The Truest Thing About You

There are many true things about you. You may be a student. You may be a mom. Perhaps you love someone of the opposite sex or the same sex. Or maybe you make music or lattes. Life may be incredibly difficult, or you may feel like you’re living the dream. These things may be true—but are they the truest thing about you?

JESUS, THE TRUEST… FOOD?

Fried chicken is food… and so is a kale salad. But Jesus declared that He is the truest food. See, other things may have the appearance of being able to satisfy the deep needs of our bodies and even our souls, but Jesus declares that He is even truer food and drink.

So even among truths, there are true things and there are truer things.

Jesus wants to get to the truer things, the things so deeply true about you that they have the power to change everything else.

THE TRUEST THING ABOUT YOU

What if the truest thing about you can cause you to reimagine your entire life? Or what if it can drown out all the noise and speak the words that you’ve waited for your whole life?

Or what the Gospel demands we ask is this: what does God say is the truest thing about us?

We aren’t always comfortable asking that question, and sometimes we only pretend to ask it. We give an answer we think we ought to give, an answer that identifies us as one of the good kids or a good Christian or a good citizen. Those answers are too easy. They’re cheap. All our lives we’ve been trained to answer that question in particular ways for particular people.

HALF-TRUTHS

We define ourselves differently to different people. I’m a good worker, a good parent, I’m a failure, I’m beautiful, I’m hideous, I’m loved, I’m not.

And maybe you answer it differently when you’re by yourself, when you ask it of yourself. Dancing alone, driving alone, sitting at a cafe alone, tapping snooze on your alarm for the seventh time, the tenth time, because there isn’t one single reason you can come up with for getting out of bed on a sunny Saturday.

You answer it differently every time because you feel different every time you’re asked. A different person with every shifting truth.

Here’s the problem: You’re elevating things that are merely half-true, or true some days but not others—to the level of “truest.” I know you’re doing this—because I do it too. We all do. It’s the human condition. But what is the truest thing about you?

FINDING THE TRUTH

Be clear: many destructive things we believe are very much true! We do fail, we did lose the money, we aren’t as beautiful, we were abused.

The problem is that we have pushed many of these merely true things down to the most fundamental layer of who we are and in so doing have built our whole lives and identities on them.

These things can be true, but we need to discover that they are not, and never will be, the truest thing.

David Lomas is the Lead Pastor at Reality/SF and the author of the book The Truest Thing About You (David C. Cook). You can follow him on Twitter @davidlomas