Let’s get real

Our goal as a church is that every week each of our people are taking a next step in their relationship with God, a next step in their relationship with others, and a next step in taking responsibility for themselves. We want to be a church of next steps.

I called this article “Let’s get real” because if we really want to be a church like that, we actually have to be real. We don’t want to be a church where we play religious games or put on a religious act.

Our Western world has tended towards a consumer model of church, which is church that is defined by the needs of it’s congregants. Church should never be organised around its people, but around Jesus.

“The Block” is an Aussie reality television show that my wife absolutely loves. In the last season there was one contestant who was really clearly lying, and she was fooling everybody. I’m not sure what was going on for her, but she kept going around and talking about “my truth.”

Have you heard people talk about “my truth” like “I’m going to tell you my truth?” The obvious question is, “what is the difference between your truth and reality?”

You don’t see the whole truth, even though you live as though you do.

One of the great challenges for all of us is that none of us see the whole truth.

There’s this really sad time in the Old Testament, in the Book of Judges that paints a picture of a society in decline:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

Judges 17:6 NIV

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

Judges 21:25 NIV

I don’t know if you have noticed, but you could use the same language to describe life here in Hobart. Everybody’s doing as they see fit.

I wonder, even in the church, would be true that everybody’s doing that which they see fit?

The whole journey of the Bible, starting with Genesis chapter three, is the journey to trust God’s reality rather than our own way of seeing.

The whole point of the start of the biblical story is that we, as humanity, said, “No, no, we want to trust our way of seeing. We want to look from our perspective, thank you very much, rather than trust your perspective.” And then God began his rescue mission.

In the gospels whenever Jesus tells the disciples off for not having enough faith, it isn’t about some intellectual exercise. It was about how they were actually seeing the world.

The core question of faith is whether you are living as you see fit or whether you are open to God’s truth.

The first Bible verse I ever learnt as an adult, came after I’d left being a journalist in Broken Hill to do Bible college, and ran out of money. It was incredibly stressful and I was seriously considering going back to a real job. Out of the blue, though, someone gave me an envelope with $50 in it and Proverbs 3:5-6 written on the front. The money made all the difference and the verse has been the challenge for me ever since.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; [6] in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV

My kids know how important that verse is for me. My son Daniel gave me a plaque that sits on the church boardroom table, and another of my children gave me another plaque that sits on my desk. Both plaques remind me that if I want to follow Jesus, I’ve got to hold loosely how I see things.

We live in a world that says trust yourself. And that’s why many of us are heading for disaster.

While there are some things you see that are true, there are some ways of interacting with the world and some things you are seeing that are simply not true, and you don’t know the difference. More than that, in terms of all the things you cognitively can engage with, there’s a much bigger universe out there that is beyond even your capacity to engage with it.

Your truth will never be the whole story, but you will continue to act as though it is.

Your truth, as this lady on The Block kept going on about, will never be the whole story, but you will continue to act as though it is.

Jesus made it clear that it’s about how you see, in Luke 11:

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness.

Luke 11:34 NIV

When I grew up, I was brainwashed by Sesame Street. I’m a Mr-Snuffleupagus-was-imaginary kind of kid. It was a bit of a bewildering thing to discover that they all got to meet him in the end. That was a whole other thing.

But Sesame Street had a song that captured the the central question of your life:

Life is about where you put your eyes, what you trust as real.

Jesus keeps saying, “No, it’s the heart that’s the issue. Not what you say, not what comes out. It’s the heart that’s the issue.”

Belief is the issue

Part of our challenge in the Western world is we prioritize thoughts, but before you have thoughts, you have beliefs. And it’s the beliefs that are the issue. As one philosopher pointed out:

“Under all that we think lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.”

Antonio Machado (Spanish poet and Philosopher)

That’s why we’ve got to get back to basics. It’s not about learning really clever stuff. It’s about facing how we actually see the world.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul makes it clear, that even if sin wasn’t the issue, God made us all different. We are one body with many parts, and we are genuinely different.

I think part of the reason God gave us the church is to help us realize just how different we are. It is one of the core challenges in relationships. We see the world differently. We don’t see the world as it is. We see it as we are, according to Anais Nin.

It is normal and comfortable to try and hang out with people who agree with you, who think like you and act like you, but it’s also deadly.

And we see the dangers that are happening as algorithms force us to hear voices from people who already agree with us, and we see how society is fragmenting, because we’re not being challenged to think differently, because the algorithms worked out that we’re more likely to stay watching YouTube if it’s feeding stuff we already believe in, whether or not it is true.

We need to face our actual beliefs.

We need to walk in truth, and we need to face our actual beliefs.

And again, this is where the church, I think, has done a disservice to us, because we have talked about believing in Jesus, and what we’ve meant by that is assent to a set of intellectual propositions.

Jesus actually says, “No, it’s not about your intellect. It’s about your heart. It’s about what you actually believe.”

It’s one thing to know that God is love, but to know deeply that God loves you.

That the core journey of faith is to let God confront and shape your beliefs, and to increasingly have your beliefs align with who Jesus is.