I spoke to a friend the other day. He said “I like Christianity as a philosophy. I just don’t like most Christians.” I said “Welcome to the club!” Cynicism aside, what is it about Christians that can be so annoying to so many people? After all, aren’t we supposed to make more disciples? We’ve put ourselves behind the 8-ball so to speak because there are so many negative stereotypes about Christians. Most of them brought on by ourselves.
Probably the biggest objectionable trait of Christians is that they are hypocritical. And we are. It’s true. Unfortunately, try as hard as I might, I continue to do the wrong thing occasionally. There is a bumper sticker that says “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven”. While that can come across as trite and even demeaning to an extent, it’s true. We didn’t become perfect or cease all sinful activity when we became Christians. We now should be able to recognize 
sinful activity and do our best to avoid it, but we are still tempted, and, sometimes, we give in. That’s where grace comes in. As Christians, we understand the concept of grace. Non-Christians don’t. It’s difficult for someone who isn’t familiar with the character of God, or for someone who has a distorted view of the character of God, to understand the concept of grace. The concept that not only would the victim of this crime (God) substitute his own son to pay the penalty for your crime, but that he would then adopt you as his own child as well. It just doesn’t make sense to a non-Christian.
But there are also things that we bring on ourselves when it comes to hypocrisy as well. Take religion, for example. You know, those rules we make up in order to clarify for those less intelligent than ourselves how to follow God. If you’re over 40, your Sundays probably looked a lot different as a child than they do now. One of the reasons was because of the commandment that tells us to keep the Sabbath Day holy. Remember that one? Forget that the biblical Sabbath is actually Saturday. It was OK to mow your lawn, go shopping, watch TV etc on Saturday. But come Sunday, all activity outside of church became taboo. Our family didn’t shop or even eat out on Sundays. To do so would have meant that someone else would have had to “work” in order for us to shop or eat. We were not going to be put into a position of making someone else break one of the 10 commandments. We even had “blue laws” that kept businesses closed on Sundays.
We didn’t watch TV on Sundays. Well, until after the Sunday night service. That put us close enough to Monday to make it OK I think. Since there was no such thing as Sunday night football back then, it meant that I didn’t grow up watching football on Sundays. No, my Sundays were usually spent taking a nap. That probably explains my fondness for Sunday afternoon naps as an adult. Somewhere, over the years, our culture changed. It is now OK to eat out, shop, mow the lawn and even stay awake all day on Sunday. As long as we don’t do those things during church time. Well – except for the staying awake part. That one is OK to do during church. So my question is: was it OK all along, or am I somehow wrong in being active on Sunday now?
Some of you remember when it was wrong for a woman to wear pants (Deuteronomy 22:5), jewelry (1 Timothy 2, 1 Peter 3) or makeup (I’m not sure where this came from specifically, but see the last reference for good measure). While I have no personal experience with this, it was a big deal for some. Of course, now, women not only wear pants, jewelry and makeup, they wear the fancy clothes that the previously mentioned verses specifically condemned, and they wear hats the size of patio umbrellas.
I won’t go into some of the other taboos from my childhood in detail, but we’ll add in some generalized prohibitions such as dancing, going to movies and drinking. And we would find it difficult to believe in our enlightened age of technology, but I know of a pastor who was fired by his church because they found out that he owned a television. Nowadays, we don’t think much of doing things that previous generations considered worthy of eternal damnation. Or at least a Sunday without football. My question remains the same: were those things wrong, or not? If they weren’t wrong then, why did we say they were? If they were wrong then, why are they not still considered sinful today?
Besides the obvious example of people who call themselves Christians and then still participate in sinful behavior, the above examples are one of the reasons that Christians are accused of being hypocrites. We flip-flop on issues of sin. We major on the minors. How appealing is Christianity to those observing from the outside? What hope are we offering those facing serious obstacles in life that the church has the answers? How can we convince a world that desperately needs Christ that we can point them in the right direction?
The biggest thing that we as Christians can do is to model the concept of grace. Grace toward unbelievers who may not agree with all of our beliefs, but especially grace toward other believers who do not believe as we do. It’s time to major on the majors and let God sort the rest out. If we were to stop focusing on sinful behavior and start to focus on people, the world would notice. God didn’t send Jesus to the world to condemn it, but to save the people in it (John 3:17). Why then are we so quick to condemn, but slow to offer salvation? It’s time the church stepped up and became the force of influence that it was meant to be. Focus on the people, not their sin. God loves people enough to pursue them even in their sin (Romans 5:8). Shouldn’t we do the same?