The authentic Christian life is built on the authentic God. He is the Rock, and there is no other (Isaiah 44:8). He is the Lord, and there is no other (45:5). As His people together pursue authentically loving and living for Him, in many ways it will look very ordinary. But it is utterly extraordinary.

I recently bought a sports shirt for my son off the internet. It was a very good price, in some ways—too good, looking back. It promised that it was the real deal, but when it arrived, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t authentic. I had not bought it from the official channels, and it proved, sadly, not to be genuine. It was disappointing and yet not particularly surprising.

It is one thing to buy inauthentic merchandise, but it is another thing entirely to be called inauthentic as a person. To be called inauthentic is never a compliment. To be described as someone who is fake, false, or phony is an enormous insult. It can mean the end of a political or business career, and it can have disastrous implications for a relationship.

When it comes to church, shockingly, there have always been those who are not the real deal. Judas was one of the twelve disciples, but he turned out not to be a true disciple. In the early church, Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 and Simon Magus in Acts 8 proved to be false. There are those who on the last day will say to Jesus that they did this or that in His name, and He will reply, “I never knew you; depart from me” (Matt. 7:21–23).

There are always those in the church who are not authentic, but one of the marks of the true Christian is this struggle and battle for authenticity. True Christians love God and trust in the Lord Jesus but are painfully aware of their battle with sin.

Every faithful Christian knows that within us there is this great contradiction. We love the Lord and are thankful for forgiveness, for adoption, for all His many blessings. Yet—and it is a big yet—we are aware of the gap in our lives: a gap between what we know and believe and how we behave. We know that there is sin in our lives; the natural bent of our hearts is away from the things of God. There are even times when we know that we are doing something wrong, but we do it anyway. It leads us to the questions: Am I the real deal? Am I an authentic Christian? What does an authentic Christian lifestyle look like?

John Newton famously said, “I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.” We need that reality and perspective in addressing this issue of the pursuit of authentic Christianity.

In this pursuit of authenticity, the primary point to note is that the Christian life is lived out with others. The New Testament knows nothing of the solitary Christian. When we see the word “you” in Scripture, our first instinct is to interpret it as referring to the individual Christian. There are times when that is right. The Apostle Paul was able to say that Christ “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), “me” referring to both the author and the reader of the statement. But the primary way that the New Testament describes the Christian blessings that we enjoy is by addressing them to the church corporately. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament shows us that twenty-one of the twenty-seven books were addressed to churches and so should be read and applied first with that in mind.

The air we breathe in Western culture is suffused with individualism, and as Christians we need to recognize that dynamic and fight it. As Christians, we are called to play our role in the people of God. God has given each of us to the church as a gift, and He has given the church to each of us as a gift.

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