Is Your Faith More than Skin Deep?

I received a message from my doctor the other day. I can’t say that I was excited to hear it, but the words were important: “It’s time to schedule your annual physical exam.” I don’t know anyone who gets excited about having a physical exam, but I know they’re important. For one reason, they often uncover problems before you have any symptoms.

So as I considered this wonderful invitation to visit my doctor, I started thinking how important it also is to take a spiritual exam. Just as an annual physical can reveal problems before symptoms appear, a spiritual check-up for Christians can help us recognize areas of our walk with God that need attention. How often do we stop long enough to ponder how we’re doing spiritually? Why do we accept the importance of physical exams but seldom perform a self-examination of our walk with God?

That’s what I’d like to do here at the start of a new “year” on the blog.

Why do I think this is important? Because I see lots of Christians whose spirituality is a mile wide and an inch deep. We talk a good game, but it’s only superficial.

We go to church on Sunday, nod our heads during the message, and leave completely unaffected by God’s Word. We may even read our Bibles, tell people we’ll pray for them, listen to Christian radio, but none of it is making a difference in how we live, how we think, who we are.

Oh, we can make sure everything looks good on the outside. People around us think we’re giants of the faith. But inside, we’re not too different from someone who’s never heard of God.

Years ago, we were lucky enough to buy a house with bad siding. I won’t mention the brand, but there were lots of lawsuits – all settled before we bought the house. A few years after we moved in, we needed to paint the house, and that’s when we discovered the rotten siding. I met with a painter, and he said he could paint right over the rotten siding. It would look great. I could pull pieces of siding off with my fingers, but it would sure look good. He strongly suggested, of course, that we replace the rotten boards rather than paint over them. And the price of the paint job went up quite a bit.

Jesus said something about this very thing, except he wasn’t talking about siding. One day he was teaching within earshot of the Jewish religious leaders, and he said…

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of impurity.” (Matthew 23:27)

When Jesus said this, the Passover celebration was just around the corner, so lots of people would soon be traveling to Jerusalem for the festival. On the way, they would pass tombs, and if anyone touched a tomb, even by mistake, they’d become unclean and unable to take part in the Passover (see Numbers 19:18-19). So nice people would paint the tombs bright white to make them easily identifiable to any pilgrims. The tombs would be nice and shiny and clean, but inside they still held dead men’s bones.

Jesus was talking about the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. They made sure to look good and holy on the outside, but on the inside they were spiritually bankrupt. They were not who they pretended to be.

How many of us are just like that? We make sure we look good and holy to those around us, but inside we know we struggle in our walk with God. Do our actions match up with what we claim to be?

If you’re a Christian, the call to Christ you experienced wasn’t a call to accept his forgiveness and receive a “Go Directly to Heaven” card, then float through life as if nothing happened. He didn’t call us to consider ourselves safe from hell, sit through church services unchanged, hardly crack open the Bible, and pray only when we’re in trouble.

The call of God on your life was a radical call to follow Jesus and to give up anything that might keep you from doing that.

The disciple Matthew (also known as Levi) was a tax collector. This means he collected taxes and tariffs on goods that entered the area for sale. Tax collectors were known to charge far more than was required, filling their pockets with the extra. But even if they were honest and didn’t take extra money, they were still hated because they served the Roman government. So they were thieves and traitors, considered to be right near the top in the list of great sinners.

When Matthew wrote his account of his calling, he said it like this:

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me,” and he got up and followed him. (Matthew 9:9)

Matthew was humble, just sharing the basics. So when Luke wrote his account, he added a little more detail:

After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow me.” So, leaving everything behind, he got up and began to follow him. (Luke 5:27-28)

Notice how Luke adds the words, “leaving everything behind.”

For Matthew, following Jesus meant walking away from his successful business and trusting God to provide. This was not a call to take a few days off and walk around the countryside with Jesus. It was a radical call to give up everything and devote his entire life to Jesus.

The call that Jesus extended to Matthew, the call to follow him, is the same call Jesus made to you when you became a Christian. “Leaving everything behind” is what it looks like to accept that call.

Being a believer doesn’t involve having a spiritual life that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s being completely devoted to Jesus and allowing him to change you as you follow him, even when he calls you to leave everything else behind.

Is that what your spiritual life looks like?