The Difference Christ Makes
In Your Reputation

Perhaps the average Christian woman does not give much thought to her reputation.

   This is a major tragedy.

   But I think I understand why it is that so little emphasis is placed upon such an important part of woman's life. Most Christian women have lived such sheltered lives, and are still living such sheltered lives, that unless an emergency situation arises, they feel no need to think about it.

   This is the outward reason.

   There is, however, an inner reason and this constitutes the tragedy. We have a superficial, false definition of reputation. I hope in these pages to get down to essentials.

   And because we will be handling essentials, there will be no comment at all upon obvious externals such as smoking, social drinking being seen in the so-called "wrong" places, breaking shop windows or beating your husband in public.

   We are attempting to be honest as we ask what difference it makes whether or not a woman's personality is controlled by Jesus Christ.

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   He is concerned with your heart.

   With the attitudes which govern the central core of your being. With the hidden depths of your personality. What is inside will come out sooner or later. Lopping off a few showy externals is as far removed from the real meaning of Christianity as it is possible to go.

   There are many areas which need exploring here. We shall look at only three. But their general direction, which is inward, should give us a key to further self-examination beyond the content of this chapter.

   What do people say about you when you're not around? Wouldn't we all like to know! But a few minutes of honesty on our part right now will give us a good, general idea. We may not like what we see, but until we see our need, God can do nothing toward filling that need.

   What words do people use in describing or discussing you? Do they call you lovely? If so, good. God can make great use of lovely looking women.

   Do they call you lovable? Also good. The more contagious your natural personality, the simpler it is for you to enter other hearts.

   But the first key to unlocking the secret of the impression you really make on other people is neither of those words, although in some sense both will follow this one. Ask yourself right now, if so far as you know, according to your own knowledge of yourself based upon your acts and deeds and the type of persons who you attract, do people call you loving?

   What have you done this week, this month? Have you taken good care of your family, or your job, and have you dispatched your church or social responsibilities and have you donated according to your income tax deductions to some charitable cause?

   If so, well and good. But don't most people do this? Most people

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in your social strata? Where, outside of your family and church circles, have you honestly given of yourself when you didn't really have to do it?

   Where, specifically, have you been loving?

   Where have you made some small or large gesture toward someone who might be too selfish to say thank you? Have you given some of your money to anyone who doesn't represent a foundation or other deductible organization? Have you taken time to send a card or write a letter to someone for no other reason than that he or she needs that card or letter?

   No one knows better than I that "by grace are ye saved." This is not an examination to determine your salvation. This is an examination to try to find some result of it!

   To whom have you shown love without their even knowing about it? Literally and figuratively, have you always taken off the price tags before you gave?

   Or, does your love seem to thrive best on response? If you've sacrificed yourself, was there no demand in you whatever for thanks?

   Recently I was riding on a train through the Middle West. In the seat behind me, an obviously moral soul held forth without ceasing, for her poor husband's and every other are in our section of the parlor car in which we were riding. I had taken a parlor car in order to avoid conversation as I began outlining this book. I avoided it myself, but I quickly gave up the outline and settled back to be at times uproariously entertained, and at others brought upright in my seat with amazement, as this good sister clicked off the miles with her tongue.

   "Bill, we're goin' home to bury poor old Mort. And we're gonna' do the right things. All of 'em. Not just some. All. We've all got to go sooner or later. Mort's gone. God rest his soul. And it's up to you and me to do the right things. And one person I'm gonna' do right by is his widow. Maud's a lovely

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person. A lovely person. Wears the prettiest hats. Good lookin' woman. And just as good as she looks, too. Yes, sir, Maud's just the way she looks. Good. But now, you take her sister, Madge. I wouldn't stir from the front porch swing if that woman needed help right in our front yard! Why, when her mother passed on, I went out of my way to be kind to her. I baked cookies and took some of my pickles and some of my best jelly over. I stayed up part of the night so's she wouldn't be by herself that first night. I even went all the way to the cemetery when I had such a bad cold I thought I'd be the next one. But do you think Madge even wrote me one little note of thanks? She did not! Not one scratch, Bill. Not one. I believe in followin' the Good Book, you know that, but Madge never did for others. Other like me did for Madge. Madge never did for others, Bill. But, with Maud — that's a different horse of another color. Oh, I'll do for Maud when we get there. And you can just bet your bottom dollar Maud'll thank me for it, too. Yes, sir, she will."

   This was a well-meaning Christian woman. At least she reminded poor, patient Bill of her Christianity for all to hear over and over during the six hours in which she kept tempo with the speed of the streamlined train. I'm sure she did many kind things for people. In fact, she convinced me that she did! But always she held the mirror (clean and polished as I'm sure all her mirrors are) for everyone to see the limited extent of no more than average human love.

   She "did for others" according to the response she received from them.

   We may not publicize our activities in quite such concentrated doses as this woman publicized hers. But our lives and our actions do. And let me make it clear that human love, even at its best does thrive on response!

   One mother admitted to me that she finds it much easier to love her eight-year-old boy when he is obeying her. It doesn't

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mean she stops loving him when he doesn't. But hers is a human love. And human love does thrive on response from its object.

   Here, then is one blind spot in the insight of many Christian women. We fail to realize that most of the time our love is merely human love. We justify ourselves by the nice things we do for the Mauds in our lives who thank us. We skip the Madges who forget to write notes of gratitude for our magnificence. We fail to see that human love is just not enough to cover the frailties of human nature. It is here that one of the most pointed differences between a self-controlled personality and a Christ-controlled personality springs up to confront us!

   God's love seems to thrive on suffering, not on response. His heart is gladdened by our response, but I can tell you that I am many times more aware of His love when I am disobedient toward Him than when I am sitting in my "chair of heavenly bliss" reading Scriptures about it! It is with this everlasting, steady love which knows no mood changes, that God melts me into repentance. I need a more thankful heart. I fail to thank Him most of the time. But my ungratefulness does not change His love. It only demonstrates it!

   And certainly none of us has human love to equal His. Ours isn't even the same kind of love as God's love. It is not a difference in degree. His isn't an improved human love. It is a totally different kind of love.

   But we have access to His love. Not only to receive it but to make use of it. Christ lives within us and when He comes He brings His love with Him.

   Christian women are few and far between who have the reputation of being loving. This sad state of affairs is true, I believe, in part at least because we do not remember that we have all the love that poured from the Cross of Calvary at our disposal. Few of us are attracted to unlovely, ungrateful people.

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   But they need love more than the grateful ones. The love which can pour from a Christ-controlled personality can love the unlovely, can love the ungrateful.

   A woman whose personality is Christ-controlled can be known as loving. I remember one such woman well. Her name was Carrie. I doubt if I even learned her last name. But she came to the prayer room after I had spoken, leading a large, overly made-up, unkempt, half-intoxicated younger woman by the hand. Carrie was a little woman about seventy. For twelve years she had been head and hand and heart holding this alcoholic woman whom no one else would even invite to her home. The people of the church talked about it. They admired Carrie and thought her some special kind of saint. And at last the night had come. This woman had broken dishes and sworn and fallen down in her drunkenness all over Carrie's little cottage for twelve years. This night she walked like a penitent child to a prayer room beside the woman who had shown her Christ's love.

   I relaxed about that woman when I left town after the engagement was over. I knew when she would be able to grow up in her new life in Christ, because she would be bathed in His love through Carrie, for as long as it took to break her old patterns.

   It was nothing I said that brought the woman to the end of herself. She had been gradually melted through the years by love, Himself, through a simple, plain Christian woman who was willing to take the inconvenience and the heartache involved for her, as He poured His love through her to the rebellious woman who needed it so much.

   In her community in the little Illinois town, Carrie has the reputation of a loving Christian woman. She doesn't preach. She doesn't try to prove her point. She doesn't argue. She loves. She can. She is Christ-controlled. And He is love.

   Do you have the reputation of being loving?

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Do you have the reputation of being sensitive to other people? I didn't say sensitive toward them, I said sensitive to them. Can you identify with other persons? Or do you sit in judgment upon them?

   To me, the key to Christianity is that God identified with us on every point. "He was in all points tempted like as we are." And right now, I hope you will check yourself closely on this point of identification. Are you able to project your own personality into the personality of someone whom you dislike? Are you willing to do it? Are you willing to project your personality into the personality of someone whom you don't consider your equal? (If there is someone whom you don't consider your equal, you have better make a double check!)

   What is your reputation here? Do all types of people feel free to pour out their hearts to you? Are you considered a bustling, busy, hard-working church woman who writes checks and passes mite boxes avidly for foreign missions? But would you welcome a Negro to your home for dinner? And are you shocked at certain sins which you haven't, by grace, committed yourself? If you would refuse anyone the right to your home or if you are easily shocked, then you are not identifying. You are not calling on the Holy Spirit of the Christ (who died with His arms stretched out toward the whole world) to enable you to place yourself in the other person's position. If someone doesn't live up to your standards, would you be living up to his if you had had his background?

   Perhaps you are a Bible teacher. Or at least you love to read your Bible and rather pride yourself on knowing your way around in it. All this is good. But does the very fact that you are sure you have the truth shut you out from someone who doesn't yet see that the Bible is the written-down Word of God? If someone disagrees with your doctrine, are your

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arms open and your heart exposed as His were that dark afternoon on Calvary?

   There is at least one more way in which we should check ourselves where reputation is concerned. That is our reputation for being able to face reality. Are you realistic? Or do you embroider things to make them palatable to you? God is the great Realist. He is Reality. He sees us exactly as we are. "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

   It is hard, for example, for some mothers to admit that their daughters need a Saviour. Mothers are lovely people, but they have a self-protecting way of making their own idealized images of their children. "My child would never do a thing like that?

   Any child may do anything!

   "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

   When we refuse to face reality, we refuse to face life. Any beginning of a refusal to face people and circumstances as they are is the beginning of genuine neurosis, says Dr. Karen Horney. I believe this, because one refusal piles upon another and soon we are living in our own idealized false worlds behind a barricade of neurotic notions.

   A mother, for example, who refuses to face the fact that her son or daughter could commit a so-called flagrant sin, is establishing a poor reputation with this child she loves, in all three areas which we have discussed. She is not being loving in the truest sense, she is not identifying with the child, and she is not being realistic. She is telling herself that this just couldn't happen to her daughter or to her son. And with this child, she is establishing the reputation of someone difficult to talk to, impossible to confide in.

   God became a human being for our sake. We, too, must be human beings for the sake of those whose lives we touch. And being human is not a bad thing. It is what we are. It is being realistic. It is being natural. It is keeping our feet on the

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ground of human understanding. It is staying off the pedestal of our own idealized images of ourselves.

   I want the reputation of being a human being who sees all the potential good and evil in herself, but who also sees the potential of her personality linked with the personality of Christ. This kind of Christian woman is easy socially, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Easy to know. Easy to talk to. Easy to love. Because she loves.

   Christ lives within us, and when we choose to do so, we can bear to look at things as they are, simply because He is already seeing them that way. We can identify with His sensitivity, we can love with His love, we can be realistic because He is Reality.

   A woman's reputation as a Christian is not, if we are being realistic, based on what she does and does not do. The real reputation is build and colored according to who is in control in the depths of her personality.

Chapter Six  ||  Table of Contents