Beth Moore - Undoing What Has You Undone

I dont know what your family was like. I dont know what youve come from. I probably come from something a lot like you do, and that is a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And a lot of those things balanced out. There was a lot of good... but sometimes the ugly is just so ugly. And if youll let me push a little bit further, its not only so ugly, but the ugly happened so early that your whole personality began to develop around all of that ugliness. Theres a lot of good going on, but it cant seem to undo the ugly.

Heres what I think. I think theres this thing that goes on among us a kind of big Christian bluff that everythings just fine, going well, and there are no real problems. But deep down we know theres a disconnect. And we know something has to change.

For many, many years of my young life the whole routine was that we went to church in a mess, in a frenzy of conflict, in all manner of chaos and all sorts of insecurity, and then when we got there we became totally different people when we walked in the door. We played church. We got back in the car and in a moment we switched back into those same people.

My freshman year of high school I lived directly across the street from our school. My front door faced the front door of the high school. I would literally open up the door, walk down the front steps to the sidewalk, walk straight across and up the stairs and into that school, and as I did it, I would become with every step a different person. And I always wondered to myself, If the person youre faking that you are is who you really wish you were, is it still hypocrisy? I know the answer. But there is the wish list: This is so who I wish I was.

What do you do with that? Ill tell you it is a train wreck.

In your life, are there places where, or people with whom, youre tempted to put on an act?

Undoing. You may have heard the word especially in the King James Version of Isaiah 6, where Isaiah looks upon the glory of the Lord and says, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the K ING , the Lord of hosts. Undone. Undone. Undone.

Its a word that means to feel cut off, to feel like something if not your very person has ceased, perished. Its a word that means to feel destroyed.

To feel destroyed. I love that wording. I think it gets to the meat of it. To feel cut down.

Saint Silvanus Methodist Church is cut down in such a way that people feel it may never recover.