Authentic?

August 13th, 2016| Topic: RaMbLeS | 2

Sean Connery is best known for portraying 007, in seven James Bond movies. He has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globes, the Lifetime Acheivement Award from the American Film Institute, he’s been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, and was voted by People magazine as the Sexiest Man of the Century, when he was 69 years old! [There’s hope for us old people!]

Several years ago, when he was 62, before he retired at 76 (and he’s now 85), Connery was asked in an interview why he continued to act. He gave a surprising reply:

Because I get the opportunity to be somebody better and more interesting than I am.”

Many people feel like Connery. Their lives aren’t all that they could be. They aren’t as good as they should be. So they act out roles. Take on a persona. And be non-authentic.

And’s that bad, says the world. You gotta be authentic. “Be yourself,” they tell us.

Said Oprah Winfrey (jokingly) a few years ago:

I certainly had no idea that being your authentic self could get you as rich as I have become [net worth: over $3 billion]. If I’d known that, I’d have tried it a lot earlier.

Be yourself!

Good advice?

Declared Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania:

If I can be authentic for a moment: Nobody wants to see your true self. We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives, but that are better left unspoken.”

Grant reports how author A. J. Jacobs spent a few weeks being completely authentic, announcing to one and all his lusts, telling the brutal truth to his in-laws (“Your conversation is boring”), etc. Be yourself was his motto for a few extremely uncomfortable weeks.

We are authentically depraved creatures!

“There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands,
there is none who seeks for God. … There is none who does good, there is not even one.”
Romans 3:10–12

And so we, authentically depraved creatures, seek to be like the only perfect Man, our Lord Jesus Christ. That is God’s goal for us:

… to become conformed to the image of His Son.
Romans 8:29

We are called to learn and evolve, grow and be … Christlike.

According to Hermina Ibarra, professor of organizational behavior at Insead, a business school in France, we learn from others and our circumstances and “non-authentically” act like our models and exemplars, denying our own “authentic” impulses.

In other words, to learn and evolve, to grow and be, we need to shed our authentically depraved creaturliness, and adopt Christlikeness as taught in Scripture. No doubt, this adoption of something that is not part of our natural inclinations is non-authentic. But the goal is to let those adopted lifestyles and worldviews gradually become who we are, letting Christlikeness become authentic in us, as we learn, evolve, grow, and be.

Here’s Grant again:

Strive to be the people we claim to be. Rather than changing from the inside out, you bring the outside in.”

We’ve been created anew. And we bear the name of Christ.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature;
the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
2 Corinthians 5:17

Now we grow into Christlikeness, as we adopt new non-authentic Christian lifestyles and worldviews and let them become our own, as we are empowered by God. Then, Christlikeness becomes authentically us, oozing from every pore, coursing through every artery, jumping across every synapse.

Don’t just be yourself. Be Christlike! Then Christlikeness will become you—the authentic you.