This past week, I heard two prominent pastors, both of whom have large audiences, declare their wretched, sinful nature over the airwaves. Nothing particular was revealed, just a general confession of miserable unworthiness. It's the "let's just admit we're screwed up and be honest about it" thinking.
I'm all for authenticity, but isn't being authentic admitting who you really are? Apparently, we don't know who we really have become in Christ. One of these church leaders said that his job was to "make Jesus look good and sometimes that means I need to honest about how bad I am." He followed that claim with the idea that we need to believe that God is sovereign and that we're "totally depraved." (Echoes of Jeremiah 17:9 --"The heart is deceitful above all things..." ) The problem with harkening back to a passage like that in Jeremiah, is that it expresses an Old Covenant reality, not a new one. Remember, there is a progression in Scripture for how God relates to his people.
We've been taught to read the entire Bible, including the Old Covenant, as if it is a current and enduring description of the human personality (including those who have trusted Christ). In some cases, it is an accurate and timeless description of the human condition. In some cases, it is no longer. Jeremiah 17:9 is a good example. The statement is true...of a heart that has not come under the transforming redemption of Jesus. Those who reject Christ are still under the ruined nature of a depraved heart. Those who have said 'yes' to Jesus are no longer under ruin. Their hearts have been restored through supernatural, invasive surgery---the giving of a new and radically pure heart for a corrupted, diseased heart. This is the promise of Ezekiel: 36:26: "I will give you a new heart and a new spirit..."
I like these two guys because they've dumped much of the religiosity of contemporary churchianity. It seems, though, that their self-disclosers, while sounding holy, are a gross misrepresentation of their actual identities, their new and renovated hearts.
We need a different version of 'authenticity' that both acknowledges our areas of brokenness and sin, while stubbornly rehearsing our new nature. Our natural inclinations as Christ-followers have now become those of Jesus, whether those inclinations are obscured and buried or not. Authenticity must now be about confessing a new self and indulging the deep desires of our new identities.