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Totally Authentic - Week Three

April 01, 2025 0 0

 

What is integrity anyway?

 

Often tied up with our feelings about authenticity is how we understand integrity. Sometimes we use authenticity as a shortcut to integrity. Living with integrity is consistently doing the right thing, the selfless thing, the fair thing, the just thing, the merciful thing. Which is hard work! It’s easier to pose at authenticity: “I’m just an everyday guy”, “I’m just like one of you”, “I just say it like I see it”, “I call a spade a spade”, “I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking.” But authenticity and integrity are not the same thing. You can, after all, be an authentic jerk! All people of integrity are authentic — true to themselves and their principles — but not all authentic people (or people who pose as genuine, unvarnished, authentic people) have integrity. The difference is wisdom.

 

SEEDS TO SOW: What does someone of integrity sound like in conversation?

 

Read Romans 5: 1-5

Character produces hope.

The authentic hope that Paul writes about here does not come from our success and achievements. It doesn’t come from pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, overcoming the odds, climbing to the top with grit and determination… it comes from the Holy Spirit! It comes from the fact that as we cling on to God through it all, we discover God is clinging on to us too. It is through God that we persevere, endure and develop character.

Most of the things the world puts its hope in start to fall apart when the going gets tough. It’s easy to take hope in friends, family, a job, a community, when things are going smoothly, but when those things start to fracture, break, or disappear, our hopes can crumble.

Why is hope in Christ different? Why does it often get stronger when other things are falling apart rather than weaker?

 

Read James 1: 22-27

Forgetting our own reflection.

It is striking that James uses a visual metaphor of a mirror to teach us about listening to God. In the same way that looking in the mirror gives us the chance to see ourselves — listening to God’s word is also an opportunity for self reflection ‘to see ourselves in the mirror’ as it were, to see who God reflects back to us. When we listen to God’s word of love we are reminded that we are beloved children of God — and so is everyone else and that should affect how we treat ourselves and others. But unlike our own reflection, we quickly forget that image — it can go in one ear and out the other.

Discuss as a group what you make of James’s mirror metaphor, what intrigues you, inspires you, or challenges you about it?

 

Read Philippians 2: 14-18

Ready to shine like stars?

Stars shine all the brighter in the darkness of night! In a time when the news cycle is full of inauthenticity and dubious claims we can shine in our authenticity as God’s children. But alas, our brightness can get dulled by acrimony and infighting. Arguments over who is the most authentic between churches often come across as pettiness rather than integrity to the wider world.

Discuss what we can do to shine together as a church across congregations and denominations.