In the past week, I ended up at the same restaurant two different times. Interestingly enough, I had two very different experiences.
During the first visit, my group was served by a waitress that was fantastic. She was there before you knew you had a need. With a smile and a pleasant word, she checked in with us often. She boxed our leftovers and gave us extra bread to take home with us. She just made the whole experience very pleasant.
The second visit was not as pleasant. The waitress wasn’t terrible but she wasn’t great either. I found myself searching the room for her several times, wondering if she had forgotten about us. She completely forgot one request and we didn’t ask again. She was pleasant enough but she seemed a bit scatterbrained and generally uninterested in the people at her assigned tables. I wondered if she is perhaps just not really cut out for waitressing.
Waitresses are the representatives of their restaurants. Like it or not, restaurant owners are putting their reputation in the hands of these people. We do the same with our landscape company. Employees represent their companies.
Sometimes, as in our first waitress, that is a wonderful thing. They represent well with stellar service and a smile. Sometimes, as in our second waitress, they are just okay. They don’t necessarily damage the business owner’s reputation, but they also don’t do anything to help it. And, sometimes, employees do irreparable damage to the reputation of a business. Lacking wisdom and only caring about self, they bring a carelessness of deed and tongue to their job that gives the company a bad name.
In all three cases it’s the same business. The same owners desire to have employees that treat their customers well. Unfortunately, they cannot always control how their employees treat customers and sometimes do not even know until it’s too late that there was a problem.
It’s just the way it is. It’s the way it has always been. It just is.
Do you see a similarity here to Christianity? Believers are representatives (lights) and we should represent our King well. What people think about God is often based on what they think about us.
Some represent Him very well—they speak the truth in love; they love and obey His Word; they love others well; and they strive to live holy, pure lives unspotted from the world.
And then there are others who don’t necessarily hurt Christ’s reputation but they certainly don’t help it, either. They struggle with worldliness and sin; lacking courage, they know they should speak the truth of God’s Word but they are are afraid ; they aren’t necessarily selfish but they aren’t really unselfish either, as they tend to things in their own little world.
And then there are those who profess Christ (only God knows the truth if they are saved or not) who claim to love Him and yet continue in sin and worldliness with not even one niggling conviction; they are self-focused instead of God-focused; they aren’t even thinking about speaking truth because they are too worried about what others will think. This last group does irreparable damage to the name of Christ.
(Parenthetically, I’d rather guess that many genuine believers vacillate between the first two types of representatives. Sometimes we do so well and we have courage and love well and then other times we get so distracted and fearful or caught up in some besetting sin that we need to battle. Probably none of us are 100% in one of the first two categories all the time. I know I am not. Praise God for His marvelous grace…!)
But, in the end, Jesus is Jesus. His weak (or even false) representatives do not change who He is.
I’ve heard of so many people who walk away from the faith because of the “hypocrites in the church”. Or use it as an excuse not to go to church or “get involved with religion.”
And I just want to say: Of course, there are going to be hypocrites in the church! Just as there will always be lousy employees.
People are people are people. Some things never change.
We should not judge a business based on one bad experience. And we certainly should never judge God based on His human representatives, genuine or otherwise.
We have to keep our eyes on Jesus. We can’t get mired in the broken, sinful world around us, wondering if what we read in the Bible is true and basing that belief on those who claim to represent Him here on earth.
The Bible IS true and if someone isn’t representing Jesus and what is written in the Bible with integrity and righteousness, we must turn from them, rather than turning from the One they claim to be representing.
𝘠𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥. (Matthew 5:14a)
AMEN!