Christians Are Expected to Be Different from Other People
I am prompted to question whether people who claim that they are Christians but who do not show kindness, love, or feeling and are not friendly really understand what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. It is quite clear from the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament that Christians are expected to act differently from other people. They are not free to be unkind, unloving, or unfeeling and to be unfriendly. Indeed, they are expected to love their neighbors as themselves, to love those who hate them and who try to harm them, to do good to them, to treat others exactly as they have others treat them, not judge others harshly but to make allowances for them, to forgive others their faults, and to love one another as Jesus loves them.
When Jesus taught his disciples and the multitude to treat others exactly as they would wish others treat them, he did not have in mind ignoring their neighbors or fellow Christians and not talking to them or avoiding their neighbors or fellow Christians. Jesus did not shun people. He interacted with them—Pharisees and teachers of the Law, tax collectors, prostitutes, and other social outcasts, lepers and those oppressed by demons. We find only one passage in the New Testament in which Jesus tells his disciples to shun people. This passage is inconsistent with his own practice and appears to be a later interpolation.
While it may be permissible for Christians to take a temporary breather from each other: Jesus on occasion withdrew to a deserted spot to pray, adopting an indifferent attitude toward someone, not giving any thought to them, or showing no interest in them, or an unfriendly attitude toward them, showing dislike of them and no sympathy toward them, and shunning them, are not consistent with Jesus’ teaching and example. If a rift occurs in our relationship with a brother or sister—a neighbor or fellow Christian, Jesus urged his disciples to pursue reconciliation with that person even going as far as foregoing their religious duties until friendly relations had been restored.
A Christian need to make clear to their fellow Christians what their personal boundaries are and not leave their fellow Christians to guess what these boundaries are, They should not wait until a fellow Christian inadvertently oversteps a boundary. Nor should they expect their fellow Christians to know what their personal boundaries are without telling them. Personal boundaries vary with each individual Christian. While some boundaries may be culturally-defined, most are unique to the individual. Some people have very rigid, closed boundaries while others have fairly loose, open boundaries. The limits of what we consider acceptable behavior may differ according to how close or friendly we are with the other person.
This means that we may relax our personal boundaries or tighten them depending upon the state of our relationship with a particular individual. We may go from having open boundaries to closed ones if we lose interest in a friend or become annoyed or angry with them. As well as changing what we consider the limits of acceptable behavior, we may become less tolerant or forgiving of their going beyond what we consider acceptable. At the same time, we may not inform them.
When we are not clear with our fellow Christians, we are setting up our relationship with them to fail. When we do not take the time or trouble to communicate with them, we are increasing the likelihood that we will misunderstand them.
Our personalities also affect how we communicate with other people. Some people are transparent in expressing their thoughts and feelings; others are guarded. Some people are comfortable in sharing personal information; others are not. People who keep an emotional distance between themselves and others may pull away from someone whom they experience as moving too emotionally close to them. People who feel insecure in their relationships with others will respond with anxiety to delayed responses to their phone calls or texts, perceiving these delays as rejection of them. They will make more phone calls and send more texts in reaction to this perceived rejection.
Because individual Christians communicate differently, depending upon their personality types, it is good idea for Christians to take the time and trouble to get to know each other well. In that way they have a better understanding of each other and will be able to avoid the kind of misunderstandings which may arise from their differences in personality and ways of communicating. People who know each other well will not make the kind of mistakes that people who do not know each other well make.
Christians need to be honest and open with each other. Persuading someone something false is the truth, or keeping something hidden from someone for their own advantage is not appropriate behavior for a Christian. Neither is telling lies, even small ones, or half-truths, statements that are intended to deceive by being only partly true.
One criticism that is leveled at Christians is that they pretend to believe something that they do not really believe, or that is the opposite of what they do or say at another time. They may act one way when they are around the members of their church and another way when they are around family, relations, friends, boyfriends or girlfriends, coworkers, and others. This is a serious criticism and is too often right. We are not consistent in following the teaching and example of Jesus and we do not always behave in the same way.
This may happen because we do not fully understand what Jesus taught and practiced, we may have mistaken beliefs about what he meant and did, or we have not fully accepted or absorbed his teaching and example that it has become part of our character. It may also happen because people have different social images in different contexts. A social image is “an individual’s public persona—that is, the identity or face presented to others in public contexts.” A persona is “the particular type of character that a person seems to have an that is often different from their real or private character.” A related concept is social identity. According to the American Psychological Association social identity is—
“The personal qualities that one claims and displays to others so consistently that they are considered to be part of one’s essential, stable self. This public persona may be an accurate indicator of the private, personal self, but it may also be a deliberately contrived image….”
We develop public persons when we are children. They are masks that we wear. We wear one for our parents, relatives, and other people in authority such as schoolteachers and another one for siblings, school mates, and friends.
One of reasons that people are caught off-guard or surprised when a teenager turns violent and shoots one or more of his fellow students at high school is that his behavior did not match his public persona. “He was such a polite, quiet boy.” But underneath that polite, quiet mask was a very angry young person.
One of the things that Jesus drew to the attention of his disciples and the Pharisees and scribes themselves was that, while they outwardly appeared to be pious—at least in the estimation of their contemporaries and themselves, their hearts were far from God. Their piousness was a part of their public persona. It did not reflect their true character. If their hearts were close to God, they would show mercy to others. They would show kindness and forgiveness toward others.
For Christians our behavior should not only be consistent with not only Jesus’ character, teaching, and example but also our attitudes and beliefs. As John Wesley pointed to the attention of his listeners in a number of his sermons, it is not enough to undergo an outward transformation—a change in our behavior. We must also undergo an inward transformation—a change in our attitudes and beliefs connected to that behavior. Our public self and our private self must be congruent.
The process by which we undergo this outward and inward transformation is known as sanctification. Wesley preferred the term “Christian perfection,” by which he meant that we did not become faultless but grew in maturity of character and love of God. Sanctification is a process that involves faith in Jesus and our own efforts. To help us grow in holiness, the quality of being holy, of being pure and good in relation to what Jesus taught and practiced, and godliness, the quality of obeying and respecting God, God supplies us with what Wesley described as “sanctifying, perfecting grace,” His divine influence works in us to these ends so that we become like Jesus. Each of us is at a different stage in this process. For this reason, we may be described as “works in progress.” The process itself requires increasing submission to the lordship of Jesus. It is beautifully summed up in this Shaker song.
I will not be like the stubborn oak
But I will be like the willow tree
I‘ll bow and bend unto God’s will
And I will seek his mercy still.
God’s will is that we fully embrace Jesus as Lord.
Something that I have brought up in several previous posts is the “negativity bias,” the “negative bias,” or the “negativity effect,” While Jesus did not use these terms in his teaching, it is clear from his teaching that he was well-acquainted with this bias or effect. This is the tendency to focus on people’s negative qualities rather than their positive qualities, to give more credence to negative information about them than positive information, to construe their words and actions in a much more negative way than is warranted, to imagine that they have additional, yet unrecognized negative qualities and essentially to think the worst of them. It is a bias that we all have and which we may keep in abeyance until something happens to trigger it.
For example, we may make friends with someone who is more exciting, more fun, and more interesting than an existing friend. This new friendship triggers our negativity bias, and we begin to see our existing friend in an increasingly negative light. We become less willing to accept their faults and mistakes and less willing to allow them to make mistakes or to allow for their weaknesses. We may come to the opinion that harmless words and action may be harmful and to the belief innocent words and actions are bad or wrong even though they are harmless and innocent. We may conclude that maintaining friendly relations with the existing friend may interfere with our relationship with our new friend. We may consciously or subconsciously look for excuses by which we rationalize discontinuing our relationship with the existing friend. Having convinced ourselves that we are doing nothing wrong in discarding them as friend, we drop them as a friend without a word of explanation, suddenly stopping all communication with them.
While we may convince ourselves that we did the right thing and may convince others that we did, if we look at our thoughts and actions from the perspective of Jesus’ teaching and example, what we thought and did are clearly at odds with what Jesus taught and practiced. Several key principles that Jesus taught and practiced and to which we as a Christian should have given consideration in our decision-making are missing. As well as letting the negativity bias influence our thinking, we gave little if any attention to what Jesus taught about showing understanding and caring for others, being forgiving, being generous, being helpful, being thoughtful of someone else’s feelings, and all the other values which he emphasized. In addition to ignoring these principles we put our own advantage first.
Why? Among the most likely reasons is habit. It is something that we do often and regularly, sometimes without know that we are doing it. We have not internalized what Jesus taught and practiced and therefore we continue think and act in ways that conflict with his teaching and example. Someone may have brought it to our attention in the past, but we dismissed what they said because we may be in the habit of doing that too.
If we are to grow in maturity of character and love of God as Christians, we need to move beyond these old ways of thinking and acting, not just for the good of our neighbors and our fellow-Christians but most importantly for our own good. They are habits that we need to replace with new habits which enable us to become our better self, the self that God means us to be and as which we will enjoy the freedom that is ours in Jesus, freedom from the effects of the negative experiences that we had in childhood and later in life.
If loving one another, loving our brothers and sisters in Christ, is an obsession, in which our thoughts are controlled by the strong desire to see them grow as disciples of Jesus Christ, then let us be obsessed. It is not something about which we should stop thinking, nor is something in which we can be too interested. When we love someone, we are not captivated by a fantasy image of them. We see them as they are. If we are Christians, we not only want to see them grow as a human being, but we also want to see them blossom as disciple of Jesus Christ. We desire most of all that they become the better self that is God’s plan for them.
