Get Your Pretense On!

84 • Get Your Pretense On!

grace, we have been set free. We do not need to be what we were any longer. With the indwelling Spirit of God, if we walk in the Spirit we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. Two distinct ways of living and responding are now available to a believer, and s/he must determine which way he or she will go. We can now choose not to agree with the lies about us, about who we are, and what we must necessarily become. Let no one fool you here: the Scriptures exhort us to lay aside the sins that limit, constrain, and spoil us – you don’t have to give in to them. You can resist them, and you can win: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, [2] looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. [3] Consider himwho endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. ~ Hebrews 12.1-3 The writer of Hebrews compares our Christian lives to a race in an arena, with the saints of the ages (those who have finished their race already) cheering us on to the finish. We can lay aside the weights, sins, and lies that hold us back, and learn a new way of running and living. Paul says that our old self, our pre Christian ways of understanding ourselves and our lives, has been corrupted through wrong desires, all of which are saturated in deceit (lies and falsehoods), v. 22b. The lives we lived before we knew Christ were not informed by the Story of God, or the reversal of God’s Kingdom, or the hope of the Church. We lived for empty stuff, wasted our lives and times on things that provided