To grow to maturity as a Christian one must master the art of pretending.
There are two ways to pretend in life
. The first is to hide what you really are in order to persuade others that your projected image is the real you. We rightly call this hypocrisy, and loathe it when we see it in others. That is not the kind of pretending I mean.
The second kind of pretending is to aspire to become something you are not in order to make that reality come true in your life at some future date. When children go into their parents’ closet and put on their clothes and slip their feet into oversized shoes, they are pretending to be like mommy or daddy whom they admire and wish someday to become like. When they use their imaginations to play at being firemen, or police officers, or princesses or nurses, they are aspiring to noble professions and the character qualities that go hand in hand with these professions. This kind of pretending we find attractive, and is the kind of pretending to which Christians are called in order to “grow up into Christ.”
The apostle Paul makes prominent use of the imagery of getting dressed in new clothing as a symbol of living as a disciple of Jesus. This entails a double action: putting off the old garments of our sinful nature, and putting on the new clothes of righteousness. He expresses this in numerous ways: “Put off the old self” (Eph. 4:22; Col. 3:9); “Put away falsehood” (Eph. 4:25); “Cast off the works of darkness” (Rom. 13:12); then “Put on the armor of light” and its parallel “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (in Rom. 13:12 and 13:14); “Put on the new self” (Eph. 4:24 and Col 3:10); and then, even more specifically, “Put on… compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience…. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony (Col. 3:12, 14).”
We are to envision what our thoughts, attitudes and actions would be like if our souls had been completely purged of envy, anger, lust, pride, sloth and all other evils, and we were clad instead with all the virtues of Jesus Christ. We are to aspire to this reality, not to pretend as hypocrites that we are “holier-than-thou”, but to yearn to become holier than we presently are, and one day to become fully like Christ.
Of course, our pretending in this fashion does not in itself change our nature from sinful to sinless. But it opens us more fully to the transformative work of the Holy Spirit, who does increasingly put to death our old natures and who nurtures our new life in Christ. Paul encourages us not to conform to the ways of this world, but to be transformed (note the passive voice of this verb, meaning that God is the primary actor and we are the ones acted upon) by the renewal of our minds (Rom. 12:2). God’s promise to us is that as we aspire to become like Jesus, the Holy Spirit will remold our spirits over time to match our yearnings. By His grace and power, we will become in fact what our hearts have cried out for.
Every moment of every day, we have the opportunity to pretend to be more than we presently are, and in the process discover how the Spirit of God fills in the gap, ridding us of a greedy impulse and replacing it with a generous act, quenching a lustful thought and leading us to honor a person’s dignity instead, draining us of bitter anger and granting us a settled peace in its place, and so on.
Pretending in this good sense is an act of faith. It is a declaration that God can do what we cannot – transform our fallen nature, make us into new persons free of evil and full of goodness. It is an affirmation of what Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come.” We don’t yet see this transformation in all its fullness; but we can imagine what that fullness will look like, and we can pretend, like children in their innocent games, to live in that fullness until the day when we are no longer pretending, but by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit we have become what we always longed to be, redeemed children of God who fully reflect the peerless glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. For now, let us practice clothing ourselves in Christ daily, until the day that He is fully formed in us (Gal. 4:19).
