Is This Too Honest?

My writing has two elements to it.  One is thinking around Scripture and the other is  applying it to explore themes to do with Church, discipleship, our relationship with self and some difficult observations around Western Christianity.  The following blog is a hard teaching and can annoy anyone who has no desire to really examine self and present the dysfunction of our walk before the Lord. 

As Westerners we place value on looking the part. We can feel utterly destroyed inside but as long as people see the ‘together’ shell, all is well. We put effort into externals, the way things appear.  Our drive to be seen to belong, ‘be part of’ and ‘identify with,’ supersedes the authentic, genuine …actually being the real thing.   It simply takes effort to be the authentic!  

Core Strength

An example of this is how a body builder can look fit and healthy yet not really be fit and healthy.   To gain shape and mass is a fairly easy thing to do given the right motivation. It still requires work but if the payoff is vanity, to look the part, it can be achieved with medium effort.  Those who really are fit are the ones who want to genuinely have maximum effectiveness in every area.  It doesn't matter to them that they look good.  Their payoff is to know they genuinely achieved ‘fitness’ and walk in it.  The ‘vanity fitness’ is what I call a construct.  It delivers a persona that has been constructed to achieve a perception.

The same is true of how we outwork our Christian walk.  We can either deliver the authentic or achieve a perception.  We are able to construct a God-life that appears to self and the public that we are in a good place with the Lord.  We can develop a vocab and a scripture bank to assure everyone that we really are who we say we are.  Is this deceptive? Is this a fraud?  I would say no!   

How can people who know no different approach something and act counter culturally?  

The Western modern lifestyle is all about constructs.  Unconsciously we all ‘set the stage’ for a brand new day.  We rarely be the people we are as we play up to the roles of the people we are expected to be.  If we stripped ourselves of the props, the script and the mask we would be the vulnerable, weak and struggling individual we really are.  To show this to the world would make us invalid, discounted, precluded and redundant.   It seems we are shepherded by the taskmaster of the Western society to become a product by which we can be accepted and valued in the context in which we live.

Holy Theater?

Has this crept into the church? Can we appear in the gathering of believers as we are or do we ‘set the stage’ for meeting?  My concern is that meetings seem to be a show of ‘mutual ability to cope’ rather than the contrition of heart that the Lord works with.  I’m not at all suggesting that Christians should drag their broken lives to the meeting and wail for an hour!  It is the trend towards appearing ‘together’ that exposes the true walk.  If we need to be validated, counted, included and tasked by the church we have sorely missed it!  A child of God is entirely accepted, lavishly loved, outlandishly adored, affirmed, assured and branded by God!   On this basis we have no need to set the scene or develop constructed versions of our persona.  We can just be who we are.

To grasp this in entirety is a work of the Lord.  To be taken to the core self in all its reality is a journey you can never come back from.  It exposes the frantic desire we still entertain to be recognized, endorsed and celebrated.  We default to the stuff of earth for these things and stumble around until someone sees our worth.  We base our value systems on this world and meet the need for security in how others perceive us.  All the core longings and desires and passions can be found in the Lord Jesus Christ.  We just don’t believe it enough and thus default to what we know.

World-robe

When the Lord is invited into this core motivation dungeon, we discover something about ourselves.  We discover how much we love and protect the constructs, especially the religious ones.  We are shown in the beginning how Adam and Eve used a construct to appear clothed. They took from what was around about them in the garden and sewed garments to ‘solve’ their disconnection from God.  The actual answer was for God to clothe them.  This spoke of the coming Lamb of God who would be our covering. We have no need to engage the construct because God has constructed our lives in him.  We need to just walk in it.  I’m not saying ‘just’ as in it is easy. ‘Just’ means there is simplicity in the idea.  I want to be free from the constructs and walk only in what the Lord has already planned. 

While we are part of groups that invite the construct we will either flow with it or feel uncomfortable around it. Thirteen years down the line since I was first accosted by the Lord to come out from religious constructs I now see them as clear as day.  I have a high-definition view of what a certain church practice invites from people.  You do get the genuine, but mainly it is good people using adopted components to produce the desired effect.  These people love God but have yet to be delivered from a deep rooted problem of inauthentic Christian practice.   The answer is repentance, but so ingrained is this problem we need to get before the Lord to ask him to reveal these Western constructs to us. We need to be able to enter into Jesus’ finished work and allow that to be our identity and our worth.  You are the elect of the King chosen before the foundation of the Earth.  What has this world to say to you that even suggests you should lend an ear?

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  

Gary Ward