In 2017, the Nivea Corporation released an ad for their Black and White Deodorant. It featured a woman with long, brown hair, wearing a white robe. She is sitting on a bed with her back to the camera, looking out a window. At the bottom of the ad is the slogan, White Is Purity.

The ad was meant to promote Nivea’s deodorant – it keeps white shirts white – but consumers recoiled at what seemed to be a blatant promotion of white supremacy. Making things worse, the campaign launched in the Middle East. It wasn’t long before angry responses alerted Nivea to the ugly mistake they had made. They quickly cancelled the ad campaign before it was released in any other markets.

It is doubtful that Nivea intended to make a racist statement, but they were certainly tone deaf. Neither its corporate execs nor their advertising agency realized how the public would take the White Is Purity motto. Nivea was surprised by the outcry and was forced to issue an apology. It was a public relations nightmare.

Sometimes, it seems like the church is a public relations nightmare—and by “church” I mean those of us who belong to Jesus Christ. We are God’s ad campaign, intended to promote King Jesus to people all around the globe. In the words of the Apostle Peter, our mission statement is to “declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Everything Christians do and say reflects on Jesus and on his Father. We are all influencers. The Christian is a poster child for Jesus’s way of life.

Maybe that’s a role we’d rather not fill. When Charles Barclay was playing basketball, he told the world that he was not a role model. It made a good commercial but it was still nonsense. The only way Barclay could cease being a role model was to leave basketball; the only way for a Christian to escape the responsibility of representing Jesus Christ is to renounce him. The question is not whether, but how, we will represent Jesus.

The danger is that we might, like Nivea’s ad agency, inadvertently send the wrong message. That has certainly been happening. In the recent U.S. election, the message went out that Jesus’s people are primarily driven by fear. Christians from the left of the political spectrum were motivated by their fear that democracy would cease. Christians on the right of that same spectrum acted on their fear that morality would collapse. On both ends of the spectrum, there were Christians acting like they expected our savior to come from Washington rather than heaven.

The election is over. The fear remains. Is that really the best way to advertise for the glorious, wise, all-powerful King of Heaven?

Christians are a walking, breathing ad campaign for Jesus Christ. We will lead people to think well of him, or badly; to look to him with expectation or to ignore him as irrelevant. We will be the primary source of information that many people will have about Jesus. They will notice whether we are happy or sad, kind or harsh, loving or selfish, fearful or confident; and that information will influence their openness to Christ.

They will also notice if we are thankful, for gratitude plays an important role in God’s ad campaign. It flounders and falls – it crashes like Nivea’s White Is Purity debacle – when Christians come off as ungrateful. A person’s opinion of God may be based on whether the professing Christians he knows are grateful, appreciative people or churlish complainers. Perhaps this is one reason the Bible has so much to say about thankfulness and why it so often links our gratitude to God’s glory. It also explains the biblical writers’ frequent denunciations of grumbling and complaining.

We have all known the chronic complainer. Almost every word on their lips and every look on their face is tinged with resentment. People have let them down. Life isn’t fair. The future is bleak. When such a person presents the gospel (or some form of it), their hearers can only assume that the life Jesus offers is a poor investment. No wonder St. Paul warned the Philippians to “Do everything without complaining or arguing so that you may become blameless and pure…as you hold out the word of life…” However, when a person “overflowing with thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:7) holds “out the word of life,” people are far more likely to respond positively. A grateful person is a powerful incentive to look into Jesus. He or she is a poster child for the Jesus way of life.