A New Song Essay
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…just as we have borne the image of the man of dust,
we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
1 Corinthians 15:49
The Value of a Counterfeit
(…or, in Christ, even the phoney has value)
As a pastor, I occasionally find myself asking non-church-attending acquaintances about their involvement with Christianity. Most are polite, prefacing responses with set phrases such as “Well, no offense…”, or “Don’t take this the wrong way…”. In the end, the answers given are almost always tied to a set of personal experiences, usually pointing to one common theme:
They really don’t like Christians.
Irreligious people not liking practitioners of the world’s largest religion? What a shocker. Yes, I suspect for most, this revelation doesn’t come as a surprise. But it should. It absolutely should.
Why?
Because, in his day, Jesus of Nazareth – the “Christ” for whom “Christ-ians” are so labelled – was phenomenally popular with irreligious people. It was religious people that hated him. So where did things go so wrong? Two commonplace observations offer up some clues:
The first is a popular quote often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that asserts: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ”. The second is the ubiquitous “The church is so full of hypocrites!”
“Hypocrite”, “fake”, “phoney”, what do you call something that looks or sounds like an item of great worth, but find it lacking the genuine qualities that give it value?
One word comes to mind: “Counterfeit”.
Worse yet, judging by the degree to which the unchurched world considers Jesus Christ less and less relevant, it appears we modern Christians – as counterfeits go – are not even particularly good counterfeits(!). We are like Monopoly “money”: fine to play games with, but not what you’d use to buy a car.
So, “in Christ”, what is the value of a counterfeit?
Two thoughts for you to consider: First, if I was a visitor to Earth from a distant planet, and if I had heard about the value of something called “a one-hundred dollar bill”, but had never actually seen one, a counterfeit “C-note” might be a useful thing. Once its bogus characteristics were distinctly labelled, it would provide me with a clear guide to finding the real thing. I’d know what I was looking for.
Secondly, there are approximately 2.3 billion Christians out there. Assuming – for the sake of the argument – the critics are right, and all of those Christians are hypocritical counterfeits. That’s a LOT of counterfeits! What might that suggest?
There MUST be something of real value out there worth looking for.
…and there IS!