“So he assembled all the chief priests and scribes of the people and asked them where the Messiah would be born. ‘In Bethlehem of Judea,’ they told him, ‘because this is what was written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah: Because out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.”’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the most difficult groups of people to minister to as a pastor are cultural Christians. These are folks who, though, they don’t harbor any real animosity toward the church, nevertheless don’t meaningfully participate. But they were generally raised in the church in some capacity. And if this was a Baptist or at least a baptistic church, they probably walked an aisle and got baptized at one point in their life. Because of this, they call themselves Christians in spite of having almost no meaningful engagement with Christ in their lives. They have all the advantages of the faith at their fingertips, but are largely clueless as to what it means. Jesus was born into this kind of a situation too. Let’s talk about why claiming belief in God and actually embracing the Gospel are two different things.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told with a straight face that someone is 100% a Christian yet who hasn’t been to church in years, doesn’t engage meaningfully in any of the spiritual disciplines (especially reading the Bible or praying), doesn’t practice any kind of generosity let alone sacrificial generosity, isn’t regularly serving anyone anywhere, and so on and so forth. Jesus said that we will be known by our fruit. If nothing about a person’s life beyond his own confession seems to support his claim, it’s an open question whether it’s actually true.

This kind of empty confession doesn’t exist only outside the church. There are unfortunately many inside the church—although not as many as there were before the decline of cultural Christianity and any sense of cultural benefits for being associated with a church—who confess Christ and yet whose lives don’t bear any fruit in keeping with their profession of repentance.

The list of problems with this professed-but-false belief is long. It is the very definition of lostness. In fact, it is the worst kind of lostness. To think you know where you are when you don’t actually have any idea where you are will not only mean you aren’t going to get where you are going, but you’ll be incredibly difficult to correct with good and accurate directions. You will be so thoroughly lost it will be difficult to get you found.

A friend many years ago referred to folks like this as the “unlost.” When approaching the unlost in order to share the Gospel with them, the first thing you have to do before you can help them be found in Christ is to get them lost. That’s not a particularly pleasant task for you or for them. It won’t typically be very well received. Often you have to wait for tragedy to strike and for them to realize on their own that all of their solutions are failing before you can come in with first gentle condemnation, and then real and lasting hope.

We talked earlier this week about the impact of belief on behavior. People who think they are right with God but aren’t really are in possession of some wrong ideas about God. Well, wrong ideas about God lead to behavior that puts and keeps us out of sync with His character. This is not a good situation for all kinds of reasons, but the most dangerous is that in thinking we are in the right, we’ll keep moving in the wrong direction, deepening the problem. We’ll keep walking into sin rather than out of it, making with every step we take the eventual collapse of our delusions all the more painful when it comes. Because it will eventually come.

This is all bad for folks who falsely profess faith but have no engagement with the church at all. It’s exponentially worse for folks who do this from within the church. It’s worse both in terms of the harm it does to their relationship with God, but also the harm it does to the image of God they portray to others. Confessing Christ without actually following Him makes you a false prophet. You are actively claiming to be demonstrating what a right relationship with God looks like when the reality is that you don’t have anything of the sort. If—or perhaps rather, when—others who are not following Jesus and know it see this, they will come to incorrect conclusions about what a relationship with God looks like and how it works.

They will see you claiming one thing and living another and think that God doesn’t really care about how His people behave. This will either draw them to a false version of the faith that will not be able to actually save them anymore than it is saving you. Or, it will push them away from the faith, entrenching them in their opposition to it. After all, why would they want something to do with a religion that is hypocritical at its core? If it’s followers don’t actually believe the things they say they believe (something that is evident because even unbelievers know you can tell a tree by its fruit), then why should they bother with them?

This kind of empty confession is ultimately unloving. In this, it is a clear and direct violation of the one command Jesus gave His followers to follow. If someone professes to love Jesus, but doesn’t keep the one command He gave us, it’s hard to see how they actually love Him.

This kind of a place is where the scribes and Pharisees sat when Jesus entered the picture of humanity as a baby. They professed a deep and abiding love for God. And some of them perhaps really believed what they said. But somewhere along the way of history, their focus and attention had shifted over from a real devotion to God and His word to a devotion to their interpretation and understanding of His word. The law became their god rather than the God who gave it. They stopped taking the law itself seriously, and focused exclusively on their efforts to keep it. They would endlessly debate minutiae of the law, but wouldn’t give nearly as much attention to actually loving the Lord.

All of this combined over time to result in the situation that unfolds here in Matthew 2 when Herod came to them to ask where the Messiah would be born, and they immediately gave him the answer they knew from the Scriptures was correct. Yet, if they knew this answer was correct—that is, if they knew where the Messiah was to be born—then why were they not out watching carefully for His arrival? The only conclusion I can conceive of is that they didn’t really believe He was going to be born there. They didn’t take God at His word, but only focused on their spiritualized and contextualized understanding of it. The result was not only that they missed His arrival when it finally came, but they inadvertently put His life at risk.

We are one week from Christmas today. That’s one week to get all of your remaining shopping finished. More importantly for right now is this: That’s one week to decide if you really believe all of this stuff. Do you really believe Jesus came; that He was born as a baby; that He lived a perfect life, and then sacrificed His life for our sake so that we can have eternal life in Him? Do you truly believe that, or is it just something you confess because the community around you mostly does and it’s more convenient to go along to get along than to acknowledge the truth and potentially lose out on a community that really does matter to you?

To put all of that another way, does your belief in Jesus, the baby born at Christmastime actually impact your life? Does it affect your decision making? Does it change the way you interact with the people around you? Are there things you don’t do because of it? Are there things you actively do because of it? Would you stake your very life on the truthfulness of this proposition? If Jesus’ claims are to be believed, there is eternal life to be found in Him and nowhere else, but it is only for those who accept Him fully and truly for who He is. What do you honestly believe, and what are you going to do about it? If you really are preparing for His arrival, the only thing to do is to follow Him. I hope you will.