On my Saturday long walks with my dog Daisy, I try to catch up on podcasts of the White Horse Inn. Today I listened to the June 14 show, “God’s Story vs. Our Stories,” in which the roundtable discussion was on how modern evangelicals tend to rely more on sharing with others their subjective conversion experiences rather than what God objectively did for them—aka “the gospel.” As host and seminary professor Michael Horton explained in his commentary from that show:

The apostles refer to the gospel as a message concerning God’s Son, Jesus Christ: God made flesh, fulfilling all righteousness in our place, enduring our sentence on the cross, and being raised on the third day as the source of eternal life. Where are you in that definition? Where am I? Nowhere!!! That’s why it’s good news. The gospel is the good news about who God is and what He’s done in spite of who we are and what we’ve done. The gospel is good news for us precisely because it isn’t about us.

Mickey0905I started thinking about this in terms of the various scandals involving well-known Christians, everyone from Ted Haggard to John Ensign and Mark Sanford. When these men in their prominent positions—while trying to publicly proclaim Christian virtues to believers and nonbelievers alike—held up their own lives as an example and subsequently fell, they fell hard. The media and those who disagreed with their politics and/or beliefs were quick to label them as hypocrites. And they were, because we all are.

Here’s an exchange between Horton and Pastor Kim Riddlebarger from the White Horse Inn I listened to today (you can hear the entire show here):

Riddlebarger: What do you guys think about the thesis that if this is the state of American evangelicalism, to go to the subjective testimony, could this be why the moral scandals and the hypocrisy become such a huge issue in evangelicalism?

Horton: Sure. . . . Because we just told everybody, “Look at us. Look at us. Look at us. . . .”

Riddlebarger: “Oops, look at him. . . .”

Horton: “. . . Look at our improved lives. Look at how we’ve changed. This is my ‘before picture’ and this is my ‘after picture.’” And the person saying that messes up—as we all do—and . . . they’re there with cameras.

Riddlebarger: Boy are they ever. And nothing offends a non-Christian any more than hypocrisy. And I think non-Christians have every right to be offended.

I agree. While it is perfectly OK to share with others how Christ has made a difference in our lives or how we came to faith through the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit, let’s remember that it’s not our experiences or our example that can make a difference in the lives of others; it is what Christ did for us and for them.

As sinners saved by grace alone, both prominent and not-so-prominent Christians cannot completely avoid the hypocrisy label, but we can lessen its blow by pointing more toward Christ instead of ourselves. As John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”