True Authenticity

Sunday, July 12, 2026

The modern age loves to remind us to be true to ourselves, to be “authentic.”  This often ends up being said when people want to do or act outside of the norm.  “I know I should get a job, but I’m an artist, I must express myself,” for example.  I get it, if you are a person with an artistic bent, you should use that talent, but I don’t think it gives you a right to leech off the rest of us.  Like most things in life, we can take this authenticity thing too far.

Church going folk love to quote Psalm 139:143 in support of this sentiment:

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.

But when they do, this miss the context and the point of the whole package.  Note first, “I praise you because….”  How well made we are is not the point of that verse – praising God is.  We are but an example of God’s amazing nature…we are not the point.  In fact the entire Psalm is a ode to how marvelous God is.  We are missing the point when we take that verse out of context and try to make it about ourselves.

Secondly, since the verse is about God, not us, it ends:

See if there is any offensive way in me,
    and lead me in the way everlasting.

That is an invitation to allow God to examine us, find out what is wrong and show us how to fix it.  The Psalm admits that if we are not in line with God’s created order, then we violate the wonderfulness with which we are made.  True authenticity, it would seem, is not about being true to ourselves, but being true to God.

I have written several times in this past week about how we keep looking outside ourselves to find what is wrong.  We look to others, we look to our institutions, but we always end up disappointed.  That’s because we never look to God.  We never issue God the invitation that David issued Him at the end of that Psalm.

If you know the story of David, then you know that his life was extremely hard. He struggled, he fought, he screwed up over and over again, he never had it easy even though he was king.  And yet to this day, thousands of years later, he is consider Israel’s greatest ruler.  Why?  Because he always turned to God and offered that invitation.  He did not sit and say “God made me king – live with it.”  He struggled with life and with God to be the king God anointed and to be God’s man.

We should aspire to no less.