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August 5 - August 17, 2024
The truth is that God is to be found in all things—even and most especially in the painful, tragic and unpleasant things. Jesus was the suffering Savior who knew every temptation and negative human experience that we could ever know. God’s heart contains every conceivable human emotion. It contains us no matter what we experience.
Most of us learn to discern God’s presence by first looking for it in the rearview mirror.
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.
three First Steps Toward Knowing Yourself
J. I. Packer
“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me.
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.
The truth is that God loves you with what Hannah Hurnard calls “a passionate absorbed interest.”3 God cannot help seeing you through eyes of love.
our being is grounded in God’s love. The generative love of God was our origin. The embracing love of God sustains our existence. The inextinguishable love of God is the only hope for our fulfillment. Love is our identity and our calling, for we are children of
Love. Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love.
What this tells me is that much more than I usually care to acknowledge, my identity is based on what I do, not who I am.
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. What he did was not the basis of his identity but rather pointed to who he was: “The works my Father has given me to carry out, these same works of mine testify that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36).
The God who is Divine community is known only in human community. Deep knowing of perfect love, just like deep knowing of ourselves, demands that we be in relationships of spiritual friendship.
Knowing Your Ignored Part-Selves
If, for example, I only know my strong, competent self and am never able to embrace my weak or insecure self, I am forced to live a lie. I must pretend that I am strong and competent, not simply that I have strong and competent parts or that under certain circumstances I can be strong and competent. Similarly, if I refuse to face my deceitful self I live an illusion regarding my own integrity. Or if I am unwilling to acknowledge my prideful self, I live an illusion of false modesty.
Powerful conditioning in childhood encourages us to acknowledge only the most acceptable parts of our self. And parts of self that are not given a place at the family table become stronger, not weaker. Operating out of sight and beyond awareness, they have increasing influence on our behavior.
From Self to God
Self-Acceptance and Self-Knowing
Any hope that you can know yourself without accepting the things about you that you wish were not true is an illusion. Reality must be embraced before it can be changed. Our knowing of ourselves will remain superficial until we are willing to accept ourselves as God accepts us—fully and unconditionally, just as we are.
Until we are willing to accept the unpleasant truths of our existence, we rationalize or deny responsibility for our behavior. Thus, refusing to face and accept his cowardice and fear, Peter may, for example, have explained away cowardly acts by focusing on the circumstances. He could have followed the same strategy after his denial of Jesus. Perhaps that is what Jesus anticipated and sought to circumvent by his public prediction of Peter’s denial. But the choice of whether to accept reality and himself was Peter’s and his alone.
You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.
Some Christians become quite upset at the suggestion that self-acceptance must precede transformation. They argue that self-acceptance is the exact opposite of what we are supposed to do to the parts of self that do not honor God. What we are supposed to do, they say, is crucify them, not embrace them.
Scriptures seem clear enough about the importance of crucifying our sin nature (Romans 8:13). But attempts to eliminate things that we find in our self that we do not first accept as part of us rely on denial, not crucifixion. Crucifixion should be directed toward our sin nature. And we must first accept it as our nature, not simply human nature. Only after we genuinely know and accept everything we find within our self can we begin to ...
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Before we can become our self we must accept our self, just as we are. Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.
Jesus said, “When you pray, go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place” (Matthew 6:6). The secret place where we encounter God in a truly transformational way is in our inner self. Prayer is meeting God in the darkness and solitude of that secret place. Nothing less than such an encounter with God in the depths of our soul will provide access to the deep knowing of both God and self that is our true home.
four Knowing Yourself as You Really Are
The roots of our pretend self lie in our childhood discovery that we can secure love by presenting ourselves in the most flattering light.
Thomas Merton warns, “There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with reality.”1 The truly spiritual life is not an escape from reality but a total commitment to it.
The penetration of our delusions is enormously challenging. It requires a relentless commitment to truth and a deep sense of freedom from fear of rejection. Nothing facilitates this like the knowledge of being deeply loved.
Knowing Yourself as a Sinner
As James Finley says with brutal honesty, “There is something in me that puts on fig leaves of concealment, kills my brother, builds towers of confusion, and brings cosmic chaos upon the earth. There is something in me that loves darkness rather than light, that rejects God and thereby rejects my own deepest reality as a human person made in the image and likeness of God.”2
You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.
Getting Behind Sins to Sin
Spiritual transformation does not result from fixing our problems. It results from turning to God in the midst of them and meeting God just as we are. Turning to God is the core of prayer. Turning to God in our sin and shame is the heart of spiritual transformation.
Ancient Aid to Deep Knowing of Our Sin
core sins identified by the Enneagram are each associated with a core need.6 The needs are basic human needs, such as a need for love, for security or for perfection. The sin consists in making these something of ultimate value—that is, making them into God. Ones need to be perfect and, discovering that neither they nor anything else in their world is perfect, are tempted by self-righteous anger. A good biblical example of this type is Paul. Twos need to be loved and needed, and their competence in making this happen sets them up for pride. Martha is a good biblical example of a Two. Threes
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five Unmasking Your False Self
Personal Style
Our basic style is often built around the things that were reinforced for us as children. It usually starts with the things we do well. Over time our repertoire of competencies grows, and we learn to live in a way that we think will work for us. This becomes “our way,” or what we simply think of as who we are.
the core of the false self is a desire to preserve an image of our self and a way of relating to the world. This is our personal style—how we think of ourselves and how we want others to see us and think of us.
The Challenge of Authenticity
Few things are more difficult to discern and dismantle than our most cherished illusions. And none of our illusions are harder to identify than those that lie at the heart of our false self. The false self is like the air we breathe. We have become so accustomed to its presence that we are no longer aware of it. It is as elusive as the wind, seeming to disappear when the light of attention is shined in its direction.
Recognizing Your False Self
One of these is defensiveness. Because of its fundamental unreality, the false self needs constant bolstering. Touchiness dependably points us to false ways of being. And the more prickly a person you are, the more you are investing in the defense of a false self. Some people bristle easily if they are not taken seriously, thus betraying a need for others to see the self-importance that is so obvious to them. Others take themselves too seriously, perhaps being unable to laugh at themselves. Both reactions suggest ego inflation. Others have learned to mask these outward displays of
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almost always the log in my own eye (Matthew 7:3). If laziness in others is what really bothers me, there is a good chance that discipline and performance form a core part of the false self that I embrace with tenacity. If it is playfulness and spontaneity in others that I find most annoying, then seriousness may be a central part of the self I protect and seek to project. If it is moral disregard that is particularly irritating in others, my false self is probably built around moral rectitude and self-righteousness. And if emotionality in others is what I most despise, emotional control is
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six Becoming Your True Self
We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.
The clarity of thought and action that would later characterize Jesus’ public ministry came from his years of preparation in solitude and anonymity. The core of that preparation was meeting God in the secret place of his inner self. It was through meeting God in places of solitude that Jesus discovered his identity and grew in intimacy with God.
Jesus gave glory to God by being himself—deeply, truly, consistently. Thomas Merton says that “to be a saint means to be myself.”
