The Emperor’s New Clothes (or)  The nekkid king (southern)

I was trying to block out the noise downstairs so I could finally make some notes for Sunday.

One of my children stuck their head in the door and asked, “You ok dad?”

“No, but I find a way to get ok every day,” I replied.

So many stressful things have been occurring lately that I have not been “ok” ANY day for weeks now. I have to FIND a way to GET ok in the LORD every day.

I don’t just wake up to find everything falling into place in life as a Believer.

Let me put it like this:

I don’t have a problem at ALL with women wearing makeup.

The problem is with Christians feeling like they have to cover up everything with makeup.

Said another way, we perform as antichristian when we try to cover our imperfections with lies instead of The Blood.

We can walk around confessing we smell like roses all day long, but if we wallowed in the hog trough, we are going to smell like a pig until we take a bath.

The people around us are holding their noses while we declare we smell great, while the TRUTH is that we just need to bathe.

We, Believers, are supposed to be the ones who love truth so much that we easily spot at least most lies.

Especially when we see them in the mirror.

BUT DON'T YOU DARE STOP READING RIGHT THERE!

When I was 18, I coached a 13–14-year-old baseball team. We would practice out behind the school on an old sandlot baseball diamond (yep, picture the movie) and we would occasionally hit one too far into left field and over or through the fence of an extremely irritable older man. And if one of the boys really got ahold of one, they could hit it off of the man's roof, at which time our entire team learned to scatter and do their best to hide behind whatever they could find big enough.

When the old man would hear the baseball hit his tin roof, out he would fly, yelling curse words that I am not sure I have heard since. And we could forget ever getting our baseball back. But if his wife was home, an amazing thing would occur... more than once she would follow him out into the yard and, (although I didn't understand what was going on at the time) rebuke him, or the unclean spirit controlling him, and he would head back into the house.

Then we could hear all the way back at home plate the sound of her speaking in tongues, then HIM speaking in tongues for a WHILE until finally everything calmed down.

Suffice it to say, it became harder and harder to find a volunteer to go get any future ball hit anywhere near that yard, except our first baseman, who I later learned had a Pentecostal background so he kinda-sorta was familiar, at least with the tongues...

But the thing was, the next time we hit the ball off of the man's roof, here he would come cursing again. And I take the space to tell his story here to say that he was not so different than a lot of us who wear our "make-up" to church or to town. 

We present an unattainable, unachievable Christianity to the world, NO, NOT just the world, but to the person sitting next to us on Sunday morning!

The well-known and respected theologian Thomas a Kempis, in the early 1400's wrote: "You are a man, not God. You are flesh, not an angel. How can you expect to remain always in the same state of virtue when the angels in Heaven and the first man in paradise failed to do so?"

This written by a monk, no less.

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.

But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 1 John 2:1-3