You Smell Like a Hypocrite: Book idea pt.2

People will risk change when the environment that they are in becomes safe for them to fail. When environments become safe to screw up and then pick yourself up and start fresh again people will improve and change for the better.

In other areas we recognize this to be true and don't bat an eye about the truth of the previous statement because we inherently know that in order to get better we must push ourselves past where we are, causing us to fail, but in failing also learn.

Sports are a great example of this concept. If you are going to excel in a sport you practice by being pushed to failure. Each day your failure happens at a further point than the day before, and this is what we call progress. At first you make baby steps and what should look like a graceful athletic event looks strangely chaotic and awkard. Nothing like what you see the professionals doing on T.V. But over time as you stick with it and push yourself towards failure, each day challenging yourself to do one more repetition or take one more step, you progress.

What is weird is that what is so clear to us as progress in sports, we define as unacceptable in areas of personal and spiritual growth and maturity. Instead of recognizing that failure is an integral part of maturing and becoming more graceful and effortless in areas of personal and spiritual growth we have made it taboo. Beyond taboo, we have made it highly improbable that any one in their right mind would come to the church or for that matter most adults to share their personal moral failure. They sense our unspoken expectation that failure is not an option and that it will carry with it guilt, shame, and punitive action. Our inability to see these failures as an opportunity to shape our young men and women disables us from being a coach, guide, or mentor before they ever cross our doorstep.



It seems clear to me that if you are reading this, you care. You want to help, or maybe you want to get help. Either way what we can clearly see is that in order for people to risk change they must have others who they are moving towards that stand on the other side of chasm that they are trying to cross. People want to move towards others they can identify with, others who not only know theoretically what to do, but who also have been there themselves and have lived to tell the tell. When we as pastors, parents, or friends position ourselves as morally or spirtually above the mess we disarm ourselves from having a voice in the conversation that will define the direction of an individual.

Essentially the truth is this, that if we cannot recognize our own failures and brokeness we will not have a voice with the ones we seek to help. If we seek to impose punitive damage first and deal with this issue as a behaviour only we will miss the heart of the individual and lose our voice.

People can smell a hypocrite from a mile away. A hypocrite is not someone who makes mistakes. What makes us hypocrites is that we won't admit our own mistakes and in our own brokeness invite the Holy Spirit to come and deal with our own hearts. In our lack of humilty we forget to ask the Holy Spirit to begin to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and we begin to lean into our own understanding. We seek to fix and in fixing forget that we also are in need of healing. Perhaps our area of brokeness has not come in the form of a pornographic addiction, however, wheather or not the issue is pornagraphy or pride every sin leads back to a spiritual condition of the heart. These are the places which we must go in order for their to be healing and lasting change and we cannot effectively go there without the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the Greek, the word for the Holy Spirit is the word "Paraclete" and is defined as "the one who hears our cries." If we are to really help people who are dealing with pornography we must recognize that this battle is beyond physical habits and behaviour. It is cleary as much a spiritual battle as it is a physical or habitual cycle we must break. This is ultimately why, if we truly seek to help people in this area, we must leave the safe towers where we have been living. We must risk stepping out of the places where our own stuggles and past have been hidden, neatly tucked away in the grout of our towers and begin to ourselves cry out to God and ask him to fill our lives, and change our own hearts first. It is then and only then that we will be ready to lead someone out.


If this is interesting to you will you please give me some feed back so that I can get better as a writer or so that I can answer any questions you have...I plan on posting sections of what I am writing as I go, so feedback is welcome. Grammatical errors are to be expected so feedback on content is preferred.