Kenny has
always loved church, attending with his grandmother as a child and even going
on his own during his teenage years.
During college, his church attendance was sporadic, but now that he’s
out on his own he’s trying to find a church to really become a part of.
The churches
he’s tried so far, though, just won’t accept him. Really.
It’s all on them. He doesn’t care
about worship style or length of service or any of that. Couldn’t care less whether the demographic of
the congregation skews old, young, rich, poor, black, white or plaid. He’ll dress up if that’s what’s called for or
wear jeans and a T if that’s the style. He
just wants a congregation who will accept him for who he is.
But they won’t. As soon as they find out that Kenny is a liar,
they immediately start to trying to change him.
They quote Old Testament Scriptures at him like “Thou shalt not bear
false witness” even though they claim to be a New Testament church. They quote NT verses to him about
truthfulness and honesty, sometimes quite harshly. Some of them are really mean about it.
Kenny has
read many scholars, after all, who say that the New Testament has been
mistranslated for almost two thousand years and verses like Ephesians 4:25 don’t
actually mean that a person should never
lie but that they shouldn’t be vicious in their lies. And, as is obvious to anyone of a modern,
enlightened, mind, John 7:18 is saying that Jesus
never lies, not that any of us never do.
Of course, we all lie now and then, so it would be hypocritical to get
on to someone who lies more frequently.
Kenny has
also found scholars to tell him that John 8:44 was mistranslated in saying that
Satan is the father of liars and of lies, though he can’t remember what those
phrases actually mean in Greek. And so what if Titus 1:2 says God never lies,
it’s not like God is built in such a way to
lie. He doesn’t have the same urges or
needs as we do.
So it has
really galled Kenny when he’s attended church and been a part of ministry teams
and taught Sunday school—and even played on the softball team side-by-side with
the minister, for gosh sakes!—and then, as soon as he’s honest with them and
tells them he’s a liar, they want to change him. Some of them shout and call him names, which
certainly didn’t make him want to worship with people like that! But the worst ones are
those that try to pretend they “love him in the Lord” and just want to help him
overcome his sin. Bunch of hypocrites.
The thing
is, Kenny was born a liar. When it comes to telling the truth or telling a lie, Kenny has no more control over his actions than a male dog has around a female dog in heat. He just has to lie. He was created
that way and he is absolutely certain God wouldn’t create someone one way then
tell them to be something else. Being a
liar is who he is and no one has any right at all to change him.
No, the ones
who are even worse than that are the ones who have tried to reach out to him
from a sense of their own brokenness.
That one church, he remembers with a wry chuckle, seemed like everyone
in it was always telling him about the sins they were battling. Lust, idolatry, covetousness, anger, you name
it. And then they’d try to tell Kenny
that they would like to come alongside him in his journey and pray for the Holy
Spirit to help him overcome the sin in his life.
Those people
were the worst, because it was clear
to Kenny that—ever since that day in college when he admitted to himself that
he was a liar—such a peace had come over him that his status as a liar had to not
be a sin, but a gift from God. Why
couldn’t all these Christians see that?
They claimed to want a revelation from God, but here was someone giving
them a clear one and all they were doing was rebelling and clinging to their
old-fashioned notions of Scriptural revelation.
Kenny’s
thinking about heading into the city because he’s heard there’s a church there
made up almost entirely of liars. The
preacher and his wife are self-proclaimed liars and so are all the elders and
deacons. You can walk right in, they
say, and no one will think any the less of you if the way you signed in and the
name you put on your nametag don’t match.
They’ll even applaud you for your boldness.
“That’s the
way churches ought to be,” Kenny thinks to himself as he walks out of one more
failure of a local church. One more
place where the people think they’re sinners in need of grace instead of
realizing that God is nothing but love and doesn’t really care what you do so
long as your heart’s in the right place.
Kenny, who lies to everyone but himself, knows this is true because his
heart tells him so.
[P.S. My apologies to everyone I know named Kenny.]
