Get Your Pretense On!

98 • Get Your Pretense On!

created in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. This step is the crowning end of our work of rejecting our former lives and reaffirming the new life that Christ won for us on the Cross. To forge a new identity demands, first, that we put off the old self, and then be renewed in the spirit of our minds. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we must put on (i.e., to clothe oneself with) the new self, our new identity in Christ. This may also be the most difficult for it will demand that we learn the art of pretense, of acting in a manner consistent with what the Word of God declares, in spite of how we may be feeling or how things appear. At the very core of the Christian life is the reality of faith, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). This establishes that our faith consists of two interrelated things. We have a sense of assurance, a deep sense of being certain about the things we are hoping for, and a conviction about the reality of things even though we cannot see them with our physical eyes. Because of God’s truth, we become assured of what we are hoping for, and though we cling to realities that may not be visible at the time, we still affirm them, appropriate them, cling to and celebrate them. Simply, we have confidence in what we take to be true because God said it is true, and so we act in a corresponding way , even if, at first glance, it does not appear to be true. We affirm with Paul that God is true, no matter how things look or what we feel: “By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written, ‘That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged’” (Rom. 3.4). This putting on the new self is not an act of make-believe or auto-suggestion. We literally put on the new self that God says we are, that God says he has given to us, that God says we were meant to be all along. This involves speaking and acting in ways consistent with what God has said about you : who you are, what