The Delusion of Christians

Do we delude ourselves when we say that we are Christians? Or do we prove our Christianity by what we do?

"But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of a person he was." (James 1:22-24 NAS)

Delusion is one of the great tricks of Satan; with it, he can convince us that we are indeed practitioners of Christianity when, in fact, we may merely be thespians in a Christian role. Oh, I don’t think we intentionally don our dramatic persona; I think we’re just afraid to look at the truth about our Christianity. If we did, we might find ourselves recognizing that our professed faith requires more of us than we are willing to give. The great hallmark of Christ was His giving – He gave us hope, salvation, eternal life with God, and a purpose to our lives. That purpose is to give so that others might come to know Christ and receive that which He would give. To do that, though, requires true Christianity.

Christianity is both faith and action; by faith we accept Christ as our Savior and by action we demonstrate to the world that our faith is tangible. Faith, without demeaning it in any way, is simply believing in something that cannot be empirically proven. We all have faith – faith that gravity will always be there, faith that the sun will rise in the morning, faith that we will be loved by our spouses. Action, though, demands something of us – our energy, our willingness to give of ourselves, a commitment. As James so aptly puts it:

"Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself." (James 2:17 NAS)

When James speaks of our looking at our natural face in a mirror and, immediately upon turning away, forgetting what kind of a person we truly are, he is reminding us that we are incapable of seeing the genuine reflection of what and who we are. A true mirror will exactly reflect our image but through our own self-deception and Satan’s distortion we believe that we are something other than what our image displays.