I grew up in a strict Greek Orthodox home and remember being told each Sunday, “Christine, you’d better behave in church because God is watching you!” I soon learned that if I ever wanted to have “fun,” I had to do it when I was not at church or any other Christian activity. As a result, my life became compartmentalized, and I put on an Emmy Award-winning performance for a few hours every Sunday. During the rest of the week, I was the real me and lived the way I wanted. Thus began my “acting” career.

Over the years, though, my love for God grew. In my late twenties I became the head of a community-based youth center and was on my way to leading a major Christian youth movement in Sydney, Australia. I was passionately serving God and so busy that my weeks literally felt like one long day with a series of naps (and these were rare). It was an exciting time for me. God had given me gifts of leadership and speaking, and many doors of opportunity were opening. I felt like I was living the dream, yet when I would get home and lay my head on my pillow at night, I felt like I was dying inside. When everything was quiet and it was just God and me, the success from the day would fade away, and all that would be left was what felt like a gaping chasm in my heart.

I didn’t understand. I was doing so much for God, but instead of feeling fulfilled with my destiny, I felt like I was on a treadmill, endlessly running, feeling completely empty inside. To fill this void, I just kept working harder and harder, keeping longer and longer hours, hoping that sooner or later my heart would feel fulfilled. This worked for a season. But eventually, the stress and intensity of my schedule took its toll on my body, and I collapsed. Quite literally. I threw my back out, and my life came to a screeching halt.

I felt as though the very breath of my Christianity had been sucked out of my lungs. I had no choice but to stop all my activity and be. Stripped of my ability to act, I lay there, feeling like I had nothing left to offer God. I felt as if I were failing Him because I could not physically do anything for Him. How could I please God when I couldn’t even get off my couch?

For the first time in my life, I stopped drowning out the voice of my heart with the sound of relentless activity. As I lay there, feeling like a completely useless Christian, I decided to pick up my Bible. As I flipped through the pages, I came across a verse in Psalms that I had probably read more than a hundred times, but that day these words came alive in a new way and arrested my heart: “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19, NIV).

I could not get my eyes off those last four words: “He delighted in me.” It was like God was screaming to get my attention: “Christine, I delight in you. Not just the thousands of young people you minister to, not just in all that you accomplish in My name, but in you, my own precious daughter.” God delighted in me—in me, with all my faults, all my failings, my broken past … me immobile on a couch! I had been completely undone and unable to perform, yet God still delighted in me. And that revelation changed my life.

I have discovered that it is easy to get caught up in “acting” like a Christian. For example, we can hear a great inspirational message and do OK for a week, but then fall back into old patterns of behavior before we know it. We can try to fix our behavior, promising wholeheartedly that we won’t be rude to our friends, react in traffic, lie, cheat, steal, gossip, gamble—whatever. But invariably, we often find ourselves unable to sustain our resolve—and we fail to control our actions (again). As a result, we feel terrible, vowing never to do those things again. This never-ending cycle causes many people to give up trying—or, worse still, give up on God altogether. That’s what happens when we try to live our Christian lives from the outside in instead of from the inside out.

Essentially, we become actors in a drama rather than pilgrims on a journey. We try to act like something we are supposed to be.

This is not how God wants us to live. Jesus doesn’t want us to simply act like Christians. He wants us to authentically be Christians. But the only way for this to occur is by allowing Him to work on us from the inside out. God doesn’t want to have a relationship with us from afar. He wants to be actively involved in every aspect of our life. The Message Bible puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14). I love the way Eugene Peterson interprets this Scripture, because this image makes it clear that God wants to be part of everything in our lives. He is not satisfied with merely having visitation rights every Sunday or Wednesday. He wants to be at the core of who we are and what we’re becoming.

Yet some of us live our life as if it were a dress rehearsal for another life in another time. Jacques from Shakespeare’s As You like It says, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” As romantic as this sounds, we must remember that we are not actors pretending to be Christians in the drama of life. We are on a very real journey to Christ-likeness, and we cannot “perform” our way to becoming like Him.

Think about Jesus: His actions stemmed from who He was. The doing part flowed naturally from being. This being stemmed from who Jesus was at His core. He did not try to act like anything He was not. He lived from the inside out. Therefore, if we are to be imitators of Christ, we need to stop trying to act like Christians, and instead, focus on being a Christian at our core. When this becomes our focus, we will discover that it’s not difficult to act like a Christian, because inner transformation works its way out into every aspect of our lives. It becomes who we are, and by default influences everything we do.

It’s time we stop striving so hard to act like Christians … and begin discovering what it means to just be one.