Vol. 11 No.10 –June, 2013

What Do Christians Look Like

Dylan Stewart

 If you were in a public setting, attempting to point out a faithful Christian in a crowd of people to someone who has never seen one before, how would you do so?  What would that Christian be doing that would make him stand out from the rest of the crowd?  According to Romans 12:1, a Christian is to present his body as “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God.”

You may be wondering how exactly one can present his body as a living sacrifice.  By looking into the scriptures, one can find that there are many ways of doing so.  To present ourselves as a sacrifice, we must “lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness” (James 1:21).  That Christian standing in the crowd should also be identified by how he interacts with those around him.  The Bible says that Christians are to be “kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love” and should “live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:10, 18).  The Christian standing in the crowd will not be partaking in “neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting” (Ephesians 5:4).

The question that we must ask ourselves is whether or not someone who has never seen a Christian before could recognize us as Christians by using the previous verses as guidelines.  Can we be identified by these same characteristics?