Off Road Disciplines Series: Honesty and Self Awareness

“Truth cannot be ignored… we do it to our loss…

“Sacred realism” – fearlessly embracing the truth about the church, and about our lives, because of a confidence in a God that is bigger than those facts…

The truth is our friend, not our enemy… God has called us to recognize the times me live in… Our best effort can amount to very little if we fail to face reality…

Do we run and hid and play defense… or in love for God and our fellow humanity do we honestly seek God for how best to reach our context…

We need to know our people within Christ and those yet to come…

Our response to reality can be anger… Seen in two ways; 1. Inward, blame the messenger, 2. Outward, anger driving us to rush to defend our positions and turn our mission field (those whom God loves) into our enemy…

Bargaining is another response to reality; trying to change as little as possible but still trying to change enough to maybe address reality (half-measures)… Trying to remain comfortable and still change and be on mission cannot co-exist… tweaks can many times prevent the major changes that need to happen within our lives and ministries…

As we’re striving to be honest with ourselves, we need to deal radically with sin, instead of doing the bear minimum…

Acceptance is the right response to reality; Negative acceptance / facing facts that something we’re doing needs to stop… Positive acceptance / doing something new that may not look like anything we’ve done before… stopping and going…

Sometimes we have to say no to making it, in order to yes to thriving within the mission God’s called us to…

“Lord, I surrender my place at the center so that you can occupy it. Thank you for changing me so that my life and leadership in mission is worth following…”

This requires two things; an ability to recognize our own limitations, and our ability to depend on His limitless ability to transform and use us…

This world is in need of an honest and self-aware church…

That we can both hold truth and reality in one hand and in the other hand hold faith and transformation…

The truth allows culture to change us in our expression of truth without changing the core truths that really matter…”

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