“Vision and lies walk close with each other in Silicon Valley.”
It has been known as the place where you can ‘make it’ the place where your dreams and your wildest inventions can take shape and change the world. Young and old flock to the famous district in California carrying a brighter future on their minds and a desire to succeed in their hearts.
One of those people who wanted to make a difference and became for a while the first young female ‘billionaire’ was Elisabeth Holmes. The Stanford dropout whose fear of needles motivated her ‘invention’ to create a technology that used very little blood to perform many tests has been recently in the news. She has been called to testify among other things, of fakery. Her company was selling technology that did not do what was promised to do. She is not the only one. Apparently, it’s the culture in Silicon Valley. Inventors sell their dreams to investors as though they are in their last step ready for the market, rather than in reality being just a concept.
I can understand a little bit why inventors do that, although I don’t agree when that involves people’s health and wellbeing. The culture of ‘fake it until you make it sadly has seeped its way into the church.
There is a popular culture nowadays in our churches to hear sermons from the pulpit with the idea of declaring truths from the Bible even if we don’t ‘feel’ like they are true for us.
“Fake it until you make it” might have worked in Silicon Valley many times, but if we are unsure of our faith, that fakery will not work when we walk in the ‘Death Valleys’ of life.
Believers don’t have to do that. If we are sons and daughters of God, we have been adopted in his family by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, because of that, our faith is based on truth, not fake statements.
It’s true that our feelings perhaps might not grasp this truth straight away, still, our declaration of faith is based on that truth, not fakery.
Salvation, redemption, righteousness, freedom, and right standing with God are all the work of God through the Holy Spirit by the Son, not ours. Because of his work, we don’t have to fake it.
When we understand that, we have nothing to fear or fake, we stand on a rock-solid truth that makes us fearless and assured even if our feelings might not align right away. We are not faking anything, we are standing on that truth.
Fakery occurs when we are unsure and doubtful, truth, on the other hand, is based on assurance and evidence.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Hebrews 11:1 KJV
In the heavenly courts, that which will matter is the truth, only that will set us free. Fake it until you make it might work here for a while, but if it’s the truth that makes all the difference, why then, do we not start and live out the truth right now?