Is Your Faith Real, or Just a Facade?

To look at me, 

you'd hopefully never think me capable 

of the hardcore bad choices I have made in my life...

...the kind of bad choices that most have the common sense to avoid.  

Since coming from those places, I have often looked back and marveled at how, despite these wildly sinful choices, my faith and relationship with Christ had remained so strong and solid.  I didn't understand how it was that I could be so strong in this area of my life and yet make choices that were blatantly against Christ's teachings.

It is only now that I am able to understand:

It wasn't that my faith was so strong, 

it was that I had created a whole facade of deep faith 

in order to allow myself to continue doing the wrong things that I was doing.  

This "faith" was a shell I hid behind...my faith and long conversations with God back then were more about clearing my name.

I was fooling myself.  

I knew what faith should look like, and I modeled it well enough that I somehow had fooled my own self.

I'd played the role of faithfulness like a part in a play, but Christ was not center stage, and He most certainly was not the star of my show.

I'd painted a picture to hide behind, but I was not behind my faith.  

I needed a place to obscure my real self, because to see who I actually was would have meant that I needed to change, 

and I didn't want to change, really...

After all, back then, it was not Christ I was serving...

it was myself ...

...and it was Satan, though I hotly denied it!

I have a deep relief in knowing that the faiths were different between now and then, because I'd been a little nervous all along that I would somehow become that person once again.  I'm so grateful to God and His faithful mercies....so grateful for showing me the difference... so grateful for the relief He has provided my heart in this revelation, even though I don't deserve it and, quite frankly, never will.

It is ever important to live in genuine faith...

to roll up your sleeves and get behind it...to deeply live it....

to not allow yourself to live the smoke and mirrors life that I had lived for so long.  

If you are there now and are just starting to wake up to where you've allowed yourself to go, you know what I'm referring to.

Or perhaps you are in the place I once was, with a faith that seems so deeply intact but a lifestyle and consequent choices that can't help but make the abyss of your faith so blatantly obvious.

Open your eyes...

WAKE UP!!

There's no time for this...

Roll up your sleeves and dive back into the faith you've been telling yourself you've been living but deep in your heart, you've known...you've just known...that you have not.

Let the excuses you've strung yourself along with for so long fall by the wayside...you know, the ones that have brought you down a path you so urgently felt Him telling you not to take in the beginning of it all...If you sit still and listen, I bet you can still hear His voice calling you...if only but a whisper...

Wake up...wake up and turn around....

He is right there waiting to lead you back out.  

You don't belong down that dark and lonely road 

that you've tried to paint with flowers and sunshine any more than I did.  

Wake up and turn...it's time.