Being a Christian Isn’t Trendy

Being a christian isn’t trendy.

Now-a-days you can change your identity and change your aesthetic like you change your clothes. But being a Christian is different. If you’ve put your trust and faith in Jesus, your identity is found in him. His ways become your ways, and in Him you have a firm foundation, one that can never and will never be shaken.  

Something that I’ve just recently learned is that we can sometimes get so distracted in our faith journey that we start to idolize things. An idol is anything you put before God. And I’m not talking about regular idols, I’m talking about the idols we see specific to the Christian community. These are Idols like having the prettiest bible, the greatest/funniest sermon, the fanciest clothes, the biggest tithe for your home church, or being Instagram or TikTok famous in the name of Jesus when in reality, we’re doing these things for ourselves and tagging Jesus to them and calling it a day. There’s many more examples but they would be far too much to list here. 

Being a Christian isn’t trendy. You can have a million followers on your Christian pages, the biggest church in all of America, and the prettiest Bible and Bible journaling account on instagram and still be far from the Lord. 

You see, all of those things are temporary and they’re man made. At the end of the day, none of that matters because you can’t take any of it with you when Jesus comes back. It’s just you alone who will be standing before the Lord. 

True Christianity is hard. It’s discipline. It’s dying to yourself daily, failing, receiving grace, and then trying again, over and over and over again. It’s being hated by the world because you speak truth found in the word of God that they don’t agree with. Jesus told us in the gospels that we will be hated for his name’s sake. We are called to be Christ-like but we forget that Christ was the first to be hated. Why do we expect our experience living for Jesus to be any different?

Are we living that set apart life that He so desperately wants us to have? What does that even look like? 

It all starts with Jesus. We were created to be in relationship with the father. Now, we can do that through Jesus as he intercedes on our behalf to God the father in heaven. It’s not about how many scriptures you can memorize, how much knowledge you can get from a seminary degree or anything else other than a right relationship with Jesus Christ. 

This means spending undivided time with Jesus every day. This means praying and getting to know more about the father and His character by what you learn through the Bible. And it’s through that right relationship with Jesus that will produce boldness in you to speak truth over your life and others. It’s then when we share the truth found in the word of God to people who may have their own reservations about God, Jesus, and Christianity that we may encounter hate. And that’s okay!