Sermon - Becoming Your True Self - Ephesians 3:14–19

And...

while I was a student and for many years after, I had this recurring dream.

I had a dream that I was facing an exam in math or French that I was totally unprepared for.

Have any of you had this dream before? Some of you have.

And in the dream, I feel this wave of anxiety come over me as I'm afraid that my grades are gonna sink through the floor.

Now, as far as I know, I don't have that dream anymore, but I have another dream.

I have a dream that it's just a few moments before I'm supposed to speak somewhere, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm gonna say.

So I reach for a piece of paper, scratch out an outline, get up, and look down at my notes and, all I see are symbols like the number sign, an exclamation mark, number three, the greater than sign.

I have no idea what these symbols are supposed to trigger in my memory.

And then someone gets up, Christy gets up, walks out, Matt gets up, walks out, and soon the whole auditorium is empty.

Now, part of what these dreams are telling me is that at a subconscious level, I have a fear of not being enough, of being deficient in some way.

And the Bible and modern social science have a word for this, shame.

Shame, the fear of not being enough.

And we can experience shame when we don't do as well on an exam as we had hoped.

We can feel shame when we don't perform to the level of our hoped for expectation at work.

We can feel shame over our financial situation if it's bad.

We can feel shame over our financial situation if it's pretty good, but we're comparing it to someone who seems to have it even better than we do.

The philosopher Michael Ray has said that the primary sin of modern times is comparison.

We can feel shame over our bodies.

When I was in high school, I enjoyed playing basketball.

And sometimes during practice, our coach would divide us into, our team into two groups so that we could scrimmage against each other.

One of the groups would be shirts and the other would be skins.

And I would always pray, I wouldn't kneel and pray, but I would always pray that I would be part of the shirts team so that people wouldn't see how skinny I really was.

No, I'm skinny now.

I was even skinnier back then.