SOULED OUT YOUTH MINISTRY

I was in the store yesterday and noticed the Halloween costumes were out. There were so many different ones. The face paint, the wigs and who could forget the masks. What other time of year can you dress up as you favorite super hero, cartoon, animal, even monster without being looked at like you were out of your mind.

Masks are something we enjoy wearing on Halloween, at least at first. This is until they start to get hot. I don’t know about you but hiking door to door with a mask on is an uncomfortable adventure. Every year, we have trick or treaters who knock on the door with their mask in their hands. “Who are you dressed up as this year?” I ask them as they shuffle to put the mask up to their face so I can see they are spider man.

This is true in our own daily lives? We all wear masks. Not just one, but several masks. Don’t act like you don’t know what I am talking about. We all have them. There is the perfect child mask when you are out in public with your parents. The one that when you were a kid you knew better than to take off until you got home. How about the best employee mask that you wear when you go on a job interview and don’t take off until after your 90 day probationary period. Who can forget the perfect Christian mask, oh yeah, I said it! This is the mask that you only break out when you run into someone from church or on Sundays. We act like we don’t have masks…guess what? That’s a mask in itself!

Plato once said “Truth is removal of the veil.” To remove the masks we wear is to show us the truth. This is what the word of God does. This is why it is so hard to read. The word makes us look at our true selves. It is like looking into the mirror when you wake up in the morning and realizing you have a pimple. So quickly you want to break out the concealer and hide that from the world. The problem with that is we can’t conceal anything from God. God knows who we really are.

Jesus was the master at unmasking people. He did this to the Pharisees when he pinpointed their pride. My favorite example of this was when he pulled off Judas’s mask. He whispered to him “Friend do you betray me with a kiss?”

We hide not only from God but ourselves. We build up these images of ourselves and try to live up to them. Why? I believe it is like the old saying goes, the truth is hard to swallow. If we really take the masks off, look in the mirror, what will we see? Will we see pride, jealousy, anger, addiction, self hatred? What is it that we are masking? What do we not want God to see?

No matter what we try to hide, God always sees the really us. He knows us better than we do. We still see the false image we have built in our minds. He sees the truth. Can we put our egos aside and really look at who we are?

God knows honest hurts. This is why we have so many people who are addicts. Numbing their pain of the truth with alcohol, drugs, religion, food or whatever takes the pain away. Turning to anything but the place we need to look: into the eyes of Jesus.

Do you know that over 25% of the people who take an HIV test never come back to get the results. Why not? Traffic? Weather? No, I believe it is they don’t want to know. Knowing the truth would mean having to deal with it. No one wants to face that kind of truth. The truth isn’t easy and no one ever said it would be. Sooner or later, you have to face it.

Sooner or later we all will stand naked in front of God, so why not start now? If you want to know yourself, don’t look at yourself. Look at Jesus. He’ll show you the true condition of your soul and he’ll reveal the full extent of God’s love. The best way to get to know yourself is to get to know Him.

As you see the costumes of the upcoming Halloween season, let it be a reminder to take off your masks. Dig into the word and learn who we were designed to be.