In my earlier article, I stated that if we are to be a holy people as God intends for us, then we must take a long, hard look at the level of honesty in our lives. And why is that? Because holiness speaks of truth and righteousness. So we must begin by being honest with God.
Being honest is not performance based, i.e. striving and struggling to show that you are doing something about it. Rather, it is an issue of the heart and has everything to do with quality of character. We seem not to understand the difference between the two. Virtuous woman, it is not the feelings that are wrong, rather it is what you do with them!
To understand this, we need to look no further than David. David, a man of deep emotion, knew where to vent all his feelings—God! He held nothing back when he talked to Him. You do not have to go further in the book of Psalms to agree with me on this point. His rollercoaster of emotions is well articulated in the various chapters. The challenge we have, o virtuous woman, is that, unlike David, we find it difficult to acknowledge and express our emotions because often times we place value judgments on them.
Being honest with ourselves is not easy and one of the reasons for this has to do with our self-perception. Distorted self-esteem is endemic to life today no matter where you live. Someone once said that we live in a season when life is increasingly complex and the fragility of our precious souls is demonstrated by growing brokenness and complicated conflicts. Because the perspective from which we view ourselves is often tainted with the pain of trauma, insecurity and lack of true significance or value, it makes it difficult to be honest with ourselves. Let’s talk about this more next week.
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