How many times have you come across this quote attributed to Mahatma
Gandhi? “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your
Christians are so unlike your Christ.” I must have read it a hundred
times in books, magazines, articles, tweets. It is used by believers and
unbelievers to point to the hypocrisy of Christians and to call us to
more and to better. Our inability to live what we preach is driving the
multitudes away. Or so we are told. After all, that’s what Gandhi said.
We
need to stop using this quote and I’m going to give you two good
reasons to do so. In the first place, Gandhi was hardly an authority on
Jesus. When he says, “I like your Christ” he is referring to a Jesus of
his own making, a Jesus plucked haphazardly from the pages of Scripture,
a Jeffersonian kind of Jesus, picked and chosen from the accounts of
his life. He certainly was not referring to the Jesus—the true and
complete Jesus—revealed from the first page of Scripture to the last. He
did not refer to the Jesus who stands reading with a sword of judgment,
the Jesus who made unwavering claims of his own deity and eternality,
who declared that he was and is the only way to be made right
with God. Jesus the good man, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the moralist,
perhaps, but never Jesus who was and is and is to come. Continue at Tim Challies
