There’s one verse in the Bible that is particularly scary to me. It doesn’t have anything to do with demons, plagues, prophecies, Revelation, or God’s wrath. It’s worse. It’s found in Matthew 7, verses 21-23. Jesus says that not everyone that calls Him Lord is really in the Kingdom, even if they perform signs and wonders and do all kinds of cool things in Jesus’ name. The key is in the last verse where Jesus even goes so far as to call them evildoers and sends them away, saying, “I never knew you.”

That should strike fear into the heart of everyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus. If He doesn’t know you, you’re out—out of the Kingdom, and out of Heaven.

When David Kinnaman came out with his book “UN Christian”, it confirmed some things that I had been seeing for some time. It’s a book about how people outside the church (“outsiders”, as he calls them—a term I’ve adopted in many of my writings) see those inside the church, as revealed by nation-wide research conducted by the Barna Group. The one that jumped out at me and confirmed what I had been thinking was that 85% of people outside the church see people inside the church as hypocrites. To outsiders, we say one thing but do another. We’re fake.

Wait, who was Jesus talking to in Matthew 7? A bunch of “Christians” who did lots of things to make themselves appear like Christians, but really weren’t because they didn’t have a relationship with Jesus. They were faking it. In fact, Jesus gets really worked up over it when addressing the Pharisees (church people, again) in Matthew 23. He rebukes them for cleaning the outside of the cup (speaking metaphorically about themselves), but leaving the inside filthy. He calls them whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside, but dead on the inside.

Why do we do it? Why do we lie during the greeting time in church and pretend everything is great, or use some spiritualized language that only escapes our lips inside those walls? Why do we hide the difficulty in our marriage, the addiction to alcohol or pornography, the fact that we screamed at our kids on the way to church? The smile on our faces is not always real, yet we feel the need to project an image of having it all together, as if that is the measure of what it means to be Christian.

I know why I have done it: I’m a recovering perfectionist. Growing up, I learned that having the right answers was something that helped me make a name for myself. To be wrong meant to be mocked, so I worked hard to never be wrong. That included hiding all the crap I was ashamed of—the stuff that made me appear less than the perfect exterior I projected. It naturally translated into my church life, where value was placed on “having it together” spiritually, rather than on being real. I remember praying that we would, “leave our issues at the door and focus on Jesus.” Sounds super spiritual, until you read Matthew 23.

It didn’t help that any “sin issues” that were brought up were often dealt with harshly. I made me afraid to be real. It makes sense when you consider that the second most widely held belief outsiders have about Christians—87% of them, in fact—is that we’re judgmental. I was more afraid of what the church thought of me than what God thought. I hid my issues and repeated all the right answers because I was afraid of the judgement of other believers. The “appearance” of holiness kept the judgement at bay, but it also prevented me from being able to talk about my very real problems and get the help I needed.

One of the major consequences of my perfectionism is a condition called attachment disorder. In a nutshell, I didn’t learn to build deep relationships with others. When you don’t feel like you can talk about the ugly stuff, trust doesn’t exist. It’s impossible to build a meaningful, deep relationship without trust. Intimacy is replaced with anxiety, avoidance and fear. Sound familiar? How many anxiety drugs do we peddle now for panic attacks? How easy is it to avoid issues with other people when our primary source of interaction is social media?

True intimacy is found in being real and being loved and accepted in that realness. That’s why Jesus puts so much emphasis on the heart, and why he dismisses fake Christians and chastises fake church people. If we’re not being real with Him, which includes being real with his followers, then we’re not really in relationship with Him. Leaving our issues at the door doesn’t make us more spiritual, it makes us more fake, and that includes pastors and youth group leaders. If you appear to have it all together, you alienate those with issues who might need to relate to you. If you want to influence people, show them your issues—that you’re human—and they’ll flock to you as someone they can relate to.

We were built for relationship, with God and with each other. It’s the basis of our faith. God exists in three persons because God’s nature is love, and love exists only in relationship. The first Christians were not known for being right about scripture or having it all together. One church father, Tertullian, wrote a century after the New Testament that unbelievers would comment of Christians, “Behold how they love one another.” It’s what we all long for: to know and to be known.