Finding the Love of Your Life
02/08/2004 - Taking off the Mask
A number of years ago Margery Williams wrote a children's book called The Velveteen Rabbit, maybe you've heard of it. I read it to Avery this week as a bedtime story. It's subtitle is How Toys Become Real. And in the story the velveteen rabbit discovers just that, what it takes to be Real.
"There once was a Velveteen Rabbit, and in the beginning he was splendid. He was fat and bunchy, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink satin ... For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard in the nursery. Being only made of velveteen, some of the expensive mechanical toys snubbed him and pretended they were real."
"'What is Real?' asked the Rabbit on day. 'Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?'"
"The only toy who was kind to the Rabbit was the Skin Horse. The Skin Horse had lived in the nursery longer than any of the others, and he was very wise."
"'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.'"
"'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit."
"Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse. 'But when you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'"
"The Rabbit sighed. He longed to become Real, and yet the idea of growing shabby was rather sad. He wished that he could become Real without uncomfortable things happening to him."
This morning we want to talk about what it means to become real, because we'll never enter into deep community with another person unless we're willing to be real. It's a process. It doesn't come all at once. And it can be uncomfortable at times. But when you know you're really loved you can take that risk to enter into deeper community. But it only happens where there is love.
Today we continue our series called Finding the Love of Your Life with a teaching I've titled "Taking off the Mask." We're basing this series on a book by John Ortberg called Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them. The love that we're out to find is that agape kind of love that the New Testament talks about, that unconditional, self-sacrificing love that Jesus said is the mark of his followers.
I've asked you to look at this series as a sequence of love lessons. Lesson number one was that all of us are slightly irregular, we all come "as is," every one of us carries a mat. Lesson number two was that all of us "as is" people were created for community. We need each other. It's not good to be alone. Lesson number three was that the community we were created for has the incredible power to heal our lives. And today's lesson is that community starts with being real.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had so much to say about community, once wrote, "In confession the break through to community takes place ... If a Christian is in the fellowship of confession with a brother, he will never be along again, anywhere."
But our natural tendency is not to confess to one another our struggles or our pains or our sins, instead it's to hide from one another. We'd rather pretend that we don't have an "as is" tag, instead of being real. And that can be traced all the way back to a garden called Eden. If you have your Bible turn to Genesis 2.
It was in the garden that Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman, enjoyed a wonderful sense of openness with each other. Genesis 2:25 says, The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Now that doesn't just mean that they had these beautiful, perfect bodies with no need for cosmetic surgery. They certainly were beautiful people. But for Adam and Eve to be naked and unashamed meant that they had nothing to hide from each other. There was no fear of rejection, no secrets to conceal, no guilt to hide. They were completely transparent with each other, fully known and fully accepted. All was right with the world.
Then came the world's greatest disaster. Adam and Eve decided to have a snack in the garden. Which was okay, but they chose the wrong tree, the tree that God said was off limits. They disobeyed God and immediately what do they do?
Look at Genesis 3:7-10, Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
They hide. They hide first from themselves, by making clothes out of fig leaves. They cover up the parts of themselves that are different from one another. Isn't that what we all do? We cover up the thoughts, feelings, and opinions that are different from others because we're afraid of rejection. That's where we feel most vulnerable so we hide from each other.
And then they hide from God by running into the woods. And humanity, from that point on, is plunged into what theologians call total depravity. And that's what's behind all our "as is" tags. That's why everybody's weird. And that's why we all play hide and seek with each other.
In his book, Ortberg tells the story of a man who was desperate for work and so he applied at the zoo. "Well," the zoo director said, "it's a little unusual, but I do have something you can do. Our gorilla died last month and we haven't had a monkey to replace him. If you're willing to wear a monkey suit and pretend you're an ape, you've got the job."
So the man signed on and felt a little awkward at first pretending to be an ape. But after a few days he got into it and before long he was the star attraction. Until one morning he was swinging from one vine to another when he went over the wall and into the cage right next to his ... the lion cage.
The man was terrified! He was face to face with an enormous, man eating African lion. So he started screaming at the top of his lungs when suddenly the lion whispered to him, "Shut up, you nut, or we'll both be out of a job!"
So God lets Adam hide for a while and then comes looking for him. He offers him the chance to come clean. He treats him with dignity, as a person, even after he's rebelled, the same way he treats all of us, because God knows that no one, not even himself, can force another person into a relationship.
By the way, one of the marks that distinguish a healthy church from a cult is that in authentic community, people are never forced or manipulated into self-disclosure. They're invited to share honestly about their lives, but never forced to. If you ever find yourself in a relationship or in a group where that kind of pressure is being applied, find the door and run. You can force people into conformity, but you can't force people into community. They need to be invited to go there.
So in Genesis 3:9 God invites Adam by saying, "Where are you?" He doesn't mean geographically. He means where are you in terms of our relationship. What's happened between us?
Verse 10, He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid." This is the first mention of fear in the Bible. Fear didn't exist before sin entered the world. And fear won't exist in God's future kingdom. But Adam's fear of being found out causes him to hide. And then he gets into the blame game and essentially tries to pin his sin on God.
Look at verses 11-12, And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" The man said, "The woman you put here with me-she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
"God when it was just you and me and the animals everything was great! It was the woman that you made that got me in trouble." So Adam blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent and to this day we all still play the blame game and the game of hide and seek. But we were not made to live this way. Jesus lived and died to offer us an alternative.
The apostle Paul says that in true community love is to be genuine. In the book of Acts we read that in the very first church people "met together with glad and sincere hearts." They were authentic. They were real. They learned to stop pretending to be something they were not.
So let's get real practical now and look at three stages of authenticity that will lead us into deeper levels of community in any relationship.
The first stage is guarded communication. Authenticity doesn't mean we tell everybody, everything about us. That would be unwise and unbiblical. There is a place for guarded communication. We need to be discerning in what we share with whom.
Proverbs 20:19 says, A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid anyone who talks too much.
Don't be too quick to share something personal with somebody you don't know or somebody you can't trust. You can get hurt real bad. Most of us have had that experience and it's painful. I've been on both ends of that equation. I've had confidences betrayed and I've betrayed a few myself, which caused great pain. And when that happens it can shut us down for years in our attempts to build deeper community with people. And we can get real cynical and say things like, "There you go! What did I tell you? You can't trust anybody." When the truth is, "You can't trust everybody. But you can trust somebody."
So there's a place for polite, surface conversation. We all need that and that is a level of community, but it's not the deepest level. We were meant to go deeper.
The apostle Paul has a wonderful line in his second letter to the Corinthians when he writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18, And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
His point is that it's possible for people to live in community with "unveiled faces." We would say without wearing masks. He uses the line in retelling the story of Moses whose face glowed after he met with God on Mount Sinai. And everyone who saw him went, "Wow! What a man of God! He is so special!"
But one morning when Moses looked in the mirror to brush his teeth, he noticed his face wasn't glowing as much. He was losing his radiance and it scared him to death to think that people would see his fading glory and think less of him so he put a veil over his face. He hid his face because he wanted people to think he was more spiritual than he really was. Until his wife finally said, "Moses, take that ridiculous thing off you're not fooling anybody!" What a relief that must have been!
But we can do the same thing that Moses did. We can keep a veil over our face, or a mask, to hide who we really are. Some of us hide behind clichés. We're always "Top draw. Doing great. Never had a bad day." Some of us hide behind humor to deflect conversations that get too personal. Some hide behind their shyness or their busyness or their spirituality. You can impress people from behind the veil, but you can't make friends that way. The truth is we're drawn to people who live with unveiled faces.
If you want to be in a relationship where people share deeply with you, then you need to take the next step towards authenticity, which is appropriate self-disclosure. Someone has said, "Disclosure begets disclosure." It has enormous power.
The apostle Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 4:25, Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
How often I've seen this in small groups over the years. The group starts out with everyone being polite and having guarded conversations. But after a while there's this unspoken yearning to go deeper. And if the group doesn't people start to get bored with it and look for other things to do. Until someone has the courage to take the risk and share a struggle that they're having at work or at school or in their parenting or with their health or in their marriage and all of sudden the group dives into a deeper level of community. And often that's all it takes, one courageous person to lead them there, one person to risk being real.
Again, we're talking about appropriate self-disclosure. What may be appropriate to share one on one, may not be appropriate to share in a group or in a mixed setting of men and women. Nevertheless, this is the level where we take risks with those we trust and show our "as is" tag by revealing areas of failure or embarrassment or vulnerability, things that don't make us look good or that we're not particularly proud of. It's communication that goes beyond clichés and opens up the heart. It's the uncomfortable part of becoming real.
Jesus was the only person who ever walked this planet who was completely transparent. He never learned to hide. He let his friends see him in his unveiled moments of joy and sadness, anger and fatigue. At one point, shortly before he died, he said his friends, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Please pray for me (Mark 14:34)."
Every one of us carries hurts and scars and wounds. And our tendency since the garden is to hide as if our life depended on it. But that's exactly what we can't do. God wants us to come out from behind the bushes with him and with at least one other person. Our life depends on getting found. There's no healing in hiding only bondage.
That's even true at the physical level. Studies show that there is a real connection between self-disclosure and physical health. James knew that 2,000 years ago when he wrote in James 5:16, Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
Which brings us to the third stage of authenticity that leads to the deepest level of community. And that is confession. Now there's an overlap between self-disclosure and confession. Self-disclosure can include confession, but it also includes sharing things that have happened to us, hurts and violations that were out of our control. Confession, on the other hand, is a moral term, and involves naming specific things that we've done that need repentance and reconciliation.
Guarded communication is telling people that you're fine when inside you're really scared to death because you just lost your job. Self-disclosure is telling people that you're scared to death about the future because you just lost your job. Confession is telling someone that you're scared to death about the future because you just lost your job and the reason you lost your job is that you were caught stealing from the company.
Confessing our sins to another human being is powerful and crucial to our own healing and sense of forgiveness. When people begin to open up at this level, then God can produce the kind of deep community that he intends for us to enjoy.
Sin thrives on secrecy. And the longer we keep our sin hidden in the shadows of secrecy, the greater its grip will be on our lives. But when we bring it out of the shadows and into the light it quickly loses its power. And we bring it into the light when we confess it to at least one other trusted person. Confessing our sin to one another is the only way we can be delivered from the power of an addiction.
Alcoholics Anonymous has known this for years. The Fifth Step of the Twelve Steps of AA is to admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. It's to come out of the shadows and into the light.
Proverbs 28:13 says, He who covers up his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy. Confession is a powerful thing because it puts us in a place where God can transform our lives.
Believe me, I know the fear that comes with confession. Someone has said confession may be good for the soul, but bad for the reputation. That's why we need to find someone we can trust whether it be a professional counselor or a trustworthy friend.
Never forget that Valley View first of all a community of sinners before we're a community of saints. No one needs to feel alone around here in their brokenness. All of us struggle. Some may hide it better than others, some may struggle in different areas than we do, but we all do battle every single day. We all carry a mat.
So today's love lesson is that community starts with being real. "Becoming Real," said the wise old skin horse, "is a process. It takes time. It doesn't come all at once. It will be uncomfortable. But once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who just don't understand."