Tapping Red & Green

I’m tired of hiding my sin!

This year, I am learning to live a transparent life before my friends, family, and world.  Gosh, how excruciatingly hard it is when the desire for approval (based on whether or not you have it all together) can enroach in on us and become so disorienting.  When that desire takes root, it can be pernicious to our grasp of a secure identity in Christ.  Because I am an extremely visual person, I sometimes imagine myself cutting the chords, (literally chopping them in half) that connect me to anyone from whom I want to gain approval, as my identity is no longer connected to anything besides Christ.  Those identity chords are not plural and horizontal but singular and vertical.   Thank goodness!  “Oh man, I messed up again.. what will they think?.” Bam! Already pardoned… and I already know what HE thinks. (Unmeritted adoration).  A healthy understanding of our identity, as believers, helps us to easily live transparent lives with one another, carrying each other’s burdens and rejoicing in each other’s triumphs.

SO, before his album She Must and Shall Go Free was released, Derek Webb toured in homes of supporters, with no more than fifty people per “venue.” Before some of the songs he sometimes offered some background, inspiration, or thoughts on the song he was about to perform. Before his song “I Repent” Webb has the following to say

I think that we often believe, if we’re really honest with ourselves, that the Christian life is about how well we can learn to hide our sin. I mean, honestly, I think a lot of us, and I do this all the time, we think that we are able to measure the growth of our spirituality by how little we are sinning. Or maybe at least how little we can convince everyone, ourselves included, that we are sinning. But the Christian life is not about hiding! It’s not about living in fear! Gosh that’s what we all do, though, is it not? I mean, we just live in fear all the time that we’ll be found out…I’m telling you, the best thing that could happen to any one of you in this room, the best thing, is that your sin would literally be exposed on the five o’clock news. Your deepest, darkest, most embarrassing sin, the one you work the hardest to hide would be broadcasted on the five o’clock news; best thing that could ever happen to you, best thing that could ever happen to me.

Because I am so weary, I am so tired of hiding my sin from people. I’m deceiving people of who I really am. I’m tired of it! I just wish my sins could be exposed! I wish there were huge screens that would just show you the truth about me. All the way down to my core. In order that you would know me for who I really was. And that I could not, I, … I did not even have the option to hide from you anymore. In order that I would have nothing but Jesus to grasp on to because that’s all I’ve got anyway! Cause the truth is, your sins have been exposed as if they were on the five o’clock news. They’ve been exposed to Jesus. He knows you better than you are even willing to admit to yourself. But He’s forgiven you! Take joy in the fact not that your sins are not real but that they are real and that your Savior is real. I cannot tell you this enough times in hopes that any of us, one of us, even me might believe this. I’ll never tire of saying this to people! I’ll never tire of hearing this myself because by the time I go to sleep tonight I’m not going to believe it again. I’m going to be thinking of ways to hide my sin from people in hope they might like me, or something. But that’s not what my Christian life is all about. That’s not what sanctification is all about. That’s not what growth as a believer’s all about. It’s about coming to grips with who you really are and being willing to admit that to each other!