The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery (The Spiritual Journey, #2)

by David G. Benner

But there is no question that the journey of finding our truly authentic self in Christ and rooting our identity in this reality is dramatically different from the agenda of self-fulfillment promoted by pop psychology.

Still, Christian spirituality has a great deal to do with the self, not just with God. The goal of the spiritual journey is the transformation of self. As we shall see, this requires knowing both our self and God.

All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him.

Beneath the roles and masks lies a possibility of a self that is as unique as a snowflake. It is an originality that has existed since God first loved us into existence. Our true self-in-Christ is the only self that will support authenticity. It and it alone provides an identity that is eternal.

for if we find our true self we find God, and if we find God, we find our most authentic self.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ. But the uniqueness that comes from being our true self is not a uniqueness of our own making. Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.

The desire for uniqueness is a spiritual desire. So too is the longing to be authentic. These are not simply psychological longings, irrelevant to the spiritual journey. Both are the response of spirit to Spirit—the Holy Spirit calling us home to our place and identity in God.

Augustine’s prayer was “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”

We have focused on knowing God and tended to ignore knowing ourselves. The consequences have often been grievous—marriages betrayed, families destroyed, ministries shipwrecked and endless numbers of people damaged.

Often times it’s because we are afraid of what we may see. Or we think it doesn’t matter if we know the Lord. But Psalm 139:23-24 David is asking God to search him and know his heart and his anxious thoughts. Point out anything that offends Him. In other words, show me me! Awaken me to myself Lord. Show me anything about me that offends you. So when I see it then you can lead me in the path of everlasting life. I have to see my ways!

Leaving the self out of Christian spirituality results in a spirituality that is not well grounded in experience. It is, therefore, not well grounded in reality.

Leaving the self out of the Christian life totally eliminates the actual experience of the day to day walk with the Spirit. We aren’t spiritual beings floating on this earth, above sin or reproach. We are actual human beings existing in bodies in a fallen world.

Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality.

We want to appear religious for religion’s sake. But appearance is not reality.

The self this pastor showed to the world was a public self he had crafted with great care—a false self of his own creation. Between this public self and his true experience lay an enormous chasm. Both that chasm and his inner experience lay largely outside his awareness.

What false self have we created? And why? When did the lines start to blur? And how much longer are we going to keep up the facade?

Suddenly the gap between his inner reality and external appearance was exposed. Things that he did not know or accept about himself welled up within him and shattered the illusion his life represented.

As these things became public, the lie that was his life imploded. It was a lie he had lived before his family, closest friends, congregation, God and himself. It was a lie that grew from the soil of self-ignorance.

Self-ignorance is a breeding ground for false living. We don’t live authentically because we don’t know how to exist as ourselves in the world.

He reminds us of Jesus’ teaching about the dangers of the blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:14)—both easily falling into a pit of pain and despair.

Whew! This is convicting! We can’t be blinded ourselves trying to lead folks!

transformational knowing.

Self-knowledge that is pursued apart from knowing our identity in relationship to God easily leads to self-inflation.

Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation.

And let God reveal to us who we are. Let Him awaken me. We don’t awake on our own.

Having information about God is no more transformational than having information about love. Theories and ideas about God can sit in sturdy storage canisters in our mind and do absolutely no good.

Living the lie of his pretend self, he had always taken safe, inconsequential sins to God for forgiveness, never daring to expose the reality of his inner world to God. To do so would have required that he face this reality himself. That he had never been prepared to do.

To truly know love, we must receive it in an undefended state—in the vulnerability of a “just as I am” encounter.

It wasn’t so much that he told lies as that he lived them. This is the tragedy of the false self.

Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about. And it is always relational.

It requires taking a deeper look inside, to see through all the cracks and broken pieces and still find the beauty within.

Failing to know God, they will be unable to know themselves, as God is the only context in which their being makes sense.

God is the only One that can make sense of His creation as He is our Creator!

Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God.

These levels of knowing of self awaited deeper knowing of God.

Peter could not truly know Jesus apart from knowing himself in relation to Jesus. He did not know himself until Jesus showed him who he was. But in learning about himself, he also came to truly know Jesus.

What have you learned about yourself as a result of your experience with God? And what do you know about God as a result of genuine encounter with your self?

It is quite astounding that God wants to be known by human beings. But nothing gives God more pleasure (Hosea 6:6). Revelation is fundamental to the Divine character. God longs to disclose to us.

God’s intention is that we know Divine love by experiencing it. But even when our Divine Lover seems distant, we can hold confident to the hope of the steadfast nature of God’s love because of the testimony of Scriptures and the witness of others.

The Christian God is known only in devotion, not objective detachment. This is why Paul’s prayer is that we may know the love of Christ and so be filled with the utter fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19). This is transformational knowing.

To know Jesus, therefore, is to know God (John 14:9). Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15 nrsv). Thus he is the filter through which we need to pass all our ideas about God as we seek to move from knowing about God to meeting God personally in Jesus.

This is a tragic confusion of an introduction and a relationship. A first encounter is just that—a first encounter. What God longs for us to experience is intimate knowing that comes by means of an ongoing relationship.

Yeah he needs to be in relationship with Jesus. Being introduced to Him is one thing, knowing about Him is another. But being in Him, seated within Him, never apart from Him is next level.

After decades of Bible reading, I realized that my relationship with God was based more on what I believed than on what I experienced.

What God wants is simply our presence, even if it feels like a waste of potentially productive time. That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other. Simply being together is enough without expecting to “get something” from the interaction. It should be no different with God.

Meditation ought to be a part of the prayer life of every Christian who seriously seeks to genuinely know God.

God gave us Jesus as the Divine Image so that we could gaze upon him and thereby come to know God. This is why Gospel meditation holds such transformational power.

“If God has come in the flesh, and if God keeps coming to us in our fleshly existence, then all of life is shot through with meaning. Earth is crammed with heaven, and heaven (when we finally get there) will be crammed with earth. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Nothing secular. Nothing absurd. . . . All are grist for the mill of a down-to-earth spirituality.”7

All of life has meaning. Nothing will be wasted.

Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.

Richard Rohr reminds us that “we cannot attain the presence of God. We’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”9 This is the core of the spiritual journey—learning to discern the presence of God, to see what really is. But nothing is more dangerous than presuming that we already see when we do not.

The goal of a prayerful review of recent life experiences is not self-analysis. The point is not to peel back the layers of the onion and find some problem or meaning.

In general, “what” questions (such as, What was I feeling? What disturbed me about that comment? What exactly made me anxious?) are better than “why” questions (Why did I feel threatened? Why did that bother me?). And avoid making demands of yourself or God. Just accept whatever comes from each experience, each day.

Sometimes we just need to sit with identifying the “what” rather than the “why.” To often we try to analyze before we have an accurate understanding of how we feel. Get in tune with the feeling first and how it feels in your body. Where is it traveling to? Where does it start? Where did it stop?

Although we speak of certain people as being self-made, no one is truly their own creation. Personhood is not an accomplishment; it is a gift.

our true self—the self we are becoming in God—is something we receive from God. Any other identity is of our own making and is an illusion.

Knowing ourselves must therefore begin by knowing the self that is known by God. If God does not know us, we do not exist. And as noted by Merton (with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek), “t...

Genuine self-knowledge begins by looking at God and noticing how God is looking at us. Grounding our knowing of our self in God’s knowing of us anchors us in reality. It also anchors us in God.

Neither knowing God nor knowing self can progress very far unless it begins with a knowledge of how deeply we are loved by God.

In order for our knowing of God’s love to be truly transformational, it must become the basis of our identity. Our identity is who we experience ourselves to be—the I each of us carries within. An identity grounded in God would mean that when we think of who we are, the first thing that would come to mind is our status as someone who is deeply loved by God.

Christ presents a particularly poignant contrast to this. His identity was defined by his relationship to his Father. This was who he was. His whole life flowed out from this.