You are not naked.

This is an excerpt from the book "Stuff Christians Like" by Jon Acuff. It's a great book; I highly recommend it! This is one of the more serious entries. Most of the other chapters are satirical, and have to do with dumb things that Christians do. Go read it :)


"Sometimes the cuts are real, like the day my five-year-old got a scrape on her face playing in the front yard. I rushed into the house and returned with a princess bandage. As I bent down to apply it to her forehead, her eyes filled up with tears and she shrank back from me.
'What's wrong?' I asked.
'I don't want to wear that Band-Aid,' she replied.
'Why? You have a cute, you need a Band-Aid,' I said.
'I'll look silly,' she answered..
Other than her sister and her mom, there was no one else in the yard. None of her friends were over, cars were not streaming past our house and watching us play, the world was pretty empty at that moment. But for the first time i can remember, she felt shame. She had discovered shame. Somewhere, somehow, this little five-year-old girl had learned to be afraid of looking silly. If I were smarter, if I had been better prepared for the transition from little toddler to little girl, I might have asked her this: 'Who told you that you were silly?' I didn't though. That question didn't bloom in my head until much later, and I didn't understand it until I saw God ask a similar question in Genesis 3:11. To me, this is one of the saddest and most profoundly beautiful verses in the entire Bible. Adam and Eve have fallen. The apple is a core. The snake has spoken. The dream appears crushed. As they hide from God under clothes they've hastily sewn together, he apppears and asks them a simple question:

'Who told you that you were naked?'

There is hurt in God's voice as he asks this question, but there is also a deep sadness, the sense of a father holding a daughter that has, for the first time ever, wrapped herself in shame.
Who told you that you were not enough?
Who told you that I didn't love you?
Who told you that there was something outside of me you needed?
Who told you that you were ugly?
Who told you that your dream was foolish?
Who told you that you'll never know love again?
Who told you that this was all there is?
Who told you that you were naked?

I don't know when you discovered shame. I don't know when you discovered that there were people who might think you are silly or dumb or not a good friend. I don't know what lies you've been told by other people or maybe even by yourself. But in response to what you are hearing from everyone else, God is still asking the same question, 'Who told you that you were naked?"
And he's still asking us that question because we are not.
In Christ we are not worthless.
In Christ we are not hopeless.
In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.
In Christ we are not naked.
In Isaiah 61:10 it says, 'For he has clothes me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.'"


I love that part of the book.
The world may try to tell you a thousand different things today. You might close this blog and hear a million declaratioins of what you are or who you'll always be, but know this.
You are not naked.