I hate when people are insincere.

Sincerity isn’t the sort of thing that seems to be contagious. People rip off their employers–they’re poor stewards of the property of others unless there’s something in it for them. People who call themselves religious or Christian seem especially prone to public humiliation. When they are revealed to not be followers of Christ (in practice, this means they have broken some of the rules for living life that they have preached), people see that Jesus Christ is not a real person and that He does not grant all of his followers the power to resist temptation. This is true but it’s also a matter of perspective. I don’t think people have the right to judge others for failing to live up to their personal high standards if the people doing the judgment don’t have equally-high personal standards. The actions of a follower should have no bearing on the integrity of the leader, but in reality we don’t think that way. Maybe it’s impossible for us to separate the actions of followers from the will of the leader who is supposed to be responsible for all the actions of his followers.

I believe in the total sovereignty of God, so I believe that God reserves the right to tempt and withdraw temptation as he pleases. Who are we to say that we are free to make our own decisions? That’s arrogant. We are not truly “free” if we are constantly under attack by emotions and temptations that we can hardly control. We only have a degree of freedom. It’s not like we can fly or breathe water or anything. If emotions can do so much to affect our decisions, then who are we to say that we are independent entities like little gods, unaffected by anything, impartial arbiters of the truth at any given moment? Emotions could be sent by God. Why should people fall in love, or care more for a red candy than a green candy when they both taste the same? People can’t justify their desires with words, which means we can’t understand or communicate the meanings of things like that.

There has to be an intersection between the natural and supernatural when it comes to our minds and our thoughts and feelings. If there wasn’t then God wouldn’t be able to hear our thoughts or the prayers that we say without talking aloud.

Essentially, I think that what our emotional weakness accomplishes is to make us completely dependent on God’s mercy, and it forces us to pray to him. If we are not Christians, then we will become dependent on something other than God’s mercy. We will run to substitutes. Christians also run to substitutes. All Christians I’ve known including myself valued their time and comfort and future happiness (by an earthly standard) more than God’s happiness. It’s natural to think that way.

In ways we cannot understand, prayer actually affects what God allows to happen. It’s not that we control God or have actual supernatural power within ourselves, but that God allows us to influence his control over events through our faith (revealed in our prayers) that God controls events. The act of praying reveals our faith in God. Of course, I don’t live up to what I have just said here at all. Every prayer I pray is 99.99 doubt. I know it. I don’t feel worthy to have my prayers heard. Even when I do feel worthy I still pray out of desperation, out of having no other options. I also pray out of habit at certain times and not because I feel closer to God during those times. (Refer to Miracles by C.S. Lewis.)

I find it difficult to believe that God is who he says he is– a father who is capable of doing anything he wants for my good. Possibly this is due to my mental image of my earthly father. I treat prayer as too much of a ritual, as something I have to do because the Bible says to pray without ceasing. It’s not like the words I say have meaning other than the meaning in my head, and thankfully God can interpret the intended meaning so we don’t have to worry about misspeaking unless we’re with other people (and then we can have insincere prayers.)

When I pray it forces me to think of (reminds me of) a word and a concept called “God” but the God that I envision is usually not the God of the Bible. It is not a great true God, but a little god, a servant to me. It’s somebody who’s willing to listen to me no matter what I say, and I’m willing to abuse that privilege as long as I get what I want out of the deal–actions, results, stuff, whatever. The whole idea that being a Christian is a “relationship”, a “walk”, a “growing closer” to Christ, means that being a Christian is not a one-way deal. We don’t ask and receive, receive, receive. Jesus also asks, and what he asks for is absolutely insane. He asks to be followed, and then he asks us to give, give, give, which is paradoxical, because in order to give, there must be somebody who needs to receive. Bingo. That’s why I’m a Calvinist– it justifies the existence of evil by putting the blame for it on God. I like to think that God has a purpose for allowing some people to suffer and some people to not suffer.

Perhaps we don’t receive what we want because we don’t want what we’re supposed to want– in other words, we never gave Jesus what he wanted: ourselves. Too often in prayer I’m thinking mostly of what will benefit me. If Jesus was really important to us, if we knew that he could save our life, then we would be willing to do anything (kill, cheat, steal, insult, love) to get closer to him, because we will see that the only true joy is a gift that Jesus gives to those who are close to him. (People get involved in protesting against wars only when there is a risk that they will be drafted to fight them. Only when it becomes a personal problem do people truly feel what it is like to care about something, and then feel compelled to take action.)

We don’t give God our entire souls. We keep something back. We keep our souls for ourselves and we can’t help it. It’s as if God wants us to pray (ask him) to take from us what was his to take in the first place–our souls. It’s as if he wants our permission before performing the life-saving surgery that he was capable of doing at any time. I find it fascinating that God keeps the souls of the martyrs under his altar. It’s as if only those who are “slaughtered because of God’s word and the testimony they had” have truly given their entire selves up to God’s control. (Revelation 6:9)

People who say they can separate their public and private lives, or school and home life, or friends and family lives, are saying that they can do the impossible. Politicians who say that religious belief and private life and public action are each different sides of their life are insincere. Everything is inseparable. You can’t compartmentalize chunks of your life, hiding some things in closets and under beds while putting others on display in the family rooms and kitchens. The hidden areas will spill over into the light. The skeletons in the closet will come out. You can’t push some segments of society to the outside and expect them to stay there. You can’t hide homeless people by telling them to keep moving.

(Ever notice how you can’t see your own brain– the part of you that you assume is doing your thinking for you, the seat of your intelligence, the control center for your body?)

You can act 90% sincere and people can still detect that 10% of insincerity. To be completely sincere, you have to be transparent, but there are so many stupid reasons why this is not feasible in this world. Here’s an informal brainstorm that makes little sense.

1. Time. Learning about other people, listening to people explain themselves, listening to the perspectives of critics and observers–it all takes time. Lots of time. I think that God made people weak and capable of only loving one person at a time so that people would learn to be interdependent and also have to experience incredible amounts of pain and stress. You can’t love a big group (such as a nation) except in theory. “I love America” does not mean you love all the individuals in America. You love the idea that the group members are supposed to represent as individuals, but you know that in practice their lives fall short of the ideal American life (if there even is such a thing, but if there wasn’t then how would it be possible to “love America”?)

2. Greed and pride and envy and competition.

3. Emotions.

4. Ugliness. Nobody wants to be known as ugly. Is it insincere to want to look “good”? We wear clean clothes and not dirty clothes and that is a conscious decision that we hope will make us appear better to other people. Jesus was always wearing white clothing. He could have worn black, but he wore white. It’s an image thing. In Jesus’ case, at least his personality and attitude matched the image that his clothing portrayed. He slept well in the midst of a storm. Kings wear glory-inducing costumes and crowns that are more awesome than the person under it all.

5. Perception. If I think you are insincere even when you think you are being honest, then clearly one of us is wrong. If you really are honest, but other people always mistake you for acting insincere, then what in the world are you supposed to do? Start acting differently so they will think that you are sincere, even when acting differently makes you feel insincere? Gah. Who are ‘you’? The sum of what people think of you, or the sum of what you think that other people think of you, or the sum of what you think of yourself? Jesus tells us that we have planks in our eyes when we see splinters in the eyes of others. We can’t see into our own eyes so we need other people to tell us that we have splinters in our eyes. The splinters always turn out to be bigger than either we or the other people could have ever imagined.

To me, honesty is more important than Bible study. If you have Bible study with all the students hiding behind layers of pretense and everybody nodding along in agreement with the Word of God without wanting to understand what it means but only to get through the lesson or the class or the sermon, I can’t see how that doesn’t dishonor God. I’ve done that before.

Pretense can take many forms, not only the ones that people usually recognize. Pretense is formality and informality. Pretense is lots of small talk before getting down to business. Pretense is lots of business and little small talk. Pretense is clothing and speech patterns and terminology. Pretense is long prayers and short prayers, the singing of songs and the refraining from singing, the eating of food and the lack of food. Pretense is fellowship and the lack of fellowship. Pretense is handshakes and hugs and pats on the shoulder and smiles and grins and laughter both nervous and forced and enthusiastic. It’s something I have to live with, not something I can change or put an end to.

I think trust is far more beneficial than Bible study. Trust is the basis for love, isn’t it? The Bible study, the Sunday school class, the baseball game, the anything else is incidental as long as people are learning how to trust one another. This is why I hate the public schools that I attended. A lot of the procedures of school life unintentionally taught me that conformity to a group-determined standard would serve as a societal basis for trust, i.e. you can trust the one with a college degree more than the bum on the street, or the president more than the prostitute, or the owner of an Audi more than the owner of a Hyundai, or the one who smiles more than the one who does not smile. The Bible is full of surprising stories where the messed-up person is also more trustworthy and righteous than other people.

Speaking of which, you might as well kill yourself and consign yourself to hell than go before the Lord with a “sacrifice” and an “offering” of fellowship for him if you are not right with the people who you can see and who are right in front of your face. If you can’t take care of people who are real to you, you can’t take care of God who is not real to you. The Bible is full of admonitions to take care of widows and the orphans and the poor and not to forget them. Your sacrifice may take the form of time or money or labor, but it’s nothing but smoke to God if it’s not delivered from a heart that actually wants to get closer to God. In fact, doing a sacrifice although your mind is not prepared to offer it is sin because it leads people to think that it is okay to do sacrifices even though your mind is not prepared. People are watching you and they might follow in your footsteps. Now you’re responsible for a whole family line of the same mistake through multiple generations. Sacrifice all you want but if you didn’t actually mean it to improve your “fellowship with God”, it won’t help you. It may make you feel better for a while but just wait and the pain will come back with a vengeance. And even if you mean it in the right way, there’s no guarantee that God won’t give you what you don’t deserve. There’s a reason why Job cursed the day of his birth. It makes us angry when we realize that we were always powerless to protect the people who we loved.

We always were weak but we liked to think we were strong. That’s insincerity.