When my kids were little, whenever I made a grocery list, I would ask each of them what healthy snack they wanted me to buy for them. Almost always, Jakob asked for watermelon. I loved that he chose a fruit for his healthy snack, but there were two things that made his request difficult: 1) I am terribly, terribly allergic to watermelon, and 2) it is not always easy to tell if a watermelon is ripe. The part that you eat is on the inside, but if you buy a whole watermelon, you can only see the outside. This makes it challenging to know when a watermelon is ready to be harvested in the garden, too. A watermelon can be beautifully green and striped on the outside, the outer shell hard, and the inside still a pale pink or even white color that tastes more like the rind than the fruit itself. Have you ever cut into a watermelon like this and been sorely disappointed with what you found? It’s such a letdown! 

There are a few techniques you can use to choose the best watermelon from the store, like making sure the watermelon has a nice yellow spot on it somewhere. This is the “field spot” where the watermelon came into contact with the ground as it grew. A white spot indicates a watermelon that was picked a little earlier, while a yellow spot hints at a riper melon. You can knock on the watermelon, and if you hear a deep, hollow sound, chances are the melon will be nice and ripe when you cut into it. There are a few other techniques people use for choosing a watermelon at the store as well, but the only true way to know a watermelon is ready and good to eat is to cut it open and see. The inside doesn’t always match the outside.

Both of our Scripture passages for this morning talk about this disconnect from who we are on the inside and how we live on the outside, even if they do it in different ways. In the book of Romans, Paul writes about new life in Christ, and how when we become followers of Jesus, we die to our old habits, our old ways, our old manner of thinking, and we are raised to a new life that looks more and more like Jesus every day. Of course, we are imperfect people, and the process of becoming more like Christ isn’t a perfect one. We have times where we act more like our old, pre-Jesus selves, and times where we show forgiveness, or love, or kindness that could only have come from the help of the Holy Spirit. Paul doesn’t tell us we should expect perfection; instead, he calls us to remember whose we are. We aren’t people who have never met Christ and been changed by him, and so we ought to act like it. Our changed insides should lead to changed outsides–changed behavior.

In Matthew 10, Jesus gives a teaching that might seem disjointed at first. Why is he talking about disciples and teachers, sparrows, the hair on our heads, swords, and not loving our families more than God all in one teaching? What do all these things share in common? At the root of it, Jesus is talking about our identity. He is teaching his disciples, the crowd, and us what it means to find our innermost selves as children of God. We aren’t higher than God, but we are so loved that God knows every hair on our heads and cares for us even more than he does the sparrows. In a time when people were judged based on their family connections, Jesus teaches us that our connection to God is the most important connection we have. In God’s reign, in God’s kingdom, we aren’t judged by what our families have done. We are seen as children of God.

This morning, as we talk about the importance of bringing our inside and our outside into alignment, I want to focus on verses 26-28 of Jesus’ teaching here in Matthew: “So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…” For the disciples who were increasingly becoming aware that following Jesus came with risks, it must have been scary to hear Jesus say, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light.” Don’t hide it. Don’t hide who you are or what you know is true. Don’t be afraid to let what’s on the inside shine on the outside.

Danny Zacharias, Professor of New Testament Studies at Acadia Divinity College captures what Jesus’s words meant when he wrote, “Just as Jesus has faced opposition, his disciples will also. If the people of Jesus’s day could see his work and associate it with the work of the devil, we should not be surprised if similar things happen to us as followers today. Just prior to this verse, Jesus has made clear that allegiance to him will sometimes cause rifts even in families. Again, this is something that Jesus himself had experienced (Mark 3:21), with some of his family questioning his sanity during his ministry.” To be a faithful follower of Jesus, we can’t only take Jesus’s words into our hearts, we have to allow them to change the way we live our lives, even if the way we live might come with consequences.

A few years ago, I started to notice I felt angry a lot more often than I used to. I was worried about this, and so I asked a therapist. She told me that anger is an emotion that is supposed to make us pay attention. When we get angry, yes we are angry, but deeper down, we are angry because something important to us, a core value, something we hold dear, is threatened in some way. We become angry in order to protect what’s important to us, but in our anger, we may not even realize that’s what we are doing. She encouraged me to pause when I’m angry and ask myself, “What core value is being threatened right now?” Discovering what’s underneath the anger can help us take healthy steps forward, rather than lashing out and causing hurt. 

The truth was, it wasn’t that I hadn’t really ever felt angry before. I had just learned that women shouldn’t be angry. It was OK to be sad. It was OK to feel anxious or scared. But angry? That’s just not OK. And so, for me, anger showed up as anxiety. When I began to work through that anxiety, I started getting angry more often, and that was scary for me. I thought something was wrong with me, but actually…something was becoming right. I was learning that having a conviction on the inside, but hiding it or trying to show it only in ways that didn’t upset anyone else, was harming me. Because I wanted to be liked and to make sure no one was angry with me, I created a disconnect between my inside self and my outside self. Perhaps you don’t feel like you need to hide anger like I did for a long time, but maybe there’s something else that you hide – sadness, insecurity, doubt, or anxiety. And, friends, that is no way to live a meaningful and fruitful life. 

Living that way is a lot like a hotel my family and I stayed at last summer. All the pictures on the website were beautiful, but on the inside…the air conditioning didn’t work, the pool was broken, the toilet paper dispenser hadn’t even been installed, the floors were dirty, and the windows wouldn’t open. When our inside life and our outside life don’t match up, we miss out on the joy God has for us. When who we are inside and who we are outside aren’t the same, we miss out on the peace that comes from living wholeheartedly and consistently.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the way the adults in our lives shaped us. Sometimes we are shaped in helpful ways. Other times we are shaped in ways we have to unlearn as we get older. We have the opportunity as we grow to live in a way that shapes other people, too. In Isaiah 64:8, the prophet writes this: “We are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” We are clay in God’s hands, and God is shaping us into beautiful, new creations. Imagine if we resisted against the work of the potter? What would we become? Would we hold our shape? Would we buckle and cave in? How good would it be for us instead to embrace God’s creative shaping in our lives with our whole selves–our hearts, our minds, and our lives! Thankfully, even when we struggle to embrace who God is creating us to be, God patiently continues to work with us. And, eventually, maybe we learn to live with joy as the people God created us to be.

This week, I would invite you to reflect on this question: Is my inside life with God in alignment with the outside life I am living? Celebrate the places where alignment is happening! I’m certain you are experiencing this unity in at least one area of your life. If something is out of alignment, what is it, and what would it take to bring the truth of who you are in Christ into alignment with the way you are living in that area of life? What needs to change? Who can help you with it along the way–as a prayer partner or accountability partner? If you want some help to guide you as you consider your inner and outer lives, I would encourage you to consider these three lies about our identities author Henri Nouwen believed most people struggle with: I am what I have, I am what I do, I am what others say about me. Perhaps one of these lies is one you struggle with the most as you seek to bring your life into alignment. What might it look like instead to believe: “I am a child of God, not because of what I have, what I do, or what others say about me, but because of who God says I am.”?

May we find the courage to tell in the light what Jesus has taught us in the dark, to proclaim from the rooftops what God has whispered to us in our hearts, and to learn to embrace and love the people God created us to be. Thanks be to God for God’s amazing and steadfast love for each one of us. Amen.