When I was in college, two Christian friends made a four-year goal to reflect Christ to their fellow students. These young women reached out to incoming freshmen, volunteered at a community food bank, and led a Bible study in the girls’ dorm. They attended chapel and encouraged others on campus to do the same. Kind and generous, they took their Christianity seriously—at least, on the surface.
They had an interesting arrangement. Knowing the warnings Scripture gives about gossip, they made a covenant never to tittle-tattle—except with each other. They didn’t have loose tongues with anyone else; they knew it would be a bad witness (and they were right). But when those two got behind the closed door of their dorm room, did they give each other an earful!
My college buddies thought they could control their gossip and still be like Christ. They tried to minimize their transgression by erecting parameters around it. It was their way of housebreaking the sin of gossip in an attempt to make it respectable. Having domesticated the offense, they assumed they had tamed it and even mastered it.
But now, many years later, those two aren’t friends anymore. Proverbs 16:28 caught up with them: “Gossip separates close friends.” But sin does much more than separate friends. It separates us from God.
I realize this is an uncomfortable topic for us girls, but here’s my point: my girlfriends wanted to be like Christ, but they were only skating on the surface with their deeds and devotion. To be like Christ, first and foremost, is to hate sin. We don’t like hearing that. It goes against everything in our human nature. We’d rather emulate the Jesus who visited the sick. We’d rather help the hungry. We prefer to model Jesus in the way He ministered to children. We like the compassionate side of Christ—it resonates with us.
But fundamentally, Jesus came to earth to square off against sin. His lifelong goal was to conquer it on the cross, and confront it in the attitudes and actions of people. So if we want to be like Christ, it means cultivating a distaste for sin—yes, in the world, but mainly in our hearts.
If we want to reflect the love of God, it means a search-and-destroy mission to uproot every offense, small and great, lurking in our hearts. Especially hidden faults or secret transgressions that disguise themselves as acceptable.
I’m serious about this. I’ve lived as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair for almost five decades, and still, when people ask to pray for my healing, I’ll reply, “Thank you, and here’s some things I need to be healed of: Pray I’d be less fearful of the future . . . that I would stop cherishing inflated ideas of my own importance . . . that I’d refrain from keeping a record of my husband’s wrongs and always think the best of others . . . that I’d stop hogging the spotlight and give credit to others where it’s due. These are the things from which I’d love to be healed!”
Some might say, “Joni, don’t sweat the small stuff. After all, you are paralyzed. God will cut you some slack.” But sins we consider “borderline” gain mastery over us. Sin deceives us about its deadly sting. Take the sort of gossip of my college friends. Their indiscretion seems harmless if done discreetly, but listen to the class in which Rom. 1:29-30 puts their habit: “They [those whom God gave over to their own devices] are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil.” The Lord places gossips and God-haters in the same sentence. I wouldn’t call that harmless.
So learn a lesson from my two college friends. Think you can tame sin and still be like our Savior? Think again. It’ll rip your soul to shreds and separate you from your companions and your God. Friend, aim higher than your transgressions—always aim to be holy, for the pure in heart will see God (see Matt. 5:8).
