the heart.

So I babysat this past weekend. The kids were great. Very respectable, sacrificial, and for their ages, very honorable to one another. I already knew they were decent kids, but peering into their home lives exceeded my expectations.
When their parents returned home, I gave them the typical 'report'. I told them how impressed I was with their behavior toward me and especially one another. They responded with gratitude and proceeded to tell me, slightly sarcastically, that they always hear this exact 'report'.

The catch? They typically see the ugliness to their kids' behavior, missing the near perfection that I was able to witness. For me, a mere outsider, they wanted to earn, for lack of a better term, "brownie poinits", to get an A on that 'report'. They strived for their best behavior. They knew it was in them, so instead of giving into their sinful desires, they pushed through in order to make me proud. The behavior they 'privilege' their parents with is possible because they know they'll always be around; they aren't going anywehre; they'll love them regardless.

Don't we do this with Christ? With other people? We strive for those brownie points, we put on a show... for other people. We know God will always be there so our behavior toward him becomes cheap (what part of this is fearing God by the way?!).

Funny thing? God knows our hearts. He sees right through our show. He sees all of our ugliness despite our successful attempts at hiding it from other people.

The challenges arises when we truly examine our hearts. Being two-faced could be an easy interpretation of such examination. One way around people, another way around Christ, in our hearts. I think recognizing this is the first step. First of all, the craziness of God seeing through our 'show' is the fact that ALL of it is swept away, free from his thoughts. He lets it go. We need to let it go. This 'two-faced-ness' is able to be reversed. It means recognizing how ugly our heart really is and wanting to clean it up. It means allowing God to show you the full extent of your sin in order to really know what freedom is, what peace is. Then, before you know it, those brownie points, that grade, is genuine. It's a true reflection of the heart.