Work Without Words (and Words Without Work)

It’s easy for Christians to want to live at one extreme or the other. One of the biggest tensions we face is between our words and our actions. Either we want our words to speak for our faith, or we want our actions to do all the talking.

You can see this play out clearly in the workplace. Some Christians lean heavily into actions—bringing cupcakes with cross-shaped sprinkles and assuming that alone communicates everything a coworker needs to know about their faith. If we struggle with our words, to be fair, many ministries are dedicated to helping people learn how to share their faith with words better when the opportunity arises.

But the more concerning extreme, in my opinion, is the opposite: when our words are plentiful, but our actions are scarce.

Over the years, most of the friends I’ve known who have left the Christian faith did so for this very reason. Someone’s words didn’t line up with their life. They talked about loving people, but didn’t show it. They spoke about healthy relationships, yet their own were chaotic and damaging. The disconnect was impossible to ignore.

One of the biggest problems in the Church today is Christians who speak fluent “Christianese,” but whose lives don’t actually resemble Jesus at all. It’s a head knowledge of the right phrases, without a heart knowledge of who God truly is—and how His character should shape real, everyday behavior. Christianity can start to look like smoke and mirrors, shallow and performative. But the real issue isn’t the faith itself; it’s the lack of depth in relationship with God.

I felt this personally recently when a new friend told me that everything was going to be different in our relationship moving forward. She said all the right things. But nothing actually changed. And instead of feeling encouraged, I felt guarded and angry—because when words aren’t backed by action, trust erodes quickly.

Both our words and our lives need to reflect God if we’re truly going to be a light in a dark world. We can’t just like the right posts on social media and call that faithfulness. We have to put our mouths and our hands where God’s heart is.

For me, this starts with honest self-reflection:

• Am I pointing out things in others that I haven’t addressed in myself?
• Am I advocating for changes I wouldn’t personally live out?
• Am I moving through life in a spirit of judgment, or in a spirit of love?

If our faith is real, it should be visible—in what we say and in how we live. This month, let’s work on doing both better: speaking our testimony and actually living it.