When Being Christian Makes You Less Honest

Some years ago I watched an interview between Bono from U2, David Taylor from Fuller Theological Seminary, and Eugene Peterson (who wrote The Message translation of the Bible).

In the interview, Bono decried the lack of honesty in much Christian music. I agree with him. I’ve hardly listened to any Christian music for many years now. I find the vast majority of it to be boringly predictable and mostly just not in touch with the reality of life.

I mention this because I’ve also experienced this lack of honesty in various Christian gatherings. Why is it that I often feel more depth and reality in a gathering that is loosely Christian at best than I do in a gathering that is overtly Christian? It’s like when we’re in an overtly Christian gathering, we think we need to be good marketers for God. One of the things Bono mentioned in that interview was that Christian musicians should focus on creating genuine art rather than “advertising”.

Hear hear!

I’ve been in Christian gatherings where difficulties might be mentioned, but they’re always qualified with, “but God is good” statements, or by always having a happy outcome which is “an answer to prayer”.

What about the times when our prayers aren’t answered?

What about when the person with cancer who you prayed for died, or when the couple going through marriage difficulties who you prayed for ended up getting divorced? Is our faith so fragile that we can’t handle it when God seemingly doesn’t answer our prayers? Or, to take it further, so what if our faith really is that fragile? Do we think God can’t handle that? God’s response to our fragile faith is compassion, not disappointment in us.

“Praising God” with dishonest worship

Apart from the gospels, some of my favorite passages of Scripture are the Psalms. That’s because they’re brutally honest. There’s no dishonest denial in the Psalms; there’s no desperately trying to defend God’s reputation. There’s just raw, rubber-hits-the-road vulnerable honesty; the kind you’re much more likely to see at a 12 Step meeting of recovering alcoholics than in most churches on a Sunday.

A problem we have in most of our churches is that, when we dress things up in Christian language, it’s often because we’re trying to cover up the reality underneath which is begging to be heard. That reality underneath is the person of Jesus. He is the One who is underneath that Christian language, begging to be heard. But we cover Him up with “but God is good” language and happy answers to prayer because we think that glorifies God.

If that’s what glorifies God, then Jesus Himself had it all totally wrong.

John’s gospel says that it was when Jesus went to the cross that He glorified God. You read that right; that’s what John’s gospel says glorifying God is; when the Son of God Himself went to the most humiliating, shameful death that has probably ever been devised by humans. No wonder John opens his gospel with the terrible truth that God came to God’s own people and they recognized Him not.

Some years ago, the Korean-American theologian, Soong-Chan Rah, compared the state of Christian worship music to what we see in the music of the Psalms. He pointed out that 95 percent of the top Christian songs, as listed by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), are songs of praise, while only about 5 percent are songs of lament. Compare that to the Psalms, of which about 40 percent are laments. What we’re singing in church on a Sunday is just not reflective of what we see in the Scriptures we claim to revere so highly.

The honest truth is that much of our Christianity is shallow, sugar-coated and dishonest. And it’s reflective of the way we do discipleship in our churches. I’m all for praising God, because, after all, God really is good. But God is also honest, and we’re therefore called to be honest as well. People we pray for do die of cancer, Christian marriages do end in divorce. That’s just the reality of life. Often we don’t know why, and we have good examples in the Bible of how we can deal with that. But it’s more honest to shake our fist in God’s face at times than it is to deny the reality of what often happens and “just praise God”. I’m convinced that God is not glorified by any denial like that. Jesus had words for people who live like that: hypocrites. He called them that because a hypocrite is someone who wears a mask to give an impression that something is better than it really is.

I generally feel more at home and feel a much deeper sense of what it means to be human as God made us when I’m in a group of people of all faiths and none who are brutally honest. I almost always feel more at home there than I do in a group of Christians who constantly talk about the goodness of God as a way of covering up the reality of what’s going on underneath the surface of their lives. Such an attitude may be nice but it never touches us in our deepest recesses.

God can handle our honesty. God doesn’t need defending. And God is actually more glorified when we can shake our fist in God’s face and cry out, “Why?!!!” than when we deny the reality of our pain and cover it over with the bandaids of empty and shallow praise.

Learning from Jacob and the angel

Read the Psalms; read the gospels. In fact, read the whole Bible! You’ll find in it a narrative of struggle, failure and humiliation by a people just like us, fumbling their way towards the light. In fact, one of the most profound stories in the Bible, that of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32:22–32, reveals the very DNA of the people of God. It’s in that story that, after wrestling the whole night through, the messenger of God says to Jacob that his name from now on will be Israel, because Israel means…”struggles with God and humans”. The very DNA of the people of God is struggle. That’s honesty; that’s reality.

Christians of all people can afford to be rigorously honest. The tragedy though is that we’re generally the most dishonest. And what’s worse is that it’s in our dishonesty that we think we’re being honest and glorifying God. Jesus won’t have a bar of it though. He sees straight through our nice dishonesty. He calls us out of our fear into full disclosure and vulnerability. That’s why He gives the beautiful invitation to come to Him all you who are weary and heavy-laden and that He will give you rest.

I long for the day when I can feel more in touch with reality in most churches than I do outside the church. My experience is that it’s the ones who have known genuine struggle in their lives who consistently have the deepest and most attractive relationship with God. They are the ones who draw me to Christ; they are the ones my heart listens to. But they are few and far between. God raise up more people like that in the church.