RIGHTLY REFLECTING TRUTH
I was chatting with a friend recently and the subject of God came up. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since because I not only came face to face with truths I needed to examine in my own life but in that moment, I also recognized the Church needs to be held accountable as well. In short, most of us who say we love and follow God don’t really know Him and because of that, we don’t accurately reflect Him to the world around us. Often what you see is NOT what you get when it comes to God.
After listening to my friend’s perspective on God, it pretty much slipped out of my mouth that most people don’t have an accurate perception of who God really is – even those who profess to know and love Him. Because of that, we don’t accurately reflect the truth of who He is, so we end up misrepresenting Him to those around us.
I took it a step further and admitted that as a church, we don’t take responsibility for portraying God inaccurately. We also don’t admit we’ve portrayed Him as being something He’s not, most often because we don’t realize He’s different than what we’ve been taught and understood.
Christ-followers are called to reflect the loving, kind, good God we worship, yet what people regularly see is hypocritical living founded on judgment – often in the name of Jesus. We preach one thing and live another. We cast stones and point out splinters in others’ eyes while ignoring our own sins and living a life relatively void of repentance.
As a church, we’ve missed the mark – a definition often used for “sin.” We’ve been hard-hearted in this area, and I believe God is calling us to account for wrongly reflecting His character and heart of love toward all peoples of the earth. In His goodness and love, He’s offering us an opportunity to pause in His presence, allow Him to reveal areas where we’ve personally missed the mark, repent, and be healed.
Healed? Why am I talking about healing related to this? Because we’ve perceived God through the filter of brokenness. When we view God through brokenness, it causes us to form a wrong understanding of His character.
Our internal mirrors have been broken, so what many of us reflect of Him to the world around us has been a shattered image - and we haven’t even recognized it because we didn’t know it was broken.
From a healed place, we’re able to repent without shame because our repentance is founded on personal revelation of the truth of the heart and character of God, as well as our identities as His beloved sons, daughters, and Bride of Christ.
This is a time in history when the world around us is incredibly in need of hope and the belief that there is a loving, kind God and Savior who welcome them just as they are, without needing to “get their lives right” first. As a church, it’s time we repented - turned away from wrong thinking and inaccurate portrayals of our good and loving God. It’s time to tell the world how sorry we are for leading them to believe something that simply isn’t true and own up to having turned hearts away from the One who loves them like no one else, rather than drawing people close to His heart.
God, forgive us! Forgive me! Clean the mirrors of our lives so we can better see Your reflection and more clearly and accurately reflect You to the world around us as we shine Your light into the darkness.
Living for Him,
Andrea & Brian
Our Mission: Love Others Well & Empower Them to Do the Same
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