I think it's actually a common tale. Not being a genius or faking being an attorney, but the feeling anxious and fearing exposure part. The going through life wondering when people will figure out we're frauds. Sometimes I have to wonder if Jesus had been a writer and continued the story of the Prodigal Son if there would have been a part where we see him twisted up inside feeling like it's only a matter of time before everyone, besides his brother who already knows, of course, figure's out he shouldn't be in whatever position the father placed him in the company business. He's the same loser who ate slop with the pigs. He just smells better. When he plays the part of the good man, he's a fraud, an actor wearing a mask, and not doing a very good job of disguising the truth. But when he does wrong, that's when he's really being himself. It's so much easier.
If I were really a Christian, I wouldn't think thoughts like that. I'm not really a loving person. I'm a selfish person wearing a loving mask and pretending to care. I try so hard to do what's right but so often I don't really want to. If I were a real Christian wouldn't being good come natural and easy, like doing wrong used to? I feel like such a fraud. I'm not qualified to call myself a Christian because there's still so much wrong with me. If people knew the real me, they wouldn't see how to walk with God, they'd call me a hypocrite and kick me out of the church. I better try harder.
Maybe these thoughts, and ones like these, aren't common. Maybe it's just me that sometimes has this fight with the accuser that lives in my brain, the one that likes to tell me the convict is the real me and the preacher is a pretender. But here's the joyous good news, the argument is a bigger fraud than we feel we are.
As anyone who has ever been really good at being bad can tell you, with the exception of a few brain damaged sociopaths, it actually doesn't come natural and easy to be bad. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's in our nature to choose wrong over right. We all do it. It's in our nature and it's easy to want to do the selfish thing. But when we did wrong, at least at first, there was this ache, fear, this understanding that we had violated our conscience. There was guilt and shame. You actually have to fight the voice telling you that you're wrong, you have to live with guilt berating you for a while and repeat the act more than just a few times before you can finally shut that voice up and kill your conscience. Then, after all that effort and struggle and misery, guilt and shame, being bad seems to come natural and easy. But not really. We just moved the line. There are still things that if we were to contemplate doing we'd suddenly be confronted by that voice of conscience, back from the dead. If you do that, then you'd really be evil.
I'd steal from you, but I wouldn't beat you up without cause. Murder was out of the question. The truth is that we all had and or have sins that we justified, did enough to kill the voice and forget the guilt and shame and live as though they are OK and natural, while other sins remained forbidden, wrong, unnatural and evil in our minds. My point is that it actually takes effort and a lot of ignoring that voice inside saying we're wrong, bad, shameful etc. to live a life full of sin as though that is who we really are and how we are supposed to live, because it's not the truth. We were born to have relationship with God.
We forget that process, that constant cycle of sin, guilt, justification and excuse and lying to self about being comfortable with the sin and that it's just who we really are, feeling OK for five seconds and repeating it all over again. The good news, something to have joy about, is that if you have surrendered and bowed the knee to the King, you have become an adopted child of His. You are not a fraud.
There is nothing you have to do before you come to Christ that qualifies you to enter His gates, except sin. There's no test you have to take to be legitimate. You simply have to need Him (that one's the easiest because we are born needing a Savior), realize that you need Him and can't save yourself from your bondage, sin, addictions, bad habits, and self, believe that God made a way for you to be made clean through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and surrender your will and life to Him. That makes you legit. Not only does it give you entrance, but you are sealed as His child by the Holy Spirit. And that means that there need not be any anxiety about the other shoe dropping, exposing you.
No one can walk up and say you don't belong, just as no one can tell me that I am not David Woodard's son. Well, they can say it all they want, but it won't effect me because I know better. There's not some standard that has to be lived up to before you get disbarred, fired, kicked out and sent to hell. And if we even fought half as hard to ignore the voice that says we don't qualify, that we're not good enough, that who we were is the real us while the new us is the pretender, that we did fighting to ignore the voice that said we were doing wrong, that we should be ashamed. we'd be a lot more comfortable in who we are in Christ a lot quicker.
There is a God. You're not Him, and neither am I. He created everything that Has been created, has the power to save and restore and does not lie. He has declared us new in Him. He says that we're right in thinking we don't qualify nor deserve to be in the family. We never will. That's why the Son came, wrapped in flesh, to die in our place. Daddy doesn't look to see if we're qualified or deserving. He looks to see if we are covered under the qualifications of Christ. It's the rightness and sacrifice of Jesus that makes us clean and deserving.
So, yeah, that accuser is right. There's no point arguing about it or feeling bad. You're not qualified to truly call yourself a good person, or a loving person for that matter. Whenever a person is called such things it's always relatively speaking, as in they were good compared to other people, or good....for a human, loving more than not loving.... But when compared to the goodness and love of God we are all just pretenders and failures. So if you do start feeling good enough, loving enough, that's the voice to be afraid of. But the joy comes in the fact that we don't have to win the fight to change and be something that we are not.
It is Christ in us that makes us new. It is the love of Christ in us that loves others. It is the Christ in us that is good and gives us the power to ignore the voice of desire to do wrong and choose to do right. It is the perfectness of Christ in us that qualifies us and makes us deserve to call ourselves a child of God. It is Christ in us that transforms us from what we were to what we will be, and He, who doesn't lie, has promised to finish the work He began.
Oh joy to the world, the Lord has come!! We are not who were. We are not who will be. But we are His and clean before Him. We are learning to be like Jesus. It's not our nature to be Jesus. But it is the nature of Christ in us to be Jesus. The more we give Him control, the more natural it becomes to do good and choose right and love others. It's a process, a process that no one, not the devil, not you, not anyone else, no one, can say you don't deserve to be a part of, because the blood of Christ says you do.
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