I wonder if Jesus feels the same way about our attitudes toward Him. How would our behavior change if He were to arrive? Perhaps we would sit up straighter, act more respectfully, speak more quietly, shove various magazines under the rug, change the channel on the t.v., and so on. Would we be frightened and tempted to flee? If we are happy and laughing and excited and joking and fascinated before Jesus walks in the room, and we shut down and clam up after He walks into the room, the nonverbal message is clear: Go away. (Of course none of us would SAY that, or even intentionally mean it, but how else can you interpret such behavior?) Even if we are grateful to the Lord for His blessings, many of us inadvertently project the attitude of, "I am more comfortable with You at a distance." When Jesus cast the legion of devils out of the man at Gadara, the entire village asked Jesus to go away. They preferred the company of a man possessed with devils to One who could heal him.
Little children don’t feel shame or embarrassment readily. They run into the living room without clothes, inform everyone about the condition of their toys, and excitedly share information about everything else going on inside them, from their emotions to their bowels. I wonder if this is part of the reason that Jesus preferred their company—they hid nothing from Him; they could just be themselves in His presence. Jesus shouted about this quality when He recognized it in an adult: "Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" (John 1:47). Is it that rare in adults? Do we usually lose our full compliment of openness after childhood ends?
We adults tend to hide our true selves behind a front. The Lord created Adam and Eve naked, but Satan tried to get them to hide from the Lord. This is an irony, since no one can hide anything from Him; He is omniscient. It is as though He is standing next to each one of us, watching our days unfold, second by second, hour by hour. "...when we undertake to cover our sins...the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man" (D&C 121:37). We even hide our sins from ourselves, sweeping them from our consciousness with raucous entertainment or anything else that can drown out the voice of the Spirit.
It is interesting that we run away from the Being who has our best interest at heart, and prefer the company of less benevolent people. We are frightened of the One who will save us. If He were to walk into the room with us, we would probably try to be perfect and dignified and respectable, to hide our flaws. But He knows them better than we do. It seems He would rather discuss those with us, to extricate them from us, rather than leave them festering in the dark. (Fungus and sin grow best in darkness.) If we come to Him, He will show us our weakness. It is difficult to discuss our flaws openly, but He gave them to us in the first place (see Ether 12:27). Toes that can be stubbed, brains that forget, organs gushing with heavy passions under which we stagger; He built everything. He sees and hears all our thoughts as though we were dictating them aloud, including all the anger, jealousy, rebellion, depression, and unrighteous desires. As President Eyring noted this General Conference, we can only hide the Lord from ourselves; we cannot hide ourselves from Him.
Jesus invited all sinners to come to Him, and He accepted their company on condition that they repented (“go and sin no more” to the woman taken in adultery; He also accepted the attention of the sinful woman who anointed His head and feet at dinner). But His most cutting condemnations were reserved for those whom He called “hypocrites,” literally “stage actors” in Greek. Isaiah foretold that Jesus would have “no beauty that we should desire him.” Externally, the Pharisees of His day were “whited sepulchers,” but internally they were “full of dead men’s bones.” They made an art of whitewashing their cracks and flaws. It is telling that not one man who brought the woman taken in adultery felt qualified to stone her after Jesus told them to do so if they had no sin. Jesus is completely qualified to condemn us for our sins because He is sinless, yet He is more patient and forgiving than anyone.
William Tyndale gives us Faith personified as a woman: “Faith, when she prayeth, setteth not her good deeds before her, saying, ‘Lord, for my good deeds do this or that;’ nor bargaineth with God, saying, ‘Lord, grant me this, or do this or that, and I will do this or that for thee;’...But she setteth her infirmities and her lack before her face, and God’s promises, saying, ‘Lord, for thy mercy and truth, which thou hast sworn, be merciful unto me, and pluck me out of this prison and out of this hell, and loose the bonds of Satan, and give me power to glorify thy name.’ Faith therefore justifieth in the heart, and before God; and the deeds justify outwardly before the world, that is, testify only before men, what we are inwardly before God.” I hope God laughs at our demanding petulance and willingness to bargain with Him, as though He did not already own the things we offer. I think the Lord wants us to come to him, privately, with our dirt showing (not to air our dirty laundry, but to come to Christ with it so He can clean us). No performance on our part can fool Him (the way we try to fool each other). We must be open, authentic, genuine, and sincere with the Lord.
Prayers offered in this blank and sincere way feel better, and I have discovered they are answered more readily. It is "counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such" (Moroni 7:9). On the other hand, Zenos says, "And thou didst hear me because of mine afflictions and my sincerity; and it is because of thy Son that thou hast been thus merciful unto me, therefore I will cry unto thee in all mine afflictions, for in thee is my joy; for thou hast turned thy judgments away from me, because of thy Son" (Alma 33:11).
My father once told me that God sees everything, all the horrible things that people are doing everywhere, and that He was certainly not surprised by anything I had ever done. Rather than thinking of getting perfect on our own, and then going to God, our repentance should involve Him intimately from the beginning. (We use the phrase "repentance process" as though all men everywhere had not been commanded to repent all the time, from the moment of accountability to death. There is no end to the process, unless we want to stop progressing.) We can discuss all the details with Him, and Jesus will succor us (literally "run to help" us) in our infirmities.
Those who come to Jesus, with great faith, great love for Him, great submission and humility before Him, and do the things He asks, will be blessed with a clean record in heaven, strength to do the impossible, and a clean heart filled with righteous desires on earth. Rather than hide God from ourselves with denial and pretense and tinsel cosmetics, let's come to Him as we are.
