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The perfect family

Alan Stanley lectures in New Testament at BST
Alan Stanley lectures in New Testament at BST

When my wife and I started having kids I thought, ‘Right, I’ll only let them see the good side of me.’ Well, it hasn’t worked. I just can’t keep it up. They’re around me too much. Maybe if they only saw me once a week I could pull it off. But every day? Too hard.
Church though, well that’s a different story. Those people do only see me once a week, so keeping up the façade of being ‘a good Christian’ is a little easier. And don’t we all try and do that? Don’t we all wear a mask sometimes? We know we’re supposed to be ‘holy’ and ‘righteous’, and we don’t want to admit that that’s actually incredibly hard, so we glide on the all-too-common surface-friendliness that church can provide and refuse to let anyone see the real us.
But the thing is, church isn’t supposed to be that way. God portrays his people, the church, as a family. Through Christ we are brothers and sisters. Jesus was the one who started this analogy: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers” (Matt. 12:48-49). The New Testament writers followed suit. We are a ‘family of believers’ (Gal. 6:10; 1 Pet. 2:17), ‘God’s household’ (Eph. 2:19; 1 Tim. 3:15; Titus 1:7) and ‘God’s family’ (1 Thess. 4:10). And family, by its very nature, is messy. It’s messy because people are messy, sinful and broken, and when we pretend that we’re not we’re simply lying to one another.
Yet there are so many things we’re still too scared to talk about in church, and so many people who don’t feel free to be honest about their messy humanity. The teenage girl who’s had two abortions; the young couple who got married too early and are beginning to resent each other; the single woman in her 40s struggling with loneliness and lust; the recently-retired man going through an identity crisis without the status of his job. These things may make us feel uncomfortable, but we can’t escape it – we’re sitting right next to those people in church. In fact, we are those people!
Over my years of being a pastor I have spoken to many men who struggle with pornography and they in turn have told me of others who struggle. This confirms what the research tells us: way more people battle with pornography in churches than are letting on. Why? The answer’s obvious: they feel guilty and ashamed. They feel like they’ll be judged. Doesn’t that say something about how they see church? Clearly they’re not thinking of it as a family, as a place where they can bare their souls.
But it shouldn’t be this way. Coming together as God’s people should be a time where we can be encouraged, embraced, cared for and prayed for: it should be a place where we can take off our masks. Being with God’s people should be like finding an oasis in a desert. It should provide respite from the world. Of course it doesn’t relieve us of the need to seek forgiveness from God for our sins, but it should relieve us of the pressure of struggling with our sin alone. It should cause our souls to cry “Finally, a place where I can go and not feel second-class; finally, a people who will love me unconditionally; finally a people who I can trust; finally a community who will walk with me through my problems; finally, a FAMILY!”
Now I’m not suggesting we should stand up in front of the whole church and read a list of everything bad we’ve done during the week. But we’re called to be godly, and Psalm 32 tells us that the godly person is the one who confesses their sin (ESV). They don’t hide it. Sure, this means they confess their sin to God, but James 5:16 says, “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other.” We need to take off the nice Sunday masks and begin sharing the difficult, frightening and ugly bits of our lives.
Do you have any one in your church that you can lay your sins before and ask for prayer from? If not, try and find one, or two, or talk to your small group leader about how to better create an atmosphere where people feel comfortable opening up and asking for prayer. You don’t have to share everything with everybody all the time, but if you’re in a situation where you feel you can’t talk openly with anyone at your church, then something needs to change.
So come on people, let’s stop trying to be the perfect family and just be a real family. A messy family. A loving family. God’s family.
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