Half-Hearted Christians
One of the greatest problems in the church today is half hearted Christians. These are the people who claim to believe in God, but rarely if ever show any signs of it. They want to use God as a “fire escape”, or they want to have both God and the World. This kind of attitude makes Christians as a whole look bad. Perhaps even worse, it hurts the new or struggling Christians because when they look at these people’s lives they see little or no difference between them and the rest of the world.
James 1:8 says that a double minded man is unstable in all his ways. These are the people that pray in church on Sunday, and go home and get on with the rest of their life. It’s not consistent for them. They turn to God when things get rough, or when there is nowhere else to turn. They have no stability in their lives because they’re stuck in the middle, unsure of what they truly believe. Do we truly mean it when we pray, or when we say we believe that Jesus is our Savior? If not, we need to examine our lives, and get back where God wants us to be.
Later on in the chapter, in James 1:22-24, James says that we need to do what the Bible says, not just hearing what the Bible says. If we just listen to the Word, but never do anything it says, we deceive ourselves when we say that we’re Christians. James uses a nice analogy, comparing it to a man looking in the mirror and walking away, and totally forgetting who he was. Do we remember who we are, and what it means to be a Christian? We need to do what the Bible says to do. It’s not always easy, and people won’t always like us for it, but if we truly believe in God, and what Jesus went through for us, it’s not so hard.
James 2:14 says that faith without works is dead. If we just say that we’re saved, or just say that we believe in God, but never actually do anything for God, then our faith is meaningless. If we truly had faith in God, we’d be doing things for God. You can’t have one without the other. Do we praise God, and do what He calls us to do? Or do we just go to church on Sundays, sing with the hymns, and go home right after the service, never actually growing or doing anything for God?
Jesus said back in Matthew 6:24 that a man can’t serve two masters, one will be hated and one will be loved. We need to choose whether we’re going to follow God with all of our hearts, or whether we will drop Him entirely. We can’t stand in the middle. In Revelations, it says that lukewarm Christians are worse than unbelievers. God would rather us not believe at all than just half-heartedly believe. So, let’s look at our lives. Where do we stand, and where should we be? We all could be doing better than we are.
