A Formula for Authenticity

How to Be Real in An Artificial World

From a young age (about my mid-teens), I have loved one word in particular. I kept coming back to it, as if it were a fortress, and held within its safe and strong walls an idea that was powerful enough to keep my life on course.

Authenticity.

Isn’t that interesting? My favorite word was not faith, or revelation, or redemption, all words pregnant with powerful meaning, but a little bit lofty. No, my favorite word was a concrete word, a word that was more like a wildflower than a far off star.

Authenticity was a flower in a garden of virtue still hanging on in the 21st century- a dangerous desert world of artificiality, pretense, and self-deception… the whole range of negative weeds that seem to grow in abundance in the winds of modernity. Authenticity meant the opposite. To me it meant truthfulness, depth, passion, wholeness… and in all of that… it brought great excitement. Why?

Because in that one word, if I could really embody it, there would be no tight boundaries, no “niches,” just room to be the full person that God made me.

But how does one actually BE authentic? What is the foundation of authenticity? If it means “being true,” then being true to what?

If it means being “real,” then being honest and real about what reality?

If authenticity means showing my full true personality, then where do I get that full personality? Who gives it to me? Who holds the key that unlocks the door to my original, untainted, pure character as God made it when He knit me in my mother’s womb?

This is where the culture has terribly lost its way.

We do not have the power to be authentic on our own. Jesus actually defines authenticity when the Jews are questioning him. His statement gives us a striking window into what it actually is. He says…

“The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.” (John 7:18)

Sisters. This is mind-blowing.

Authenticity is actually marked by glory.
Authenticity is not seeking your glory, but God’s. It’s not being true to your “self” but laying self down and being true to GOD.

When you seek your own glory as you communicate to the world, you begin to speak, teach, and share on a foundation of sand, straw, and mist. It may look beautiful, but it’s not substantial, it’s not real. It’s like a building a world on top of a vaporous and shifting cloud. It’s when we speak and act out of a genuine longing to glorify God that we mysteriously become strong, fierce, bright, defined, stand-out individuals. Whole individuals, unshaken by cultural winds and trends.

What a paradox!
Your only pathway to your true self is to never seek your own glory.

Jesus said that when we seek the glory of the Father, we become “a man of truth… in whom there is no falsehood.” As we copy Jesus, we become “women of truth,” rays of authentic light in a world that has become so big in its own eyes that it has nearly blocked the uncreated light of the Creator. It’s time to become porous again and let His light break through us, and bring out all of the divinely placed color and detail in us.

Can anyone enjoy the stellar beauty of an ornate gothic stained glass window without the sunlight, pure and warm and strong, shining through it? It’s impossible.

Follow Jesus’ pattern for authenticity. He was true to Himself when He was true to the Father. He did not speak on His own authority, and he did not seek His own glory, and yet no one was a more unique and distinct personality than He! C.S. Lewis, bitingly aware of the modern longing to be a unique character in a world of uniformity, encourages us that the only way to actually have a self is to lose yourself to God. In Mere Christianity he writes, “The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of “little Christs,” all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him.”

Your real self… waiting for you…in Him.

This means the next time you must make a reel, share an IG story, do a live video, or speak off the cuff, and long to be real, you know the secret key to achieving it every time. Close your eyes, bring your mind to a still, and burrow deep into the love you have for God. Set a very narrow target, a very particular goal:

Bring glory to the Father.

When we genuinely long to glorify the Father, we topple into being exactly who He made us. Everything lovely and special about us comes bursting forth into the light effortlessly. To give the world yourself, you must first give HIM yourself.

Oh, what this simple shift will do to the cracked, dry, artificial, landscape surrounding us!

Press on!
Love, Kel

~

P.S. This quote is gold too.

“Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most “natural” men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.” -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity