The Vineyard has begun a new Breakthrough series that will lead us through Easter on March 25. One of the things I’m hoping for in the lives of the men of the Vineyard is complete authenticity.
Over the months the so-called Osama Binladan keeps issuing audio messages. The United States entered Afghanistan to destroy Binladan, and yet messages from him are regularly broadcast to the world. The picture, like the one shown here, is pretty-much the same photo that has been issued for years. So is he alive or not? Are the messages he transmits his voice or not? Who knows?
This I do know. If we are going to discover the compassion and power of Jesus, we must be real about who we are. Pretending to be what we never intend to be breaks trust. Pretending is not reality. It’s deception.
To build trust with your wife, your friends, really anyone, you must be authentic. If at your core you are authentic, people will begin to trust you. Hypocritical phoniness or pretense never leads to truth. I admit to being a mixed bag of complex emotions, which makes this stuff of authenticity so tough. Still, one of the best compliments you could ever pay me would be to say: "I’ll tell you, Follis is the real deal. From the crown of head to the bottom of his feet you know exactly what you are getting."
Jesus despised the shams of his day, especially the religious fakers. "How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. You try to look like upright people outwardly, but inside your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness." Matthew 23:27-28
Don’t just pretend in the days ahead and allow trust to fray. Be real. Be authentic. Breakthroughs occur when people are utterly genuine with God and with their fellow humans.
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