we use to judge others, and to not judge the mote in our brother’s eye, whilst we have a log in our own. It is a rightful warning against hypocritical judgment of others, judging people harshly, while we have done, or are still doing, things just as wicked, if not worse. The more insidious danger, however, is that such a mentality may lead to the erroneous belief that one is a good Christian when solely compared to the failure of others.
If we are to be honest with ourselves, this is an easy conclusion to come to – that we are “good Christians.” After all, in a world consumed by darkness, it is not a high bar we often times find before us. It is easy to find ourselves on that high horse when we look around ourselves at the state of Christendom, and those who claim to be Christian. Many churches trip over themselves to protect those who hate them, while condemning their own people.
Evangelicals and many other Protestant groups in the South have been tricked and twisted into essentially worshiping Jews as God’s “Chosen People,” even as the latter rejects Christ and His salvation for us and often uses that admiration to turn us against our own and undermine our faith. Others have abandoned Christ’s teachings for racial idolatry and accepted a misplaced pride in claiming that, in fact, we are the “Chosen Ones” and that Christ belongs to us, and us alone, through our skin color. Additionally, others have abandoned Christ for secular values, their faith little more than a hollow shell of Christian aesthetics and weak justifications which they fill with whatever progressive, degenerate nonsense they want Christianity to be.
Churches willfully encourage, even praise, mortal sin and degenerate behavior. They embrace feminism with female pastors and priests who melt promises of chastity to make idols to their own sexuality. They tell young women they have God’s permission to be promiscuous. They encourage their children to be homosexuals, saying God made them sinful and so it is just fine to wallow in it, even be proud of it.
Baptists work overtime to condemn wrongthink while their congregations and communities disintegrate. Pentecostals are too busy speaking in tongues to mourn the liberalization of their church, resulting in the abandonment of their staunchest moral behaviors. The Church of Christ is so wrapped up in sending people and money to the Third World that they oftentimes ignore the needy right in their backyard. They’re addicted to the rush of telling themselves what a good person they are for helping an African kid, meanwhile a poor boy down the road goes hungry.
Methodists, Lutherans, and Anglicans are dead set on destroying their oldest traditions in the name of inclusiveness, casting God by the wayside in the process. The Church of England has begun special baptism ceremonies for those who believe God made a mistake in assigning their sex, an effort to “correct” what God screwed up so that they can be reborn in their “proper” gender. The Roman Catholic Church is feeling the rising tide of degenerates within its own ranks calling for the inclusion of female priests, while homosexual priests are found dead within their churches hooked to homemade masturbation devices. All the while, priests and bishops, ones trying to preserve and safeguard their faith and traditions, the very commandments of God, are ostracized and forced into retirement.
Even Orthodoxy feels the nipping of the wolves in sheep’s clothing, circling on the fringes in the form of groups such as Orthodoxy in Dialogue, an increasingly push of queer and secularist views and positions on the Church. In turn, we experience a schism as a result of the corrupting influence of globalism and uniatism within the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
For the above paragraphs, I’m sure you felt anger reading them. I certainly felt anger writing them. It reminded you of situations you have seen in the slow fall of Christendom. You know many of the specific groups I referenced, many of the instances I cited, which we have seen in our news feeds or heard of from others. It is all too easy to look at these things and think to ourselves, “I hold fast to the faith, to God’s commandments, to Christ’s teachings. I uphold the traditions, I reject the degeneracy of the modern world. I am a good Christian.” However, this is one of the greatest traps we, as Christians, can fall into – thinking we are good Christians in comparison to the world.
When we fall into this belief, when we seek to compare ourselves to others and use them as a standard of how well we ourselves are doing, we are training ourselves to think that we are good enough. And, therein lies the danger. It is not just ignoring our own sin, as we seek to condemn it in others, it is when we see ourselves standing above those around us and we stop seeking to rise even further. So, we continue to fall, even if we pick ourselves back up, or maybe we cease trying to pick ourselves back up and are content with where we fall. After all, the thinking goes that we are doing better than those other guys, the ones who love gays and think God made some people believe they are really men instead of women. Ultimately, to engage in this mentality, to accept this idea, this view, is to surrender to the Adversary and give up.
We are called upon to be the “city of light upon the hill,” a light to the world to show them God’s salvation. We are called upon to live our lives for God, so that through us others see God when they look upon us. In Orthodoxy, we call this Theosis, literally “divinization.” We seek, as St. Athanasius of Alexandria so eloquently put it, “becoming through grace what God is by nature.” That is, we seek godliness. Not to be confused with thinking that we will become God, or a god in our own right, it means that through Christ’s sacrifice, reuniting mankind with his divine nature, it is possible for us fallen, sinful men to become holy and righteous. And in doing so, be reunited with God, which is the purpose of Christ’s Salvation itself. But, while Christ made this thing possible, it is up to us individually to realize it. And what is more, it is our responsibility to help those around us realize it. As St. Peter said, “we have become partakers of the divine nature,” but it is on us to actually partake of it.
You might be asking what this has to do with you. Some of you may have already realized it, others may not, and this is alright. This pertains to you because, even if you are not Orthodox like myself, you are still called by the Word of God to strive for this goal, even if you do not recognize Orthodox doctrine or Theosis. Whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, or some other variety of splinter group, if one considers himself a Christian, then it is your duty and your calling to strive for godliness.
So long as we hold onto this mortal coil on this mortal plane, so long as we walk this world, we will always be tempted by the evil that has consumed it. We will always be tempted by the passions of our flesh and the lusts of our hearts. In believing ourselves to be good Christians we will, consciously or unconsciously, make peace with these passions, these lusts, and ultimately these evils – by telling ourselves that we have no need to improve upon ourselves any further. We can never achieve the spirit of peace needed to save those around us, if we become content in our own salvation.
The only good Christian is a dead Christian. Because, it is only when join in our Lord’s kingdom, that we will cease to be tempted by the passions of the flesh and the lusts of the heart. And, and only then will we exist free from sin. Until that day comes, we Christians must never stop striving to improve upon ourselves in our journey towards godliness. There will always be temptations to overcome. We can always do better. We should always strive to resist the traps of judgment and pride so that we, for our own sake and that of those around us, never forget this.
Do not become content in being a sinner and begging for forgiveness, but rather acknowledge that while you may be chief among sinners, you should never cease working to resist and overcome that sin, so that by your example, and by your struggle, not only will you be saved, but thousands around you will be saved alongside you.
Cast aside your vices. Overcome your lusts. Lean on your brother and let him lean upon you, as you both walk the narrow path to God. Do not become content. Then and only then, can we become the men God wants us to be, and the men that our people need us to be.
-By Dixie Anon
2 Peter 1 2 Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; 3 seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. 4 For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. 5 Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, 6 and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, 7 and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. 8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For he who lacks these qualities is blind or short-sighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins. 10 Therefore, brethren, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble; 11 for in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
