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September 10 - September 25, 2020
self-love is inherently unsatisfying. It depends on our feelings, which are subject to constant change based on our circumstances, our performance, and other people’s opinions. Self-love is unreliable, conditional, and limited. Chasing after it always brings us to a dead end.
We don’t know who we’re supposed to be, and our ideas of what our purpose is are both changing and elusive. The standards we set for ourselves are ever evolving, so we’re never fully content with who we are or what we’re doing.
If we were enough, we wouldn’t need Jesus to do these things for us, but we do. Without him we’re hopeless, purposeless, and dead in our sin.
The two key tenets of the cult are Authenticity and Autonomy—being true to yourself and maintaining control over your life. Anyone or anything that attempts to limit who you believe you are is immediately categorized as “toxic” and “judgmental” and is thus pushed to the side.
What happens when we place too much importance on “being yourself” is that we justify choices that hurt us and other people simply because it’s “true” to who we are. We convince ourselves that as long as our choice falls in line with who we claim to be, it’s good.
This is the how “morality” within the Cult of Self-Affirmation works: the only standard of right and wrong is how you feel.
Authenticity and autonomy certainly aren’t bad at all times in all ways, but they must be subjected to God’s objective standards to produce anything good. Otherwise, they’re just trendy-sounding excuses to sin.
The yoke of the god of self is difficult and its burden heavy, but God’s yoke is easy and his burden light.
we’re not enough to come up with our own truths. Our thoughts confuse us. Our intuition is often wrong. Our feelings deceive us. Our desires can be misplaced.
Letting these things go and instead turning to the Lord would mean I actually had to feel the hurt, and I didn’t want
I didn’t start healing from heartache until I stopped submitting to my own standards for right and wrong, which were based on what felt good, and submitted to God’s standards for right and wrong, which are based on what is good.
Studying God’s Word is necessary for Christians to form their worldviews and establish their moral compasses, and yet, tragically, many Americans who identify as Christians don’t know their Bibles.
The prosperity gospel exchanges God’s truth of promised hardship for our “truth” of entitlement to an easy life or overflowing bank account. It views God as a genie aroused by “naming it and claiming it.”
If we view Scripture through the lens of the prosperity gospel, we see the biblical narrative centered on us and what God can do for us, rather than on God, what he’s done for us through Christ, and how we can serve him. This is the danger of meology: it misses the truth. And when we miss the truth of Christianity we lose everything: salvation, joy, sanctification, intimacy with God. Our very souls are at stake when we exchange God’s truth for ours.
The one, true Jesus cares so much about our sin that he endured a gruesome death on a cross to save us from it. On earth he healed and he comforted, but he also called those he encountered to repentance (Matthew 4:17).
Our aim in studying the Bible is to know God. In learning his character and his truth, our view of ourselves and of the world are consequently shaped. Scripture provides a firm, unchangeable foundation for our lives that secular self-help and “Christian” meology don’t and can’t.
A good question to ask when listening to preachers is: Is he providing context and pointing us to Christ, or is he extracting verses to fit a predetermined message and pointing us to ourselves?
Our truth is both elusive and unsatisfying. God’s truth is present and sustaining. While the world tells us our truths are somehow simultaneously within us and “out there,” God gives us real truth in himself here and now. As available as God’s truth is, though, understanding it is a lifelong process.
This is not a culture Christians should be a part of. We don’t discern good and evil based on the latest rage trend. We don’t use Twitter as our source of truth; we use God’s Word, which never changes. We don’t have to be tossed by the waves of cultural relevance. We have God’s absolute truth as our anchor.
If God is our only source of morality and truth, that means he also defines justice. And according to the Bible, God’s justice doesn’t judge people based on their identity groups. Biblical justice is concerned with righteousness, not with an arbitrary calculation of how to hold back one group and lift another to achieve equal outcomes.
Leviticus 19:15 explains God’s idea of righteous justice: “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”
But our fight for the “least of these” needn’t be lumped in with the secular world’s definition of “social justice.” Biblical justice is both truthful and direct; it does not advocate for punishing entire groups based on perceptions of privilege. It does not demand that those whom one group views as more privileged hand over their earnings to the government to be redistributed as the government sees fit. When Jesus calls his followers to care for the “least of these,” that is an individual mandate, not a bureaucratic one (Matthew 25:40).
Christians don’t view people through the lens of their collective grievances. We view people as individuals, made in the image of God, valuable and equal, all dead in sin apart from Christ and responsible for his or her actions. The Bible doesn’t give us any other option for how to view one another. Our experiences and even ethnicities matter, but they don’t ultimately define us. We are defined by Jesus. There is no place for intersectionality in the body of Christ.
This Gospel has been the sufficient driver of true justice as long as it’s existed.
Christians do not need “social justice.” We have the Word of God as our guide to what causes to care about and how to fight for them.
Without the Bible as our basis for justice, we get a system based on the only tool we have without a supreme moral Lawgiver: the self. The best the self can do is a kind of justice based on perception rather than on objective standards of righteousness and truth. Social justice gives us an overly simplistic worldview of the oppressed versus the oppressor. Applying these categories to all people at all times leads to more unfairness, not less, as adherents aim to reach an impossible outcome of total equality through cosmic calculations that aim to help one group at the expense of another.
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But guess what? We don’t have to worry at all whether the world thinks we’re compassionate or not. In fact, I can tell you from experience that if you align yourself with the Bible on controversial topics like abortion and marriage, you’re going to be labeled a misogynist bigot. People who don’t even believe in God will tell you you’re going to hell. As hard as that is to take at times, it’s okay. There is relief in realizing we don’t answer to the rage mob. We answer to Christ, steady, faithful, and sure, who calls us to be set apart and obedient.
The toxic culture of self-love tells us that we are “enough” to determine our own truths. But as we’ve discussed, this just leads to unsustainable confusion. It’s not our or society’s truth that matters, it’s God’s. That’s because he’s perfect, and we’re not.
The new self sees these expectations as good boundaries set by the Father who loves her, not inhibitions hindering her “true self,” because her “true self” is the person God calls her to be, empowered to love him and others and to pursue holiness.
Obedience to God in all we do is the goal of our lives, which may mean our definition of success doesn’t come to fruition. Our call is to do “whatever [we] do, in word or deed . . . in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” and to “work heartily as for the Lord, and not for man” (Colossians 3:17, 23).
Introspection doesn’t take us down a path of sanctification. That’s a New Age idea, not a Christian one.
To constantly focus on our unique attributes is to totally miss the point of what God calls us to do. God calls each of us not to be our “best selves,” but to be filled with the fruit of the spirit, which, according to Galatians, is made up of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
But Christians also understand that we are depraved sinners in need of a savior. Contrary to the core assumption of self-love culture, we are not good deep down, and nothing we do could ever merit God’s mercy. Jesus’s followers were “chosen in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4) and therefore can take no credit in our salvation or sanctification. We are irreversibly and eternally secure in him, knowing that “it is God who works in [us], both to will and to work for his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). We weren’t chosen because of our good works, but rather for good works.
The Bible is clear that while our capacity for emotion is God-given, feelings aren’t to be unconditionally followed. Rather, they’re to be bridled by truth and subjected to the authority of Scripture.
While our feelings change, God doesn’t. Every thought we have is to be held “captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). This doesn’t mean we pretend our emotions don’t exist; it means we assess them, examine them, and weigh them against reality and God’s Word. We surrender them to our compassionate, attentive Father, who hears us, sees us, and knows what we need before we ask (Matthew 6:8).
Our identity, our significance, and our confidence come not from what we see in the mirror or what others say online, but from who God is and what he says we are.
Who we are meant to be, as followers of Jesus, are self-sacrificial disciples who take God at his Word and are empowered by his Spirit to live in peace and confidence in who Jesus is and what he’s done.
This means that whether you’re a CPA, a botanist, a janitor, a secretary, or a graphic designer, your work can matter and bring glory to God. Glorifying work doesn’t have to earn a paycheck either. Stay-at-home moms, caretakers, and volunteer workers can still fulfill the qualifications for God-honoring work by working diligently to help those around them.
Work is ordained, work is necessary, and work matters.
God, our authority, says work exists for his glory and our good. He also assures us that though our work won’t always be fruitful, he will always be faithful. He doesn’t promise that all of our dreams will come true or that our goals will be reached, but instead he commands us to obey him and to work with excellence in whatever realm we occupy. This may include our dream job, and it may not. Either way, we can have peace knowing we’re able to fulfill our aim of glorifying him no matter what role we fill.
Because of Jesus, we have an answer to our insecurities, our self-criticism and self-doubt, and it’s so much better than flimsy, shallow self-love. Our answer is him, the eternal, unchanging Creator and Sustainer of the universe, who paid for our sins on the cross, declaring us forever forgiven, innocent and righteous before a just and holy God. What deeper and surer confidence could we ask for than to be irrevocably purchased by Jesus’s perfect sacrifice, not as a reward for our goodness but as a gift by his grace?
Philippians 2:3‒4 says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
The love that we, as Christians, show people—as unlovable as they may be—is a reflection of God’s love for us. We, too, are unlovable. We, too, are undeserving of God’s approval and affection. And yet even while we were yet sinners, God made a way through Christ to have a relationship with us (Romans 5:8). We don’t have the right to ignore or dismiss people because they’re hard to love, because God didn’t dismiss or ignore us.
Romans 12:2 calls our bodies a “living sacrifice.” This means that our whole lives are meant to be dedicated to God in worship, not just certain compartments. Being a mom or student or employee who does our work with joy and excellence for the glory of God and the good of others is also an act of Spirit-filled generosity.
God doesn’t promise us earthly blessings in exchange for obedience. He promises us a peace, a joy, and a deep contentment that far surpasses any happiness an earthly relationship could bring.
You are a Christ follower first—that is your defining and highest purpose. Any other title that comes along—or doesn’t—is secondary.
Placing ourselves in the center of our universes always leads us to confusion and chaos. It convinces us of our “enoughness” and leaves us disappointed when our sufficiency inevitably proves a mirage. It makes us feel we have the authority to determine our own truths, only for us to realize we’re unable to distinguish right from wrong on our own. It encourages us to chase after perfection—both within and outside of us—leaving us exhausted when we see that perfection was just a mirage. It tells us that our dreams are ours to have, that we deserve everything we want, leaving us bitter when we
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It is through the self-forgetfulness found in Christ and the humility of following his commands that we find life—nowhere else. When we recognize him as God, removing ourselves from the center, we find the “enoughness” we’ve been craving.
