When I first declared my faith in Christ, a man from the local church came over and ‘interrogated’ me. He wanted to know on which Bible passages I based my faith. I knew what he was doing, but didn’t resent it. He’d known my previous lifestyle and wanted to make sure I was not going to bring any of it into the church.
This past Sunday our ladies class talked the conversion of the woman at the well in John 4. After her encounter with Jesus, she went out and declared to the people of her village, “Come and meet a man who told me all I ever did.” They came.
We noted that no one doubted something had happened to her. One woman in our group wondered at that. She said, “Everyone in this room would doubt, for instance, a jailhouse conversion.” When someone with a bad reputation claims to have become a Christian, people are suspicious.
This was true for the Apostle Paul (formerly called Saul) also. Acts 9 says, “And when Saul had come to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples; but they were all afraid of him, and did not believe that he was a disciple.”
What happened between the time the woman at the well met Jesus and the time that Paul met Him? Or what was different about the people of her village who believed her and the disciples who feared Paul? Or the church that was suspicious of my conversion?
The woman was a Samaritan. She left the well and told others who were also Samaritans. Did they accept what she said simply because they didn’t have the same religious history as the Jews, or even as modern-day Christians? Or was the change in her life so obvious that they could not push her aside? The change in Saul/Paul was obvious too. He went from killing Christians to preaching Christ. Why were the disciples afraid of him? Or suspicious of me?
But as admitted last week, I’ve also been suspicious of “jailhouse conversions.” Last week God showed me that a self-righteous attitude can be at the root of such suspicion. Perhaps the Samaritans, who were shunned by everyone, had no such attitude. Perhaps the disciples had a tinge of it, or maybe they were being protective of their baby church, wary that a persecutor like Saul/Paul could be faking it for better access.
There is more to the story. The next verses in Acts 9 tell how one person went against all this. “But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles. And (Saul/Paul) declared to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that He had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus. So he was with them at Jerusalem, coming in and going out.”
Barnabas took this new convert at his word, and by encouraging Paul, he was partly responsible for the impact this man had, not only in the new church, but in the known world.
What if he had been wrong? What if Saul had been a fake? A verse in 1 John comes to mind: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; if they had been of us, they would not have continued with us . . . .”
Being a Christian ought to carry enough heat that the fakes will not stay in fellowship with genuine believers or stick with the true church. Our lives should be so dedicated to Christ that a fake can’t imitate us. They might go off and form a cult or just drop out of sight altogether, simply because they can’t convince anyone.
While I’m concerned that I might shun a genuine new convert, I’m also concerned about the presence of fakes in our midst. What does that say about our lives of those who do follow Jesus? Have I become too easy to imitate?
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