I’ll be really honest with you, I can’t believe I’m looking at houses right now. Its a long story but after living in the house that we are currently renting, we’ve been told that the owner is coming back and we have to look for a new house. We were pretty shocked initially, mainly because we haven’t been living in this house for a full year yet, but we see God’s hand in it ultimately. It helps that we started looking at houses to buy! The kids have had a ton of fun picking out their rooms, checking out the backyard and rummaging through people’s stuff that currently occupy the house. Just being honest here. We don’t encourage it, it just happens. Sorry if you are reading this and we looked at your home.
As excited as we are about looking for a house to own, we are suffering from sticker shock a little bit. I am floored by what people think their houses should be valued at!!! I totally get it though. You buy a house at $160,000 and then you replace a roof, a water heater, put in new flooring and bingo, bango bongo…it should be worth at least $200,000 right??! Wrong actually. We all know the housing market isn’t what it once was. I feel like I need to have a heart to heart with some of these people. We have been surprised by what people think their house is worth versus what we see when we walk through the door. In their minds, what we are looking at has a higher value than what it actually does.
That’s humanity for you. We assign different values to things and that may or may not match up with reality. We often live our lives in a bubble where we make cartoon drawings of others, exaggerate their shortcomings as well as our righteousness. We are living in a $160,000 house but telling others that it is $200,000. In other words, we make our lives seem better than they actually are, while demonizing others. We are hypocrites! I think as believers in Jesus, we have to come to terms with our hypocrisy. Let’s face it, we are all hypocrites. We are all professing a lifestyle that we will never live up to. Should we shoot for it? Absolutely! Should we get as close to the life of Christ as we can? We better try!
One of the chief reasons people leave church is because of our hypocrisy. What if we just fessed up to it? What if we were okay with our hypocrisy? Don’t get me wrong, their is a dangerous type of hypocrisy that says, “I’m just keeping up appearances and have no intention of follow through on this Jesus thing.” That is clearly not okay. It is also not okay to point out the faults of others while being oblivious to your own. What I’m saying is that we need to be self aware.
What if we could say “I’m a hypocrite. I try to live like Jesus but I will never be perfect until I’m with him forever.” Let us be honest hypocrites and fail forward!
1 Timothy 1:15
“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
mlsnellings 