2022-10-09 Prayer - Present Yourself to God Without Pretense

Have you ever been to a wedding that felt like a masquerade party? No one wore physical masks, but it seemed that no one was being real either. (blank)

Have you ever met someone who put on a certain image that later on you found out was completely false?

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone where you went away knowing next to nothing about that person? They were as deep as a shallow mud puddle. No feelings, no emotion, no opinions and no personal details.

For some people, they’re always at a masquerade party.

E.g. Lyndon Berg

Why do people wear masks? The reasons are many and varied. The person I was just talking about maintained an image of the “fun guy”. Why? He was good at it, it was fun, and I suspect that by doing so he was able to hide his insecurities from others.

Many people wear a mask of respectability. They want everyone to think of them as respectable, whatever that means in their culture, and will cover up whatever might destroy their respectability.

Some people are simply covering up the painful past.

Shame, of course is a huge motivator to wear a mask. Either shame because of what happened to us or shame because of what we ourselves have done.

For others, it’s more simple and straightforward. They wear the mask of what they would like to be. Tough, sexy, cool, suave, successful, competent, strong, nerdy, etc., etc. Fake it until you make it. Admitting fear, or mediocrity, is too difficult.

The reasons for wearing a mask are almost endless. Not only do people wear masks, many wear multiple masks, different ones with different people.

The difficulty is that once you get used to wearing a mask, it becomes harder and harder to take it off, even for a moment, even for those who are closest to you. I recently talked to a woman who told me that she and her former husband rarely had heart to heart conversations. She really didn’t know, a lot of the time what he was thinking. Either he hadn’t ever learned to be transparent, or he was afraid that the real him wouldn’t be accepted by his wife. In reality, the relationship they had was quite shallow.

What does mask wearing like this do to your relationships? It hinders them. In many ways. People respond to you according to the mask you wear, not the real you. This has all kinds of repercussions. If your mask is ‘the tough guy’, the people around you will think you never hurt and are never struggling. As a result, you never receive comfort because no one knows you need it. Mask wearing keeps you from drawing close to others and keeps others from drawing close to you. At least the real you. They might draw close to the fake you, but deep down inside you know they really aren’t attached to you and so you’re still alone.

Mask wearing affects our relationships with the people in our lives and our relationship with God as well.

Wearing masks with God

Our sermon series this fall is Hungering to Know and be Known with the focus being our relationship with God.

Needless to say, mask wearing will definitely hinder our relationship with God.

What kind of mask do you wear before God? The respectable church goer? The faithful attender? The competent disciple? Or the busy, busy follower? Kind of like Jesus’ disciple Martha who complained about her sister Mary just sitting there while she worked.

Why does mask wearing hinder our relationship with God? For the same reasons it hinders our relationships with people. When you wear a mask, what you’re doing is keeping the other person at arms length. You’re not letting them into certain rooms of your life. Those rooms are blocked off. Your true feelings, thoughts and actions are hidden away. And instead, an image, a false image is the one that is presented. When we wear a mask with God, we keep him at arms length.

So how do we take off the masks we wear before God? How do we enter into a real relationship with him?

Last Sunday I introduced you to the PAPA prayer taught by Larry Crabb. Here is a quick review of the four elements

“P: Present yourself to God without pretense.

A: Attend to how you’re thinking of God.

P: Purge yourself of anything blocking your relationship with God.

A: Approach God as the ‘first thing’ in your life, as your most valuable treasure, the Person you most want to know. (blank)

P10, The Papa Prayer

Today we’ll focus on the first one, “P: Present yourself to God without pretense. In other words, take off the mask. (blank)

A few Sundays back I spoke on our position in Christ, asking the question Who Are You?. In that sermon I was encouraging us to really take on our identity in Christ. Today I’m again asking, “Who You Are”, but now I am wanting us to learn to be real with who we really are before God. Not our position in Christ but being real about our brokenness. I’ve taken various personality gift tests over the years and whenever I’ve taken one, the makers of the test have always asked me to answer the questions as truthfully as possible, to not give the ‘correct’ answer, as in the one I want to be true, but to say things the way they really are. The more you follow these instructions, the more likely the evaluation will be accurate.

Just as it is impossible to draw close to people without opening the doors of our hearts with them, it is impossible to draw close to God without becoming transparent in his presence, to say things the way they really are. What does that look like?

Well, the first step is to

Stop Trying to Be Who You Think You Should Be

I grew up in Church and have followed Jesus since a young age. I have learned all the proper Christian ways of behaving and speaking. Much of it was very good. But sometimes it hurts me because I think that I have to present myself before God a certain way, the correct, Christian way, for God to hear me and listen to me. I have often worked hard at “Trying to Be Who I Think I Should Be” in God’s presence. In other words, I put on the Christian mask.

Guess what, God isn’t interested in that. Besides, he can see right through it anyway. God is omniscient, all knowing. Nothing is hidden from him. There isn’t any thought I have ever had or thing I have ever done that he doesn’t know. So, if he knows everything already, I may as well be honest with him about where I’m at.

I’ll give you a visual way for you to think of this. Suppose you want to figure out how to get to a friends place who lives on one of the new streets in Steinbach you’re not familiar with. You don’t know the street and how to get there. What do you do? You pull out your smart phone and open Google Maps. What is the first thing Google maps shows you when you open it? It tells you where you are. It gives you a Blue Dot. As you can see by the screenshot on the wall from my phone, right now the Blue Dot says that we are at Gospel Fellowship Church. (blank)

Tell God Your Blue Dot

Presenting Yourself to God Without Pretense is giving God your Blue Dot. Not physically, but mentally. Where are you at right now? Are you frustrated? Are you angry? Are you happy? Sad? Are you super excited about your boyfriend? Are you nervous about some of his character traits? How do you feel about that last medical test?

Biblically, many of the Psalms are Blue Dots for the people who wrote them. Both good and bad. Just so you know, we need to read them not as necessarily the ‘correct’ way of thinking but as the writer’s honesty about where their heart is at. I’ll read three short psalms so you can see how transparent they are about where they’re at.

Read Psalm 13

Read Psalm 126

Read Psalm 137

The Psalm that was read for scripture reading, Psalm 55, is a longer example of this kind of transparency with God.

As you can hear, there isn’t anything you can say to God that he can’t handle. These psalmists wrote what they were feeling, even when it was shocking. It’s easy for us to say that the Psalmist was being cruel and vindictive when he talked about how happy he would be when he saw the enemies’ babies being killed by throwing them on the rocks. However, none of us have also had that happen to us, like the Psalmist did. The Psalmist was being completely real with God re his feelings, as difficult as it is to hear.

So what does that look like for us?

Finding our blue dot involves more than mentally assenting to our feelings. In many ways it also involves entering into what we’ve been trying to avoid. You see, often our blue dot involves deep shame and guilt. Turn with me to Genesis 3. (Read Gen. 3:1-13) (blank) For Adam and Eve, their blue dot was one of deep shame and guilt. They hear God and the shame they’re experiencing washes over them. They hide behind a tree. As if God won’t know where they are and doesn’t know what they’ve done. God doesn’t need to ask them where they are and who told them they were naked or if they’ve eaten from the tree. He knows it all. So why does he ask?

He’s inviting them to be completely honest with him and enter into their new blue dot. They grudgingly do, but only partially. They don’t tell the full story. He blames and she blames. They don’t own their part of the story. As a result, their relationship with God is broken.

We are invited to enter our blue dots and tell God all about it. To unburden our souls and call a spade a spade. You see, it’s the only way to draw near to God. We can’t do so by hiding and not owning who we are, what we’ve done, what has been done to us and how it has affected us.

And we can do so because God is safe. Is he happy with us? Not necessarily. Is he angry with us? Possibly. Does he love us in spite of what we’ve done and what we’ve become through ours and others brokenness? Yes!!!

Romans 5:6-8 settles this once and for all. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (blank) Yes, God is angry because of our sin and how others sin affects us. He was so angry, he died for us so that the cycle could finally stop. Because of this knowledge we can approach his throne of grace without fear. It’s because of the good news of Jesus that we can tell God where we’re at, that we can tell him our blue dot.

Practically speaking, what does entering your blue dot and describing it to God look like?

I’m going to read a little from Crabb’s book and respond to it. (read pp95-96) Do you see what it looks like? Presenting yourself to God without pretense is simple but hard at the same time. For some of you it will be very difficult, mostly because you aren’t used to identifying what you’re feeling and putting it into words. Learning to do this won’t be easy. Practice with a friend. For some of us we’ve stuffed things for so long and had all the ‘right’ Christian attitudes that we have a hard time telling God exactly what it is we feel.

Larry Crabb says, “Stay on the lookout for distinct feelings that arise within you. They may be ugly emotions like perverted lust or violent freedom or joy. They may be glorious emotions such as an exhilarating sense of freedom or joy. Or they might just be everyday emotions, like impatience with rude drivers or pleasure in a good cup of coffee.”

You can talk to God about the mundane emotions and the deep, heartbreaking ones. Believe it or not, God wants to know all of them. He wants to know all about all of you. Yes, he already knows, but he wants to hear it from your lips. I remember when our kids were young. Sometimes I would see them experiencing something new and they would come running up to tell me all about it. I already knew what they had done and experienced, but I didn’t tell them because it was so good to hear it directly from them. It told me that they trusted me, that they loved me, and it was good for their souls to be able to share their joys with me and for me to take the time to hear them. Me listening to them told them that I loved them. The same is true of God.

I’m going to finish my sermon by reading two more stories and a few words of advice from Larry’s book, The PAPA Prayer and then we’ll have a Q & A time where you can ask questions or tell a story of how you have put this idea into practice. (read pp97-98)

Pray

Homework. Yes, today I’m going to give you homework for this week. It’s simple. For 5 minutes every day, pause and tell God what you’re feeling, not holding anything back. If at any time throughout the day you feel some kind of emotion, good or bad, tell him about it. Next week I’ll give you opportunity to share your experience of doing so.