Defending Who You Are.

I am so excited for the upcoming Elephant Room 2 coming this January.

However, recently Mark Driscoll posted the full video of the conversation he had at the first Elephant Room with Perry Noble.

I noticed something in the video that was troubling.  Perry Noble defended his decision to have “Highway to Hell” performed at his Easter Service.

I will let this video show an issue with that.

Clearly,Perry Noble had been pulling a politician-level pander.  He told the crowd at his church who were there for his conference that he did indeed choose that song to anger people, while at the Elephant Room saying the decision to do it was directly NOT motivated by that.  It reminded me of Rafael Palmeiro  pointing his fingers at members of Congress emphatically denying he ever used steroids only to have it come out not long after that he did indeed use steroids at one point.

This has me wondering why it is so common for people to shy away from who they are and why they do things?  If you truly think you are right, why would you not defend that honestly?  Why would Perry defend/describe his decision one way at one event and the exact opposite way at another?

It’s easy for us and me to be angered by this, but really, how are we really that different?  How often do we tell simple stories differently to sound best to different kinds of people?  How often do we talk up something big only to shy away from it around others?

How often do we do this about our faith?  We have “courage” to be open about our faith in Christ at church, but many times as soon as we leave the doors its a whole other story to the outside world.  Defending is one thing, but we don’t even make known who we are in the first place!  Maybe this is because we are too scared to defend ourselves or don’t have real confidence in the object of our faith.  Or maybe we don’t actually have faith.

I don’t want to minimize the problem with Perry Noble here, but I think we are kidding ourselves if we think we are perfect compared to him.

“So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 10:32-33

And don’t get me started with this…