An Honest Community
Notes
Transcript
What is the single most important component of any healthy relationship? Honesty
What is the single most important component of any healthy relationship? Honesty
Hook: You’ll have to bear with me today, pastor Tom was scheduled for chapel today, but he wasn’t feeling well, and so I found out yesterday I needed to be ready with some notes!
Who are some of the biggest liars you know? These could be in your personal life, TV, movies, history?
We are surrounded by lies. You can’t open social media without seeing your grandma sharing a false news story—something like Forrest Frank saved 400 kittens from a tree. Or The US President says, “The moon is made of cheese” All it takes is a picture with some text put over it and people will believe it. That’s not even considering A.I. and the amount of pictures that people think are true, but we later find out are totally fake.
We have a lot of recorded lies and scandals from history—Watergate, Ponzi, Bernie Madoff...Hitler.
After WWI, Hitler started to propose some ideas about what led to Germany’s defeat he started to develop out his plan for how to communicate some lies to get his way. He started a propaganda campaign to villainize groups of people and justify some extreme actions. Over the last 80 years, there has been a lot of time spent studying what went on, and the psychology behind his methods. He developed a clear set of rules that seemed to be pretty closely followed during his rise and time in power. There were a few clear rules to his propaganda campaign:
Never admit a fault or wrong
Never accept blame
Concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything
Repeat the lie constantly to ensure the public believes it
The Belief was, that if said frequently and consistently, the public would believe a lie, no matter how big it was. Whether on a national scale or a personal level, these things only do one thing, they pollute relationships and community and make things incredibly toxic.
Repeating the lie until everyone believes, that tends to be how we operate too. The book “The Gospel-Centered Community” says this—
Intro: Real authentic community involves being known “as we really are.” But most of us are worried that others would not like us or accept if they really knew us. So, we hide behind a false self. We put forward a good image. We pretend. We engage in an “image management.” It’s a subtle form of dishonesty, manipulation, and lying. Doing this keeps us from, what the Bible describes as “walking in the light” and pulls us away from living as the gospel instructs. The gospel assures us that God fully accepts us in Christ, despite our weaknesses and sins. The more we truly believe this, the more we are freed from the slavery of the approval or disapproval of others. We can walk in the light, confident in our identity in Christ, free to be known as we really are and to love others as we really are.
I. The Impostor
How does this tie to community? Honesty is probably the most important component of a healthy relationship. Relationships simply cannot exist without honesty. Once I am untruthful with someone, I unravel a piece of that relationship.
HOA stealing from Account story. That relationship was broken!
In order to guard against this, we often convince ourselves that we are truthful, while also not wanting people to know us as we really are. We want to be known as a certain kind of a person. We want to be good honest people, even if we have to lie a little to make that happen.
Author Brennan Manning refers to this as “the Impostor”
“The impostor is the classic codependent. To gain acceptance and approval, the false self camouflages feelings, making emotional honesty impossible. We present a perfect image to the public so that everybody will admire us and nobody will know us… The impostor prompts us to attach importance to what has no importance… The false self causes us to live in a world of delusion. The impostor is a liar.”
This is exactly what Adam and Eve did in the garden of Eden.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Before the fall, there was a transparency and an openness. We should highlight that at this time, there was no shame.
But once they sinned, they began to hide.
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Rather than being fully transparent they were ashamed and began to withhold things from each other and from God. And we’ve been in that boat ever since.
In my 8th grade Bible Class, we’ve been studying ethics, specifically the effects of the Fall (shout out).
The truth—The Fall makes us lie about who we really are. It distorts our identity and image of ourself to the point that we hide and try to stay in the dark.
II. Walk in the Light
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
True community exists in the “light.” This is where we have true fellowship.
Imagine your relationships where you are able to be your truest self—you’re not pretending, hiding, covering up. They know the real you and you know the real them. You may have a few of these...maybe none! It may be a group of best friends, it could be a sibling, at one point in your life, it was probably a parent or grandparent.
I have a sister. She refers to me as the “golden child.” Claiming I was the favorite of our parents growing up. I push back against that, but it’s totally true. She can say that, because she’s seen the real me. I could be on my best behavior when grandma or an aunt came over, partially because I’m six years older, I was better at faking it! But then when it was her and I, she knew how mean I could be! But we also knew how loving we could be to each other too! We both are able, like many siblings, to call out things when they need to be called out.
This is at its core a gospel issue. Because unless you have been cleansed and forgiven by Jesus, and we’ve resolved our struggle for righteousness and identity, we won’t be open to others.
We start to decide all of the worst things that can happen. People won’t approve of me. They won’t think I’m a good person. If honesty is rooted in belief, dishonesty is rooted in unbelief. I’m not resting my identity and righteousness that I have in Christ, so I’m saving face to make sure people have a certain impression of me.
Which, is not recognizing that that is something the gospel frees us from! Jesus gives us a new identity and a righteousness not based on anything we’ve done!
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord;
my soul shall exult in my God,
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
We are all in the same situation. If we want to have true Christian community, we have to be willing to show our true selves to others, with the understanding that Christ has changed the worst things about us, and covered us in His righteousness.
We can have a community where people are loved as they really are but loved too much to let them stay that way. A community with radical grace, generous hospitality and joyful humility.
III. Truth in Love
If we want to be able to tell the truth about ourselves, and speak the truth in love to others, we have a few steps we can follow.
First,
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,
if we want to speak the truth in love, our aim has to be to help people be like Christ. We are telling the truth about someone to them for the purpose of humiliating, shaming, bullying, etc… It is I love you, I care about you, I’ve been where you are, and this is what you need to hear.
We have to find the unbelief and the idol behind why we do what we do.
Think about a scenario where you are tempted to not be your true self. Maybe a new group of people, a new job, new school, family function, whatever it is…When we go into this image management mode, we are actively choosing to be dishonest, and in doing so, we are serving some underlying idols, that are countering what the gospel has already done for us.
Identifying Idols
Approval
if people knew the whole truth about me, they probably wouldn’t like me.
Control/Manipulation
If people knew the whole truth about me, who knows how they’d react? I wouldn’t be able to control their opinion of me.
Respect
If people knew the whole truth about me, I might lose standing or respect in their eyes.
Reputation
If people knew the whole truth about me, who knows what they’d do with that information? They could tell others.
Look To Jesus
We have to look at what Jesus offers in contrast to all of these things. The God of the universe approves of us, He is in control, our respect and reputation can be centered around what He’s done and not what i’ve done.
Believe the Gospel
And then choosing to live in light of those truths, shows a true belief in the gospel.
Closing:
None of this is an easy task. It requires a lot of soul searching and vulnerability. It has to be done carefully and with discernment.
Maybe you can think to an exact time that this happens.
Maybe you are doing it right now.
Maybe you’ve been around church and you don’t have this because you haven’t fully repented and believed the gospel.
We have to be able to know, are there people around me I can trust, and am I someone that someone else can trust. If the answer to either is “no” then you have some prayer and growth ahead of you to reach that point so you can truly and fully be a part of building a gospel centered community in your home, your friend group, and your school.
