The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self

by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.

Jesus is praying that you and I would live in a similar kind of relationship with God that he has as the revelation of true humanness in the image of God.

Union with God results in our being a person through whom God's presence touches the world with forgiving, cleansing, healing, liberating and transforming grace.

Such Christlikeness, however, is the consequence of a loving union with God.

The source of a loving union with God lies in God's unfath...

To be like Jesus, then, as it is portrayed in the New Testament, is a matter of both "being" and "doing." It is being in a relationship of loving union with God that manif...

He reveals there are two fundamental ways of being human in the world: trusting in our human resources and abilities or a radical trust in God. You cannot be grasped by or sustained in the deeper life in God-being like Jesus-until you are awakened at the deep levels of your being to this essential reality. You might describe these two ways of being in the world as the "false self" and the "true self."'

"Repentance is not being sorry for the things you have done, but being sorry you are the kind of person that does such things." With

God's purpose for us was not simply to forgive sins but to transform our false self-to cleanse all its unrighteousness, to make us righteous, to restore us to our true self in loving relationship with God and in being Christlike in the world.

I was a mud pie

with a thin layer of Christian frosting trying to pass myself off as an angel food cake, but the mud kept seeping through! I needed God to take that mu...

The temptation to take over God's role in our life is the essence of the false self. The false self is a self that in some way is playing god in its life and in its world.

You are created to experience your true life, your genuine identity, your deepest meaning, your fullest purpose, your ultimate value in an intimate, loving union with God at the core of your being.

God did not abandon Cain. Cain turned his back on God.

We orient our self at a distance from others. We position ourselves "over against" the created order.

This posture reduces others to objects to be manipulated for our purposes, whether those purposes be political, economic, social, cultural, religious, ethnic or whatever.

The ecology of this planet is being destroyed because we have treated it as an object for us to manipulate and abuse as we desire in order to...

Fear is the alternative to being a child of God, one whose spirit is in union with the Spirit of God.

This loss of ultimate reality is sharply manifest in our postmodern culture, where the only ultimate reality is that there is no ultimate reality.

our false self tries to compensate is to find our identity in performance. "I am what I do" is one of the primal...

God alone is capable of bearing the weight of our identity

the only way we can know the true

nature of our gender, sexuality and roles is by being in loving union with God a...

The false self is so subtle in the ways it sinks its roots into things other than God, especially when you are engaged in God's work.

To the extent our false self guides our life, we fear others.

A secondary aspect of our false self's fear is anger. When we find ourselves unable to maintain a satisfactory matrix of identity, meaning, value and purpose in a world that constantly threatens to deconstruct that matrix, our false self is frequently angry at anyone or anything perceived to be thwarting our agenda.

Indeed, our false self is a fearful self. Isn't it interesting in the biblical story that when persons encounter the presence of God, often the first words spoken to them are "Do not be afraid."' Fear seems to be the inherent state of the false self.

A corollary of our false self's fear is our protectiveness.

Our false self sinks many of the tendrils of our identity and value into possessions.

Our false self is a master manipulator, always seeking to leverage its world and all those in it in ways most advantageous to our own security, prestige and, especially, agenda.

When we operate as a false self we become destructive to ourselves, to others and to the world in which we live.

When we operate as a false self, the natural world becomes a commodity.

When we take the place of God at the center of our life and world, our false self always promotes us and our agenda above all others.

The best of our behaviors become stained with the need for approval; the ultimate goal of the action is not the purpose integral to the action itself but the promotion of our value.

A side effect of self-promotion is p...

Often our false self's primary purpose in life is the gratification of our desires.

Our false self almost always treats symptoms rather than addressing the cause because to address the cause calls into question the viability of our false self.

Finally, our false self is characterized by a need to categorize others in ways that always give us the advantage.

Paul's "flesh life" is the pervasively self-referenced life of the false self.

"Now the works of the flesh are obvious:

fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunken...

Our false self is a self that is playing god in our life.

These characteristics-fearful, protective, possessive, manipulative, destructive, self-promoting, indulgent, distinction-making-shape our perspectives, attitudes and behavior patterns.

None of the grounds we choose for rooting our identity are sufficient. None of them in and of themselves are necessarily bad, but they are not created to bear the weight of our being. When we seek to root our being in something other than God, we are a false self.

They were so busy being in the world for God that they failed to be in God for the world.

Oswald Chambers says it well: "Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self entirely into union with Himself."'