Wannabe Butterflies & Fake Faith
Wannabe Butterflies & Fake Faith
Knowing my love for nature and beautiful creatures, a good friend of mine gave me a seed pod from a milkweed plant growing in her yard last year. Little did I know then just how many spiritual lessons I would learn from planting those seeds and watching nature take its course in this fallen world…
The milkweed grew like — well, like a weed. This brought many female butterflies to our yard, eager to lay their eggs.
Novice keeper of caterpillars that I was, however, I did not anticipate (1) how quickly caterpillar eggs hatch, (2) how many eggs a single butterfly can lay, or (3) how voracious caterpillars can be! They tore through those milkweed plants faster than I could plant more, so we quickly found ourselves buying milkweed starter plants by the cart-load from local nurseries, just to keep up with the season’s “butterfly babies.”
As time passed, and the more they ate, the caterpillars began to change in appearance, shedding layers of ill-fitting skin as they outgrew their old distinguishing markings of maturity (or lack thereof).
And eventually, after some time and much consumption, the apparently mature caterpillars that made it to the end-stages of their earthbound existence assumed a death-like position, preparing to shed their skins one final time…
And after shedding their outer skins one last time, these caterpillars would enter into a sort of tomb.
But while some would enter into their tomb only for a time, to later reemerge in glorious resurrected life…
… there were others that never came back out of their tombs.
For those, there was no glorious transformation, no marvelous resurrection, no completion of what seemed to have begun. Their final form upon “dying” was indeed their final form.
Our churches can be kind of like this, as well…
We plant seeds, and we see growth by God’s good grace. Also by His good grace, that growth attracts, and suddenly, what was planted becomes a factory for reproduction.
What started out small turns into a whole bunch of voracious “baby Christians” who all look and act more or less the same. By outward appearances, we’re all growing and changing and doing exactly what young Christians are supposed to do. We seem healthy and full of life, and it looks like we’re all maturing and becoming exactly what we’re supposed to become.
Except in reality, some of us are, and some of us aren’t. And sometimes, those of us who aren’t truly alive in Christ can fake it all the way to the very end.
Because much like real faith, fake faith can look like attending church every Sunday, giving tithes and offerings, teaching a Sunday school class or Bible study, praying out loud at prayer meetings, lifting hands during worship, and even pastoring a church.
Fake faith can have all the outward appearances of sanctification-in-progress, layers of caterpillar skin falling off at just the right moments to appear in sync with all the other soon-to-be butterflies, but with something never having been made right or whole at the deepest level.
Whereas real faith is being clothed in righteousness and made whole by Jesus, fake faith is just sickness wearing a wellness costume.
And the scariest part is, fake faith can look just like real faith, pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone (except for God, of course) right up until someone’s tombstone doesn’t roll away on judgment day to reveal that glorious transformation to which everyone else was eagerly expecting to bear witness.
So the question is, is your faith real or fake?
Because you can fool everyone else. You might even be able fool yourself. But we’re all going to die someday, and when we stand before Jesus, He’s not going to ask us if our faith looked real to everybody else. He’s going to tell us that it was or it wasn’t.
For those whose faith is real, Jesus will finish the work that He started in us, just like He promised (Philippians 1:6). The grave will only be the beginning of the glorious next chapter of our lives with Him!
But for those whose faith is fake, there will be no glorious next chapter. No genuine transformation will have ever taken place, and their story will end with the dreadful hearing of Jesus’ voice declaring, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:21-23).
If you’re reading this today, and you’ve realized that you’re not sure whether your faith is real or fake, or you know for a fact that it’s fake — as long as there is breath in your lungs, then the Good News of Jesus is still good news for you. Let today be the day that you receive the promise of salvation through faith that is real — faith that leads to glorious transformation in resurrected life!
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