How Do You Find the Freedom to Live Into Who You Actually Are? Here is the Truth That Gives You That Freedom

Something I read a week or so ago has been haunting me.   The poet E.E. Cummings said it.  Cummings said.  “To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.”

Why does that haunt me? It haunts me because I can’t help wondering how well I’m winning that battle, how well anyone is winning it.  It can be hard simply to be yourself.  What do I mean?  I mean that instead of being real we put up a front.   We create an image.   It’s why a preacher I admire calls Facebook, Fakebook.    You go out with your family to the beach.   On the way you have an argument with your spouse on where to park, and then your kids get into a fight.   By the end of the day, you feel miserable, sun-burned and cranky, but what do you do?  You put everyone together for a smiling family selfie and post it on Facebook with the tagline – awesome family day at the beach!  

Too often people are present to each other in superficial ways.  People have become more interested in ‘connection’ rather than communion.”   But communion is what everyone deeply needs.  You and I need places, relationships where you don’t have to act like you’re happy when you’re sad or cover up your anger or your fear. You need relationships where you can live out the truth of who you actually are, even when that truth isn’t so pretty.   

But instead if you are like most, you hold back from revealing that truth.  You cover up.  You hide behind a smiling face.   But behind that smile you aren’t finding freedom but the opposite.   How do you come out of hiding?  How do you find the freedom to be nobody but who you actually are?   In these words, Jesus shows the way.  Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to say. 

John 8:31-36

You can go through life, and never be who you actually are.   Instead you hide that truth.  You cover it up.   And that hiding and covering binds you.   It even imprisons you.  And it can be so hard to break free.    So how do you find the freedom?   You find freedom by realizing the truth, the truth about you and God.   But before that freedom comes, you will need to face the hard truth of just how bound up you are.  

The famous preacher, Bill Coffin put it well.   He said.  Honesty does not come painlessly; “The truth will make you free.” (Jesus), but first it makes you miserable!   What did he mean?  He meant that a lot of people like to think they are already free or that freedom will come if they just break free of whatever master in their life is holding them back.   But here’s the truth.   Freedom is never about having no master.  Freedom is instead about having the right one.  You see, people can think they are free, when they are not at all.  Why?  

Everyone, whether they are conscious of it or not, is living life with a certain goal in mind.  I’m not talking about goals like getting a better job or losing 20 pounds.  I am talking about a deep, overriding desire that drives your life, whether you realize it or not.    Jesus is telling you that this desire that drives you actually owns you.  It is your master.   

For example you may make the ultimate value of your life to be successful in your career or your marriage or with your family.   You may be unusually focused on gaining the approval of some person or persons or avoiding their disapproval.  Everyone has a desire like this.  Heck, even if you say, that is definitely not me.   I cherish my independence.  I will never let anything control me.  You don’t get it either!  Your desire to not let anything control you actually does control you.  And that desire affects your relationships; your work; everything.   These desires can be and often are good.  But when they become ultimate desires, they enslave you.  Why?  They drive you.  And as they drive you, you live with the underlying fear that if you don’t fulfill this desire, then somehow you will be worthless, that your life will have failed at some deep level. 

These desires can even be religious ones.  In fact, Jesus is talking here to religious people who wanted to follow him.   But Jesus told them that they had a wrong desire that drove them too, that literally made them slaves.   He said.   Look, in a Roman household, a slave and a son can seem in many ways the same.  They live in the same house.  The head of the house provides for them both.   They also work for and obey him.    But they are very different.   If the slave messes up, his status can change like that.  His status depends on what he does, and how well he does it.  And that makes it very uncertain.  But the status of the son doesn’t change.   Whatever mistakes he makes he will always be a son, no matter what. 

Jesus is saying to these folks.   Yes, you follow God.  You even have a relationship with God, but your God actually doesn’t exist.  Your God only accepts you if you’ve done what He expects.   And if you don’t, then you’re cast out so that the desire that drives you is to get this God to accept you. And you live every day with the fear that maybe God doesn’t.   And that binds you up just as much as anyone driven by a desire for approval or success or money or whatever.    That’s how people can grow up in a religious environment, even a Christian one, and instead of finding freedom get guilt and anxiety.   They never experienced the truth that Jesus is talking about here, the only truth that can actually set you free. 

What is that truth?   The master you need is not this false God who comes to you as a boss that will boot you out of the house if you mess up.   No, the God that actually exists comes to you as a father, who loves you period; no matter how badly you mess up.   And the more you grasp that truth, the freer you become.  Why?  You know who you are, a beloved child, one whose place in her parents’ heart is always secure.

How do you know that you have experienced this truth?  You will know it by the degree to which you live your life in hiding.   Every human being has a tendency to hide.  They live with this sense that at some level they’re faking it.  And if others knew the truth about them, oh man, if they only knew, it would blow them away.   But the more you hide, the more alone you become, the more bound up inside.      But the more you realize who God is, who you are, that truth gives you the courage to live into who you truly are, to come out of hiding, to live with an unveiled face.  What do I mean by an unveiled face?  

St. Paul in a letter he wrote to the church in Corinth talked about how when Moses came off the mountain after talking with God, his face shone with such radiance that he had to put on a veil because his face blinded the people.  That’s a pretty impressive image for people to have of you, Moses, the shining one.  But Moses had a problem.  The radiance went away.  But he still wore the veil.   He didn’t want anybody to know.   And what Moses did, every human being does in their own way. 

People put on veils to hide their own inadequacies, their fading radiance.  So your veil might be superficial conversation or humor, and you use it to mask your pain or your hurt or your insecurity.  Or maybe you hide behind your intelligence or your busyness or your phone.  And yes, you can hide yourself behind your religiosity, quoting Bible verses or mouthing religious phrases.  But none of these are real. They are not you.   They are veils you put on to hide behind.  But you don’t have to carry them.  The more you know the truth of who you are, the more you find the freedom to take the veil off.    And who are you?  You are a beloved child of your heavenly Father, and as you realize that then the more you can live in the freedom of that blessed child that you are.   

After all, children haven’t learned to manage their faces, to hide behind them.  I see that with my own son.  When he is not happy, his face tells you.  And when he is full of joy, his face tells you that to.  But we get older, and we learn to manage our faces.  We look confident, when we’re scared, happy, when we’re sad, holy when our hearts are crazy with temptation.  But God didn’t make you that way.   And God doesn’t want you to stay that way.   God wants you to know the truth that will set your free, that will free you to leave the veil behind.  Why?   Because you know at the deepest part of who you are that you are loved and accepted just as you are.  

God didn’t create you to hide,  God came in Jesus to invite you out of hiding, to take the veil off your faces.  In Jesus, you see the unveiled face of a God who went through infinite, incomprehensible suffering just to bring you home, to open you to the truth of who you are.   Jesus invites you to taste and see this God who loves you like that.   So come and taste and see and know the truth of who you are, of who God is, the truth that will set you free.   For if the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.