There is all the difference in the world between playing a role and being a truth.
There is a popular fable that confirms this. A motherless tiger cub who was adopted by goats and raised by them to eat grass and bleat as they did. It wasn’t long before the tiger cub came to think of himself as a goat. But one day a magnificent king tiger came along and asked the cub what he meant by all this masquerade. All the cub could do in response was to eat nervously and nibble on the grass. So the king tiger carried the cub over to a pool where he forced him to look at their two reflections side by side. Then he gave him a piece of raw meat to eat. At first the cub recoiled from the strange taste, but he ate more, and as he ate more his blood warmed and the truth dawned. Lashing his tail and digging his claw into the earth, the young tiger raised his head with great dignity and let out a huge roar. He was not a goat; he was a tiger.
That’s what God does for us. He tells us we don’t have to nibble at the grass like the goats. We were created by God, and more, we were created in God’s image. There’s something great and grand about each of us, no matter who we are.
There is all the difference in the world between playing a role and being a truth.
Paul spoke to this struggle as he wrote to the Romans, Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold, but allow God to remold your minds from within (Rom. 12:2 Phillips). There is not a more common struggle… the struggle to resist the pressures to conform that come from every corner. The bottom line is whether we are going to play a role or be a truth?
Are we going to be conformed to the world, or allow God to transform us? The Greek word Paul used which we translate conformed comes from the Greek word, schema. It’s almost untranslatable into English, but it means the outward form which varies from year to year, even from day to day. The Greek word Paul uses for transformed is morph and it means the essential unchanging shape or element of anything. A man in dungarees has not the same schema as he does when he’s in coat and tie, but he has the same morph. His outward form changes, but inwardly, he’s the same person. Paul is admonishing us to resist the temptation to be a chameleon, which takes on the color of its surroundings.
Our acting should be grounded in, and determined by, our being. There is a sense in which we should never be playing a role. The power to be a truth, and to determine our life with integrity from day to day depend on our making the ultimate commitment to be and do what God wants us to be and do. As long as we’re wrapped in ourselves, concerned about what others think, we’re paralyzed. But once we give up playing roles, trying to make something of ourselves, once we find ourselves in commitment to God and to the person God means us to be, we are free. The world then cannot squeeze us into its mold.