Proof That You're Merely a Cultural Christian

Adriel Sanchez: I was raised in a nominally Catholic home. I embraced the title or the name Roman Catholic, and I was baptized in the Catholic Church. But faith in God actually didn't really mean anything for me until I was in high school. There are many people who are raised with the trappings of Christianity or religion who really don't take the faith to heart. People who say, "Oh, yeah, I'm a Christian," and maybe even go to church on a weekly basis, but who, nevertheless, are nothing more than cultural Christians.

Now, in society, there are benefits to cultural Christianity, but when it comes to your personal life and what God calls each person to, cultural Christianity can actually be a great stumbling block. It can be a way of being deceived into thinking you're a Christian, when in reality you're a pagan with an impotent knowledge of Christianity and maybe some Jesus ritual sprinkled in.

How do you know if you're a cultural Christian? And what should you do about it if you are?

Why is this so important for you personally? Jesus said that on the day of judgment, there would be many people, religious people, who had confessed the right things about God, but who nevertheless had no relationship with Him. Consider what he said in Matthew 7:21-23:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”

So think about this for a second. Here are people who confess Jesus as Lord—repeatedly, even: "Lord, Lord," they say. And yet they're barred from heaven. Jesus doesn't let them in. Jesus will say to them on that day of judgment, "I have no idea who you are. We've never met." These aren't people who knew Jesus and then lost their salvation. Some people are worried about that.

No, these are people who thought they knew him, but actually didn't believe in him or follow Him. They had the trappings of religion without genuine faith. Now, that's a scary thing. And the reason Jesus mentions it is as a warning to us. Cultural Christianity uses the language of the faith, but it doesn't actually follow Jesus from the heart. There's no intimacy, no personal relationship, no salvation. Cultural Christianity is characterized by familiarity with Jesus, but not faith in Jesus.

There's actually a great story in the New Testament that illustrates this danger. It's when Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and the people who were raised around him actually rejected him. This is Mark 6:1–6:

"He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, 'Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not his sisters here with us?' And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, 'A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.' And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief."

Did you see what happened there? Here are people who think they know Jesus. They were raised around him. They had a real familiarity with Christ, and yet they didn't understand who he was. They assumed that they'd figured him out. And sometimes people who are raised as Christians can make the same mistake: "Oh, I've heard the stories. I went to Sunday school, it’s nothing special." Their pride in assuming they totally understood who he was kept them from genuinely seeing him. And that faithlessness resulted in a powerless Christianity. Jesus did no mighty works in Nazareth.

Cultural Christianity is, in the final analysis, powerless because it doesn't depend upon faith or the Holy Spirit. Cultural Christians are people who think they have Jesus figured out, but who actually stumble when it comes to hearing his teachings. Even if they confess him as Lord, they reject him as Lord, scoffing at his calls to repentance, at the Christian sexual ethic, at the teachings of the Bible, the exclusivity of the Gospel. It's one thing to be familiar with the teachings of Jesus. It's another thing to actually follow them.

Jesus doesn't just want you to be familiar with his religion, but to follow him, to have a personal relationship with him, to believe in him—not as your mind conceives of him, but as he reveals himself to you in his word. Sadly, cultural Christianity is a religion of the lips, not a religion of the heart. And again, this is a great danger in Scripture. Throughout the book of Isaiah, one of the warnings that God had for his people is that they had hollowed out their religious ceremonies. They went through the motions of the rituals that God had instituted, and they didn't actually believe. He said, quote,

"This people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men." —Isaiah 29:13.

In other words, they say, "Lord, Lord," but there's a disconnect between their heart and their mouth.

Cultural Christianity is Christianity without the heart. It's lacking the power of the Holy Spirit and a genuine personal piety.

Now, I want to be cautious here, because I know that there are a lot of genuine Christians who struggle with the question of whether or not they truly believe in Jesus. They don't have assurance of faith, even though they long to know, love and follow Jesus. I'm not talking about you when I talk about cultural Christianity. I'm talking about the person who assumes they have it all together because of a prayer they prayed or because they've professed Jesus as Lord and yet they actually have no interest in following Jesus at all. When confronted with Jesus’ teachings, they get angry and think things like the people in Nazareth did: "Who does he think he is?"

If you have familiarity with Christian teaching, but not faith—the religion of the mouth but not the religion of the heart—then the only way you can accept the Jesus of the Bible is if you domesticate him. He's not the sovereign God, but a nice and gentle deity who doesn't care about how you live, whether you sin, or what you actually believe, so long as you're generally good. That is not Christianity. And if it happens to be your religion, you are in a precarious spiritual state. You may be assuming you've figured Christ out, when in reality, your heart is very far from God.

What do you do when you're familiar with Christianity but you don't know Jesus? I think the first thing is: admit you've missed something critical along the way. You see, the people of Nazareth should have acknowledged that their small view of Jesus didn't do justice to who he actually was. They needed to repent of their unbelief and embrace Jesus as the one who had come into the world to save sinners, including them. It's when we assume we know something that we stop being curious about it and learning. You need to recover a humble curiosity about Christ and recognize, "He's bigger and greater than I assumed, and I desperately need Him."

It may not be that you need more or new Christian rituals. Maybe it's that instead, by faith, what you need to do is grab ahold of the Jesus who has been right there by you all along, but you've tragically missed him. And I want to take a moment to pray for you and ask God to help you grasp the depths of Jesus’ love and glory, so that rather than stumble over his teaching, you might humbly embrace it.

Lord, we know in your word that there are so many warnings about heartless religion. We read passages like that text in Matthew 7, and we tremble, Lord, to think that there are people—religious people—who think that they know you and follow you, but to whom you will say on the day of judgment, "Depart from me. I never knew you, you workers of iniquity."

Oh Lord, there are so many people who have the privilege of being raised around Jesus in Christian homes, hearing the gospel day in and day out, but who, for whatever reason, Lord, those words, those promises, have not sunken into their hearts.

Lord, we confess our own hardness of heart, Lord, we confess our own slowness to receive your word. The times, Lord, that we've drawn near to you with our lips, but not with our hearts. And we ask for your mercy.

And I pray for the person watching now, listening now, who feels far from you, who feels as though their heart has grown cold. Or perhaps, Lord, they have grown up around the truth of the gospel and yet they've never made it their own. Theirs is a powerless, spiritless, heartless Christianity.

Oh Jesus, would you intervene even in this moment and help them to lay hold of those great and precious promises that you've given to us in your word through the gospel, that they would embrace them by faith, knowing you truly, that you might know them truly.

And so, Lord, we ask for the presence and the work of your Holy Spirit right now. God, grant each of us that sincere and heartfelt faith that we might know you and know your Son, Jesus, and rest in and receive his great mercy and forgiveness, even now.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.