A comment I receive often from new people I meet is, “You’re so genuine.” It’s usually a compliment – they can’t quite believe that what they see is actually who I am. In today’s world, too many people are living behind masks of fake personalities, false fronts that make them look like more or less or at least different than they actually are.
It stems from insecurity: ‘If I act the way I actually am, I won’t be accepted.’ We’re so familiar with ourselves and so afraid of letting the real side of us be seen that we too often choose to put forth the personality we think people want to see rather than the person we actually are.
But there is power in genuineness. When we’re genuine, we give up our fear of others and what they think. We’re not trying to hide something, so we don’t have to spend our energy making sure we don’t let the false front fall down. Perhaps the greatest power of genuineness is that God can flow through us because we don’t have a perceived need to hold back what He is doing in us and through us for the sake of “fitting in” or “not offending anyone”.
One of the fruits of the Spirit is self-control. Genuineness doesn’t mean that you’re a loose cannon flying all over the place on whim and impulse (see Ephesians 4:14). It means that you are and can be free to be yourself in every situation – and to allow the people around you to be themselves without masks.
The wilderness is genuine. It is what it claims to be – the creation of God, marred by the fall of mankind. I’ve read many posts on the internet down the line of, “I can be who I am in the wilderness. It has never judged me for who I am or who I am not.” They feel the freedom to be genuine because they are in the middle of genuineness.
It’s not an uncommon ploy for leaders to take their followers out into the wilderness for the followers to “tell their secrets”, “have real conversations”, and so on. Again, they sense the very real nature of the wilderness, and it draws the truth from behind the masks of religion, societal expectations, and “if you knew, you wouldn’t like me.”
Be yourself – but even more, be who God sees you to be. He sees us through the Blood of Christ as a spotless bride (Ephesians 5:25-27, 2 Corinthians 11:2; Ephesians 2:13). That is genuinely who you are, who He is making you to be – and you’ll never be more yourself than how God sees you.
