Truth Professed, or Believed?

Why are Christians so often so mean to each other?

I think it is because we do not care enough about truth.

I think its because we do not get clear about what we believe.

I think our thinking gets fuzzy, often enabled by the kind of subculture we have created, and fuzzy thinking goes largely unnoticed. I think we need some truth champions.

For instance, here's a clear statement from the Bible: "Love must be sincere." Or it could be translated, "Love must be without hypocrisy."

How serious do you think Paul was about that one? Think it's true? Must love be without hypocrisy?

Is your church a place where people love each other without hypocrisy? Is it even seriously attempted? Do you hold one another to it? If you work on staff at a church, do you spend as much time asking if you are loving without hypocrisy as you do planning services or evaluating programs?

Or here's another one: "Be devoted to one another in brotherly love."

Tertullian famously claimed that it was said of those inside the church by those outside: "'Look' they say, 'how they love one another' (for they hated one another), 'and see how they are ready to die for one another' (for they were readier to kill one another.)"

Think that is being said a lot by people who follow our intramural conversations these days?

I will tell you what bothers me.

It is clear that Jesus was very concerned about people obeying him. He said the difference between wisdom and folly was actually doing what he said versus not actually doing what he said.

He said that his followers were to make disciples, baptizing them, and then "teaching them to obey whatever I have commanded you," a phrase that Dallas Willard has called the Great Omission from the Great Commission.

But we seem to have found a way to appear to place Jesus at the center of our faith without actually struggling very much over whether we are really doing what he said to do.

Our problem is most of us don't know what we believe.

We may know what we profess. But knowing what we actually believe turns out to be a tricky business.

I believe in gravity. It is part of my mental furniture. Therefore I always act consistently with that belief. I don't have to psych myself up to believe in it. I don't get anxious if someone else disagrees with me about it. I know that reality will teach them about gravity without my getting mean-spirited about it.

Do I believe it is more blessed to give than to receive? The best way to tell is not to ask me—its to check with my bank.

What do I really believe about these statements:

Bless those that curse you
Love your enemies
Live in harmony with one another
Do not be proud
Do not be conceited

Do I really believe that these commands reflect God's expectation for my life?

I find a strange and humbling truth. I can talk about, or write about, or even simply begin to think about writing about someone with whom I disagree, and suddenly I begin to experience a sense of righteous indignation or superiority or judgmentalism.

I find it easy to dislike people; not just to be mad at them or frustrated over them but to have a contemptuous spirit of dismissal. I can want to hear or think bad things about them.

Jesus was not this way.

But I can harbor these thoughts and simultaneously count myself on Jesus' side. Anne LeMott wrote that you know you have remade God in your own image when He hates all the same people you do.

Love must be sincere.

When I was a boy, if there was a single connecting point that held the evangelical subculture together, it was a man named Billy Graham. So many relationships ran through him that if a discussion started to run off the tracks, he was able to pull together the primary voices of our little movement to return to civility. Kind of like my grandmother did for me and my cousins when we were boys, "Sit down at the table and say you're sorry and shake hands before you eat. You're family. You know better."

Our community is not webbed so thickly as it once was. There are more fiefdoms, and the fief-ers are not so connected.

It will help if we grow up.

It will help if we speak the truth in love.

We are good at professing our beliefs. It will help if we actually believe what Jesus said.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership Journal and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.