This morning, my pastor, Mike Lee, talked a lot about authenticity. Throughout the sermon, there were a lot of people nodding their heads and grunting (translation: that usually that means it’s a “pretty good sermon”). I took a couple notes, myself. I scribbled down the words, “Deep down inside of us, we all want to be known. The problem occurs when there is a gap between who we want people to believe we are and who we actually are. We all have gaps.”
As Christians, we love to tell our testimonies. We often tell of our lives through the eyes of our most monumental hurt. Then, we explain how Jesus interrupted our lives, and The End.
I decided, I don’t want that to be my story any more.
The problem is, we tend to acknowledge the brokenness our lives enslaved “before” Jesus, but we rarely like to the admit how messy and broken we are right now, in this moment, “after” we have met Jesus.
It’s true, before I truly knew the life-shattering love of the cross, my life was messy. However, that’s only half the truth. The other half is that the more I fall in love with Jesus, the more my (current) brokenness is revealed, and the more I desperately need Jesus.
That right there, the second half of the truth, is my “new story.” It’s the simple story of grace; the unwavering, earth shattering, day-by-day and second-by-second kind of grace.
I love the four Gospels (i.e. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). They’re simple, straightforward, and bold, much like Jesus, himself. In Luke 9:23-25, Jesus addresses his disciples before the day of His crucifixion. “And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”
Our flesh fails us every day, yet we are so quick to live as though we are no longer in need of Jesus.
Here’s the truth: we hate authenticity.
We live safe, comfortable lives in order to save face. We attempt to shield others from seeing our imperfections, and we often speak hollow words that fail to be followed in action. We become so focused on serving Christianity that we forget the beauty of Jesus.
To allow the finale of our stories to be the moment we meet Jesus is to rob ourselves of a greater love story that is written into our lives as we begin actually walking with Christ. Christ isn’t limited to the day of our salvation. No, Jesus came to wreck our lives. He came so that our hearts would constantly be broken for His kingdom. He came so that our worlds would be flipped and our eyes finally opened. Jesus came so that every day, we may come to know love.
Jesus came to do life with us.
As I began to get to know Jesus, I realized that my story was not my story at all.
I covered my “gaps.” I did all the right things and I said all the right words. But how many times did covering my gaps cover the work of Jesus?
What if we allowed our lives to become transparent and our words authentic? As people begin to watch our lives, our never-ending testimonies to Jesus’s good grace, would they fall in love with the mind blowing realization that Jesus came for the most unrighteous, broken, and desperate of them all?
Would they begin to see that Jesus came for wild things like me?
