Saturday

The Beauty Of Brutal Honesty


Mark 9:23 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. 24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

Brutal honesty has a unique beauty. But, oddly, religion can provide the motivation to abort that beauty before it is born. In religion people often cloak the truth about themselves so they will appear to be what they know they are not. But this man, looking into the face of Jesus, knew he couldn't hide the truth from those eyes. He believed, but he also struggled with doubt. So the hard truth just came tumbling out. Beautiful... So vulnerable and real...

I once heard a preacher say, “If you doubt, you’re damned!” He taught that a constant perfect faith is necessary for eternal salvation, and if we ever waver in our faith it is evidence we weren’t really reconciled to God in the first place. I was intrigued and repulsed all at the same time. Intrigued by how far people will go to steal the credit for salvation. Repulsed by the pain and confusion caused by deflecting attention away from Jesus, the source of salvation, to self. This is the slight of hand used to place the chains of religion around fearful, guilt-laden hearts. An honest person's examination of self will always find insufficiency, but when we keep our attention on Jesus and His gospel we will find all sufficiency.

It would be a wonderful thing if we could compartmentalize our personality so that one part of us was perfectly pure, while the other part struggled with imperfection. But, sadly, imperfection stains every attribute of our being. When religion says you must be perfect in this way or that, we either fake it, or walk away.

Jesus either died for all our sins, or He effectively died for none of our sins. There is nothing completely pure in us this side of heaven, and that includes our faith. It is mercy that our struggling faith seeks from God, or it is nothing at all. Heaven will not be ours because of our perfections. It is ours because God chose in His mercy to save us in and from our imperfections by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Look to Jesus for salvation... and be brutally honest with Him.

1 comment:

  1. This is definitely so true. That's why I choose not to have "Religion" but "Christianity." When there's religion, there's a tendency to cloak our true feelings. But with Jesus, all we have to do is run straight into His arms and bare it all.

    Great post.

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails