Do you want to know what is easy?
Crafting an image when you only see me for 20 minutes on a Sunday morning.
Do you want to know what is hard?
Crafting, managing, and controlling that image when my family sees me up close all day. Keep covered the under-sanctified places of my heart and life when I spend forty hours with my coworkers. Guarding my words (and therefore my heart) when I am in conversation with those who know me well.
In Isaiah 6:8, the prophet says ‘Here I am! Send me.’
In Romans 12:1, we are exhorted ‘…by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’
In Hebrews 4:16 we are invited to ‘…with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.’
All of the disparate pieces of me are gathered up - the fragmented and the fake, the whole and the holy, the polished and the broken - to draw near in worship and obedience. Nothing needs to be kept at a distance, nothing must be hidden away or self-sanitized, but everything in me can together declare: “Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.” Psalm 86:11
As we increasingly rest in our identity in Christ, our grip on our image-crafting is safe to fall away. The gap between perception and reality can lessen, and we are indeed united to fear the LORD - rather than man.