“Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him. I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” So said Mahatma Ghandi, the father of the then new independent India.
Dr. Martin Luther King respected Ghandi for his commitment to peaceful resistance and saw from Ghandi’s life how to mobilise and encourage the civil rights movement in the USA with courageous, yet peaceful, demonstration, often at great cost physically to the demonstrators. In a way, Ghandi’s life modelled the principles of Jesus Christ, and when he went on hunger strike in order to stop the bloodletting of Hindus and Muslims in India, Ghandi demonstrated an example of Christ through his personal sacrifice.
Today, globally, Christians are suffering very real persecution. At a meeting in the House of Lords a few years back, a persecuted pastor from Sudan said to the assembled meeting of national Christian leaders: “Please do not devalue the cost of our faith, truly lived out within our persecuted communities, by the compromise of your faith in the West not lived out correctly according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
The Christian faith is a faith that encourages its adherents to become like its founder, Jesus Christ. The foundation of this faith is the mystery of the ‘cross’ which illustrates a life moving from spiritual death to spiritual life, by encouraging us all to pick up our own cross daily and understand that we all have a destiny and purpose in God.
Real love does have the ability to absorb people’s brokenness and abuse, often at a real cost to the person manifesting the grace and love. This isn’t a soft option as some people would believe.
In other words we should not be surprised, as Christians, when life becomes difficult and challenging because it is often through these conflicts that the Kingdom of God is revealed through our lives, both individually and corporately.
At this same meeting in the House of Lords it was agreed that the Christian Church in the West isn’t being persecuted, but it is being marginalised. This is in comparison with those fellow believers, estimated to be 160,000 a year, who surrender their earthly lives around the world for their eternal hope through real martyrdom. In other words ‘faith in Jesus Christ is more important than life itself.’
Christians are often the first ‘bible’ people will read. People need to see how we live as Christians in the good and the bad times. To live life well, we must understand that the eternal perspective of life is more important than the years we live down here. So why is this world view so important to us as Christians? Because without understanding the gift of life from God’s perspective, we won’t understand the ‘spiritual revelation’ that without free will and free choice there is no ability to really understand real love, which is the currency of the eternal Kingdom.
Verses in 1 Corinthians 13 state:
“If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship/martyrdom that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.”
The only real competition that stops us truly loving each other as Christ commanded in life is the darkness in our own personal hearts and minds.