During my childhood years, our family attended a church in a denomination that focused largely on controlling the external behaviors of its congregants: no drinking, no dancing, no cussing, no going to certain types of places or viewing certain forms of entertainment. The theory seemed to be that if you put in enough guardrails on behavior, you’d avoid all the pitfalls of immorality and produce righteousness in your life.
What it actually produced, from young to old, was a group of people who were highly skilled at lying about who they really were and who lived in fear of being known. In quiet, behind closed doors, lived drunkards, people with marital problems who couldn’t seek help in the church, arrogant jerks who looked down on others based on their own ability to abstain from select sins on the “really bad” end of the list, congregants who cussed proficiently and meant every word with malice, gossips, sexual involvement outside of God’s design… The list goes on. People did what they needed to do to keep the façade in place, but meetings were filled with prettied-up rotting corpses.
In short, the church was filled with human beings. Human beings who knew that their behavior was wrong, who understood that none of it was a good look, but who lived powerless to actually change it. When they went into public, they covered it up as best they could, endured the meetings that salved their sense of guilt a bit, then went home to live another day.
My heart breaks because it remains the same today. So many of our churches are filled with people who are lying their way through life, quietly hoping that they never get found out, desperately wanting to do better – BE better – but constantly finding their efforts to be in vain.
A people who serve God with their lips but whose hearts are far from Him.
The tragedy of it is that there’s a solution. The whole of God’s interaction with mankind was woven together to bring it to us. We weren’t created to live in this quiet desperation; we were created to live in victory and beauty, in relationship with God Himself.
The good news of Jesus is that because He died, He paid the price for all that rottenness in us. Because He was perfect and had no rottenness of His own, He was not bound by death and was therefore able to rise again to life. Because the purity of His perfection was enough to eliminate the whole of the rest of the world’s rottenness, we can be restored to life as well. Actual, new, from-the-inside-out life; not just a desperate, repetitive covering-over and patching-up of the externally exposed decay of a walking death.
That new life doesn’t involve hiding. It doesn’t have any need for falsifying the public record of who we are. It flows with true goodness, because the internal reality is one of goodness. We become able to do right things because it is coming out of who we really are; it’s not an act we have to maintain. It’s not exhausting. It frees us from the constant looking over our shoulder to make sure nobody’s watching; it allows us to put down our comparisons to others that lead to arrogance or despair.
The new life that Jesus brings also comes with a source of power – Holy Spirit – who keeps the old rottenness in us from gaining authority again, even though we are living in the same world with the same people around us. We don’t have to be afraid of what we know about who we were in the past. Holy Spirit in us, according to the Bible, SEALS us. He fills up all the gaps and makes us air-tight. The newness and goodness that Jesus brings doesn’t leak out, and the old rottenness doesn’t gain entry again.
We forget that sometimes. Just as we once covered up our rottenness with a false beauty, sometimes we cover up our new beauty with old activities and attitudes that make us look rotten on the outside. But here’s the glorious hope: because it’s just on the outside now, we can be cleaned up again. Over and over, we can allow the water of the Word of God to cleanse us, to wash away the grubby stuff we went and got ourselves into, and to allow the TRUTH of who we are because of the life of Jesus and the power of Holy Spirit to shine once more. The more we experience the joy and freedom of walking in that clean freshness, the less and less we find ourselves playing in the graveyards full of rotten flesh.
I pray that if you are one of those rotting corpses dressing yourself up, doing the “right” activities to look good and beautiful but knowing that it’s all an act, you will let the mask fall to the ground. I pray that you’ll stop playing the game of dress-up and let yourself acknowledge that no amount of costuming can cover the reek of the decay inside. I pray that you will instead put on the new life that was bought and paid for by Jesus, and allow Holy Spirit to be your power, strength, and seal. You don’t have to be good on your own. You can’t. You know it. Won’t you stop lying to yourself and accept the freedom that comes from walking in Truth?
