In my last post I asked the question, “How do we live in light of the fact that Jesus wants to pull up the roots of sin in our lives, not just ‘trim the weeds’ and make us look externally good?” Our Destino community finished up last semester and started this new one talking about what makes a community healthy. There is a connection between a healthy community and this pulling up the roots of sin. At our Destino Winter Conference last week, our keynote speaker described the kind of community that breeds healing as, “a place where people can be ‘naked and unashamed.’” This borrows imagery from Genesis 2:25, where Adam and Eve, having a perfectly harmonious relationship with God and with each other, didn’t hide anything about who they were. That, of course, was before sin became a part of their reality, so they had nothing to hide. Today, however, it’s a different story. We have shame and guilt from things we’ve done and things that have happened to us. We have our background and family history that we either want to hide or selectively reveal to others. We have lies and facades that we want people around us to believe.
There are a lot of things to hide and a lot of good reasons to hide them too. Our world’s main operating principle is pretty much survival of the fittest, so if you can’t be the fittest, the next best thing is to look like the fittest and hope nobody calls your bluff. Now, the Kingdom of God isn’t like that at all, but unfortunately we treat it like the rest of the world. That’s to be expected, though, because we’ve only ever known the world. But our Christian communities ought to be places where we don’t need to keep up the lies.
|I have lies, you have lies, and I’m sure we’re both tired…
Maybe part of the solution is just talking about it honestly with another person, saying, “Look, I have lies, you have lies, and I’m sure we’re both tired of keeping up with it. Let’s agree to be a safe place for each other to be honest and start to heal.” In I John 1:7, God tells us, “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, purifies us from every sin.” I’m praying that in Destino, if we get nothing else accomplished, that we’d allow light to be shed on our lives, every part, and therefore start to be purified from every sin.
Devin is on staff with Destino in St. Louis, MO.
Photo Credit: jcarlosn