Authenticity

Faking it always came easy to me.

There's a lot of reasons why, from the earliest ages, I remember pretending not to know something I already knew, or to have answers I didn't have, or to hide my feelings or pretend in one area or another. One of the first things God began working on when I started walking with Him was the need to be real. Since that time, authenticity has been vitally important to me. It's become quite a buzzword in the church these days, as well.

In my journey toward authenticity I've had to learn and relearn a basic principle: Authenticity is not the greatest expression of a redeemed man or woman, Christlikeness is.

Instinctively, I think we know this. When I first started walking with God and He began peeling back the layers to show me the depth of my artificiality - so deep that even I didn't know who I was - my initial reaction was repulsion. I couldn't possibly be authentic, because I hated much of who I was. I didn't want  to have to show who I thought I really was. I still remember the prayer I prayed years ago when I began a Kay Arthur study on the Beatitudes: "Lord, if I'm going to be authentic, you're going to have to change who I am, because I don't want to be authentic the way I am today."

Ah, but that was the point. I had to learn that He loves me just the way I am, but too much to leave me there. There were things in my life that desperately needed to be changed. There were other things that I had to learn how to exhibit in the Spirit and not the flesh. For example, God gave me the personality that I have. That personality is fairly strong-willed and quite opinionated. I love to think and study and research. None of that is wrong, but I've had to learn to bring my will and my tongue under the control of the Spirit (correction: I'm still learning!), and to focus my time and energy on thinking and studying and researching things that truly matter. I can be fascinated by any number of topics, but I don't need to give years of study to each of them. Furthermore, authenticity has been as much about learning what not to change as what to change and what to control. I don't need to seek change in areas that are just different. God's Word is filled with marvelous examples of unique individuals that were different from each other like night from day. Each had a mission that the other would have been ill-suited to fulfill.

As I've reflected on my journey toward authenticity recently, I realized that I had drifted away from the basic principle that Christlikeness, not authenticity, is the greatest expression of a redeemed man or woman. As I look at the trend within the church toward authenticity, my concern is that authenticity has become an idol to us. We rightly want pastors and teachers who don't act superior and let us know they, too, are flawed. But we need pastors and teachers to take it to the next level and help us learn how to take our flaws to Jesus and ask Him to make us authentically Christlike in that area. We need to be walked through the steps of 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 and other passages that can help us submit our flesh to Christ.

What we need in the church is an expanded understanding of all it means to be Christlike - not a deeper glimpse at our own humanity. Too often we've limited Christlikeness to moral actions and failed to explore His deeper emotions and motivations. Scripture records Jesus as feeling compassion, sadness, anger, joy. He sought the prayers of others. We see Him resting and eating and walking through the fields. As we behold Him, Paul tells us, we are transformed more into His image.  Keeping our eyes on Jesus, studying what is revealed in the Gospels about who He was in all His humanity and deity, will help us to know all that it means to be fully human - and we'll be changed in the process.

Seeking authentic transformation to Christlikeness is not hypocrisy. We'll still mess up, and we should never claim to have "arrived". Hypocrisy is pretending to be something that we're not. If we're believers, we should be on a journey toward Christlikeness. Authenticity is simply letting others walk that journey with us.