Faking Jesus

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Sitting in on a conversation with several guys, we were talking about what it looks like to follow Jesus. One of the men, Daniel, had some interesting comments.

“Jesus isn’t about church or reading the Bible or doing rituals or observing certain days. He’s more about a relational transformation that may include those things, but they are not the center of what makes your life in Christ.”

True that!

Don’t get me wrong.  Reading your Bible is good for your soul.  Praying consistently is vital for making sense of God and the life around you.  Attending church fosters worship and fellowship, essentials for a healthy spiritual life. But, they are not the Christian life.  Jesus is.

A book entitled “The Cure: What If God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You?” by Bruce McNicol and Bill Thrall does a great job delineating religion versus a transformational relationship with Jesus.  https://a.co/d/3iuleiH

You’ve probably heard of the Sunday-only Christian.  They show up on Sundays for church, smile, tell everyone life is fine, listen to the sermon, and perhaps get a warm feeling inside. After lunch out somewhere, they get home, shed the suit, kick back, totally forgetting Jesus until next Sunday.

Perhaps that’s you?  I won’t lie, there were seasons during my teens when that’s exactly who I was. I could fake Jesus on Sundays and be somebody totally different the rest of the week at school. I was very duplicit, and frankly, parts of me didn’t care.

Faking Jesus is something a lot of us do. When life hits a crisis, we suddenly call on God. Otherwise, it’s life as we know it, on our own, trying harder with mediocre results.

So, how long can you go living like this?  A year? Five? A decade? What’s it going to take for you to see Jesus less as a timeslot and more for who He truly is; your life?

A while back, I wrote a post called  Nanosecond Jesus.  https://mentoring-warriors.com/2025/05/nanosecond-jesus/  It relates to this idea of faking Jesus.  In Nanosecond Jesus, it’s the idea of inviting Jesus into every aspect of your life. No stone unturned, no nanosecond where you ignore his presence.

Faking Jesus has more to do with putting on an image of walking with Jesus when you have no clue what it means to walk intimately with him because in terms of human relationships, you’ve never been close to anyone. 

The mask needs to come off. That’s usually when one bristles because if the mask is removed, the scars reveal the wounds. Since we live in the in-between world of Eden Paradise and Eden-restored, we each carry trauma, wounds large or small, that affect us in a host of ways.

Dan Allender and Steve Call outline these wounds in their book “The Deep-Rooted Marriage”. https://a.co/d/ciIyAgs  Although the book is about marriage, its descriptions cover the gamut of wounds:

• Emotional
• Physical
• Sexual
• Spiritual

All of us have small traumas, while some of us also have big traumas. Traumas of any kind may overlap the four areas listed.  For example, you cannot be sexually abused and not have it impact the other three areas of your life.

You may have never been sexually abused, but your emotions and spirit are deeply wounded because your identity was ignored or held in contempt.

Instead of facing the pain with and in the presence of Jesus, we create a parallel universe to escape to. Those parallel worlds can seemingly be benign, even good or worthy causes, although some have extremely destructive results.  You consume yourself with the kids’ sports, you take online courses to further your education, you over-volunteer at church, or you work overtime to earn extra money. All noble causes, in one manner or another. 

You could also cope by diving into more evident destructive patterns like pornography, substances, or conveniently being out of town every time extended family wants to connect over the holidays.

You get the picture. 

The point is that faking Jesus could very well be a way to hide your pain.  

You could be one of those Sunday-only Christians, or you could find yourself very active in “church” but lonely because you intentionally pull back from any sense of vulnerability.

Either way, it’s faking Jesus.

The way out can seem excruciatingly painful, but the truth is the transformation Jesus wants for you requires the mask to come off. 

Drop the mask.

Drop the “perfect” image. Life is not all well. Be honest, the parts of your story that need the kindness and mercy of Jesus is larger than you think.

This is not a doom and gloom reality. (Although, if you choose to ignore the pain, you will end up in a doom and gloom spot.) 

Jesus is ready to enter. In Revelations 3, we love to quote verse 20 where Jesus is knocking at the door asking us to invite him in.  What we also fail to read is verse 19, where Jesus says for those he loves, he “reproves and disciplines”.  

Take some time alone with Jesus soon.  No earbuds, no music, no podcast, just you and Jesus and the Bible. Sit in silence and say one thing to Jesus:

“Jesus, I invite you into my pain. Help me drop the mask.”

Warrior On!