Are you really you?

The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. 1 Samuel 16:7

Jesus said, For out of the heart come evil thoughts – murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person… Matthew 15:19-20

Everything they [the teachers of the law and the Pharisees] do is done for people to see… Matthew 23:5

Many years ago I worked as a part-time hospital chaplain. This involved interacting with staff as well as patients, and one day I met a young man wheeling a trolley whose face seemed familiar, but which I couldn’t place. I said Hello anyway and apologised for not remembering who he was. “Oh, don’t worry about that!” he replied cheerfully, “I decided to change my image a bit”. Ah! As soon as he said that I understood my confusion – of course! he’d drastically altered his hair-style and various other things.

Thinking about it, I found myself pondering, “What a strange thing to do! Why would anybody feel the need to ‘change their image’! How much time, energy and even money might be wasted in changing one’s image? Why would anyone even feel the need to have an image, never mind change it?”

But then it struck me that in truth many if not all of us (certainly me!), tend to be more or less “image-conscious” – we want to feel confident that we come across to other people in a good way. What we are actually like takes second place to what we want people to think we are like.

The word of God through the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 16:7 puts the key point with crystal clarity: God is not interested in how we look outwardly, our “image”; but he is very interested in the condition of our hearts, what we are really like inside. Don’t worry, I didn’t launch into an impromptu sermon that day in the hospital corridor; but for those of us who claim to be followers of Christ, this surely is a truth which we need to frequently remind ourselves of.

I can think of various ways this simple saying, taken with proper seriousness, can help us to be better followers of Jesus, to be, in fact more like the human beings God wants us to be.

First, it is a safeguard against anxiety.

Many of our anxieties are just inevitable and, as I wrote in a recent blog, it is our responsibility to bring them under control with the help of the Holy Spirit. But how many are self-inflicted? How much anxiety do we load upon our own shoulders by worrying unnecessarily what other people think of us? How much energy, effort and time do we burn up struggling to “keep up with the Joneses”, bothering about our “image”.

I started to go grey in my early twenties. Various people were kind enough to recommend preparations which would keep the dreaded grey at bay; some did this as a friendly joke, others, I fear, more seriously. But such is my sometimes rebellious spirit that I had no difficulty batting that suggestion aside. (I claim no credit for that, of course: I wish I could say the same of other temptations to “go with the flow”.)

I hit upon what seemed to me a good, practical life-motto: Be like Christ -  and be yourself. As long as we get the order right there, that just about says it all, doesn’t it? What a weight of anxiety might be lifted if we learned to consistently snap our fingers at the world’s pressures!

Second, Samuel’s word is a safeguard against hypocrisy. 

Too much of a focus upon ourselves, then, can be a self-inflicted burden, a folly of our own making. But let’s crank it up a notch: it can also invite the sin of hypocrisy.

This word originally meant “play-acting”, pretending, putting on a show, and the link between it and “religion” is no accident. Jesus often used it to criticise the religious leaders of his day, not least in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and in Matthew 23.

Is there anything hostile unbelievers enjoy more than pointing out areas where we Christians display evidence of hypocrisy? Sometimes, of course, their criticisms are unjust; but, sadly, too often that isn’t the case. And we don’t need to be scribes and Pharisees to fall into it.

This week I’ve been following with interest the many comments in the media on the life of former American president Jimmy Carter. What’s been particularly noticeable is the way people – people of all faiths and no faith - have queued up to pay tribute to his humility, honesty and integrity. Some, also - though not many – have drawn attention to his “simple” and “devout” Christian faith. Oh yes, they have commented too perhaps on what they see as his failures politically; but this almost universal respect for him as a person is very striking.

No doubt Carter was far from perfect; he himself was the first to say so. But if “what you see is what you get” is a good definition of the non-hypocritical Christian, it certainly seems to have fitted him.

To sum up: there are two you’s and two me’s; the outer, public one, and the inner, secret one. The question is: Are they in alignment with one another? That is the key to Spirit-filled, Christlike holiness.

Dear Father, forgive please my often unthinking tendency to put on a show, to worry too much what other people may think of me, especially to hide corrupt thoughts and feelings under a veneer of goodness. Help me day by day not only to appear like Jesus, but truly to be like him. Amen.

For further reflection – Paul’s sobering lists in Galatians 5:19-26