I have continued to think about the things that inspire me and have been pondering ‘authenticity’ recently. What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be genuine, rather than counterfeit?
The first dictionary definition of ‘authentic’ surprised me: “conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance, or belief.” As someone who struggles with the unreliability of feelings on a daily basis and who is, therefore, striving to live by faith rather than by feelings, I liked how this definition was anchored in ‘fact’. Authentic living is rooted in reality, not fantasy.
The second definition is ‘not counterfeit or copied’. It’s very easy to ‘fake’ things at times, especially in Christian circles. We can ‘look the part’, but as in the old sketch, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than flapping your arms makes you an aeroplane. We need to learn to walk with God for ourselves, not copying other people or putting on a show. God sees the heart. Authentic living must, therefore, be genuine and must reach the parts that only God sees. What we are in private must match up with what we are in public. Authenticity and dissonance don’t go together. Dissonance (lack of agreement or consistency) is most often associated with musical sounds that just don’t ‘sound right’; usually intervals of the second and seventh, or diminished and augmented intervals, and all chords based on these intervals. In the same way that such sounds ‘hurt’ our ears, a life that is dissonant can’t please God, because there is a lack of agreement between who we say we are and how we really are.
Synonyms of ‘authentic’ are given as ‘bona fide, genuine, real, true, undoubted, unquestionable.’ All of those adjectives could be applied to God, and as always, He is our standard for authentic living. If we look at the life of Jesus, we see someone who lived to do His Father’s will. There was consistency in His lifestyle. He lived with people who knew Him: “…which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched”, as John says in 1 John 1, yet there was no sense of dissonance in His life. He is our great high priest, our example, our hope and the genuine article!
Does this mean, though, that to live authentically we always have to be on a high? That we always have to have the right answers or be living on the mountain top? I don’t think so. We are frail and fallible people, who wrestle with sin, who struggle with doubt. We are like the man who cried out to Jesus, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) I think the mark of authentic living is not a denial of doubt or fear or uncertainty, but a willingness to trust God through all of those things.