Website owner:  James Miller

The True Christian

   The true Christian.  What sort of person would I expect a true 
   Christian to be?  I would expect that a true Christian ought to 
   stand out from other people for his exceptional honesty, 
   integrity, morality, chastity, kindness and goodness.  That is 
   what it would seem to me.  He ought to stand out for his 
   integrity and goodness.  His love of God and those things that 
   God stands for ought to reveal itself in his values, outlook 
   and character.  I would expect him to be a righteous, upright, 
   good person.  From reading New Testament scripture and just 
   from reason and intuition it seems obvious to me that this 
   should be true.  Yet this is not what I have seen in real life.  
   In my experience I have not found many Christians of any type 
   or denomination to stand out in this way.  What is wrong?  I 
   don't understand.  Why is it that they don't?  I have found 
   most Christians to be essentially the same as the rest of the 
   world in regard to their moral character and to come up far 
   short of what I would expect a Christian to be.  More than 
   this, it seems to me that if you compare the people of the 
   Christian countries with people of, say, Moslem, Hindu, or 
   Buddhist countries it is the Christians who have the fewest 
   morals.  Why is this?  I just don't understand.  I would expect 
   that the Christians should stand out for having higher morals 
   and better character than people of other religions.  In fact, 
   I think that Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists are all shocked by 
   the gross immorality of Christian countries and have a very low 
   opinion of Christians.  They view Christians as being devoid of 
   morals.  They see Christianity as a religion of few morals.  
   And, in my view, with good reason.  I am ashamed of 
   Christianity as I see it practiced in most of the Christian 
   countries of the world.  Yet I believe totally in Christianity 
   as I find it in the New Testament.  It is Christians that I am 
   ashamed of.  They have not lived true to the religion.  They 
   have twisted and perverted the message that was given to them 
   and often Christianity seems to me to have become a religion of 
   talk and religious cant and dogma and theory instead of a 
   religion of faith and practice.  Everywhere I see terrible 
   corruptions of Christianity, in all types and varieties, but I 
   have difficulty finding true Christianity.  And in the 
   Christian countries of the world I think it is mostly an 
   abandoned religion.  And that is too bad because I believe it 
   is the true religion.

   I secretly wonder how things are going to turn out for the 
   Christians.  They have been given the truth and have not lived 
   true to it and, by their lives, have brought discredit on the 
   name Christian, and thus on the name of Jesus Christ himself.  


   Oct 2001