Day 27
Monday, March 31st
God can’t love the person you’re pretending to be.
When we show up to God with masks on, pretending to have it all together, with our fears, struggles, and shortcomings hidden away, we close ourselves off from the work God wants to do inside us. God can’t love the person we pretend to be because that person doesn’t exist.
In today’s narrative, words like sin, confession, and repentance have fallen out of favour. We don’t like to talk about personal accountability anymore. We have become experts at pointing fingers and we don’t have to listen very hard to find a voice to assure us that the problems in our lives are not our fault, that the blame lies with someone, something, somewhere else.
But as followers of Jesus, our life with God begins when we admit we are sinners in need of a saviour.
We were born with a sin condition, and evidence of that condition can be seen all around us in this broken world. Sin separates us from God, but God sent Jesus to rectify that, to bring us back into a relationship with Him. If sin weren’t a reality, if sin hadn’t separated us from God, Jesus died for no reason at all.
For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow.
(2 Corinthians 7:10 NLT)
We should welcome the conviction of the Holy Spirit in our lives. He never sends us shame, but He does convict us. That flush we feel when we say something hurtful or act out of anger toward someone, “leads us away from sin” and draws us back, again and again, to our loving, forgiving God. We should welcome “that kind of sorrow.” Confessing our selfish acts to Him and receiving His unconditional forgiveness is how we receive the strength to love and forgive others in that same way. We can only offer grace to others when we first learn to receive it from God for ourselves. Asking God to help us see our blindspots, and keeping short accounts with God, with people, and with ourselves (quickly asking for and embracing forgiveness when we mess up) helps us learn to live without masks.
God can’t love the person you’re pretending to be. But He infinitely loves, without one single condition, the person you really are.
Do you find it hard to admit when you’ve done something wrong, even to God?
If so, why do you think that is?