Know Yourself That You May Know God
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, prt. 2
Wildwind Community Church
October 17, 2010
Week 2 of our Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Initiative. Did you do your Daily Offices this past week? If not, how come? When will you begin? I know it’s a change, I know it’s different, but for the next few weeks I’ll keep asking. The first step in making a change is deciding that a change is needed and realizing that now is the time. Don’t say you’ll do it later, or that you want to read the book and absorb the concepts first, or that you want to hear the sermons first. Decide to do it, enter the process, and allow the process to speak for itself. Then you can have experiential knowledge, which is always better than head knowledge and theoretical knowledge. Seriously, just do it!
Last week we looked at a story in the life of King Saul and then you studied that in your workbook and in small group. This week I’m not going to go that route. This week I want to use a different passage of scripture to speak to you about chapter 4 of the book, “Know Yourself That You May Know God.” Then you will study a story from the life of David in your workbook. So don’t be confused when the scriptures you study in the workbook are not the same ones we look at today. Here’s where I want to start:
Ephesians 4:22-24 (NIV)
22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;
23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds;
24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Old self. New self. False self. True self. Spirituality can only be emotionally healthy (and healthy at all) when it is true. When it is real. When it is deep. When the “you” that Christ is redeeming is the “you” that you actually are. Most of us actually don’t actually end up letting Christ redeem us because we remain “false” all of our lives. Paul says that the new self – the person you really are – was created to become like God in what? Pretending and making everything look okay? Created to become like God in what? Stuffing and denying your feelings and opinions because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient? C’mon, we know this. You are to put on the new self, created to become like God in righteousness and holiness.
Vast portions of the church right now are concerned about correct beliefs –having the right beliefs ABOUT God. They want to be right in what they BELIEVE. But righteousness is about TRUTH, and truth is about REALITY, and reality is about WHO YOU ARE! If you are angry, and you deny it and hide it and cover it up, you are not living in reality – you are not living truthfully. Righteousness and truth cannot be separated. You cannot know God unless you know yourself. In A.D. 400, St. Augustine wrote, “How can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self? Grant, Lord, that I may know myself, that I may know thee.”
Knowing ourselves begins here, with Paul’s admonition that we are to take off the false self and put on the true self – get rid of the old self and embrace the new self. But what does that mean? Conservative, evangelical Christianity would tell you that what Paul is saying is to stop having premarital sex, stop lusting, stop getting drunk, and pull your act together and start doing “righteous” things. This is in fact part of living in truth, but only a very, very small part of it, and most of the church has made it almost the entire pie! Actually, you can do “right” behaviors all your life and they can in fact drive you further and further into the false self – that part of you that does not know that you are loved by God, that God accepts you, that God and God’s approval are enough, that you don’t have to perform for him, that you are under grace, that you do not have to live with guilt, with fear of punishment, with insecurity, etc. In fact, here are symptoms of the false self.
Symptoms of the False Self
1.I say “yes” when I really mean “no.” The false self cannot be authentic because it needs approval.
2.I get depressed when people are upset with me.
3.I have a need to be approved by others to feel good about myself.
4.I act nice on the outside, but inside I hate people who have upset me.
5. I often remain silent in order to “keep the peace”. The false self cannot handle disagreements of any kind. They make it feel like it’s in danger of permanent rejection. The false self remains silent and calls it peacekeeping, but it’s a form of deceit based on deep insecurity and fear.
6.I believe that if I make mistakes, I myself am a failure. The false self is harsh with itself. It doesn’t know that it is truly and deeply loved by God, therefore it looks to other people for approval and when it fails, it feels it has lost everything.
7.I criticize others in order to feel better about myself. This stands to reason, right? The false self needs to be on top and superior, which it will do either by having to be the best, or by putting others down in order to still come out on top.
8.I avoid looking weak or foolish for not having the answer. The false self must perform. The false self must know. The false self must impress.
9.I have to be doing something exceptional to feel alive. The false self needs constant activity. This keeps the false self from doing what it tries at all costs to avoid – realizing how shallow it is.
10.I have to be needed to feel alive. This is why some parents who have never found their true selves cannot tolerate their children growing up. What if I’m not needed anymore?
11.I am fearful and can’t take risks. Why do you think this is? Someone might be be upset with me, or disagree with me, or not like me.
12.So I do what others want so they don’t get mad at me. Of course I resent it, but I don’t say anything, at least not to anyone who can do anything about it. To do that I would first have to own my own feelings instead of blaming others, and then risk some kind of conflict. I can’t do that.
13.Of course I can’t let anyone know how weak I feel and how insecure I am, so I use knowledge and competence to cover my feelings of inadequacy.
14.I want my children to behave well so others will think I am a good parent. They are a direct reflection on me. I have terrible boundaries so I don’t know where others end and I begin. Therefore I am threatened to the depths of my being when they act up.
15.I am constantly comparing myself to others. When I come out on top, I feel good. When I come out on bottom, I feel terrible. Thus my feelings about myself are constantly at the mercy of things almost totally beyond my control.
Watch old movies of when you were a baby. Ask yourself, “What happened to that joyful, spontaneous, loving, open, human being?” The answer is that that human being was sent to prison. My friends, the false self is a prison of our own making. It is a prison that we at some point have locked ourselves away in because something (or perhaps many things) have happened to us that were so painful that we didn’t know how to bear it – so we pulled into ourselves. We stopped sticking our necks out. We stopped loving spontaneously because someone might not love us back. We stopped smiling at delightful things, because smiling is vulnerable – it reveals too much. Someone might use your joy to put you back in your place. We stopped reaching out to others and letting them carry us at times, because at some point we reached out and somebody refused to carry us. We stopped saying what’s on our minds, because somebody used our words to hurt us, make fun of us, or condemn us.
That loving, open, beautiful, happy person you were when you were born – that’s who you are. That is who you were created to be. And that joyful, authentic self was not created or manufactured by you -- it was given to you as a gift of pure grace. A number of years ago there was a movie out called Things We Lost In The Fire. Living is trial by fire, folks, and there’s no way to get through that fire without losing some really precious things, without receiving the wound. The wound is simply those series of things that caused you to lose yourself – to pull into a shell of – whatever you pulled into. Introversion. Extroversion. Power. Maybe you’re the joker. Maybe you can’t really laugh. Maybe you can’t cry. Maybe you cannot accept criticism, even when given in love by someone who cares deeply for you. Maybe you have to always be perfect. Maybe you have to always be liked. Maybe you have to always have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Maybe people have to always be looking at your body and admiring it in order for you to feel special and valuable. The list is endless, but do you see what I’m saying?
These are layers. They are layers of the false self. They are not who you are. They are not who you were created to be. You were created in love and with joy by a joyful God who loves you, and you were created to be loving and joyful, to be capable of giving and receiving love, to be able to exercise your humanity and uniqueness and God-given gifts, without fear of rejection or retaliation. You were not made to have to hide. You were not made to have to live with your head in the sand, or your heart cut off from the rest of your life.
Let me show you another picture.
That’s who I became as a result of my wound. Some of you know what it’s like to be picked on as a kid, to feel like going to school is a nightmare every day. That was my experience, not always, but nearly every day for a few critical years – and that’s all it takes to get the wound, my friends. And I decided, unconsciously at first but later on I became aware of it – that nobody was ever going to mess with me again. And I found a way to hide. For me, all that hair was security. It kept people from seeing me. When I combined that with being quiet, not talking to strangers, not sharing my feelings, and not looking most people in the eyes, I was able to live comfortably – relatively free of the fear of being humiliated. And it was better. Sort of. It was better than humiliation, but it wasn’t really life. See, my senior year of high school I had started hanging around with this energetic, spontaneous, people-person named Christy Weidman. She was amazing and I loved her soon after we started hanging around. There was a freedom about her that I loved – an energy that she wasn’t afraid to let move through her. She didn’t fear life the way I did. [Of course she would tell you that she – like everybody -- feared life in some very different ways, but that’s not my story to tell.]
What I can tell you is that I found this person incredibly attractive, but at the same time my false self was deeply threatened by the very things that attracted me to her. [That is true of many of you in your relationships as well. Unless you have managed to completely peel off almost all the layers of the false self before you meet the person you marry, chances are good that the same things you love about them also are very threatening and cause negative as well as positive reactions in you.] Anyway, it was largely through watching Christy live her life and love it that I realized over a long period of time that in some ways I was half alive – that I was imprisoned in this shell that I had created. Now I won’t bore you with details of how long it has taken to come out of that, and all the roads I have had to travel down, but I will tell you this – I am learning. Layers of the false self are peeling away. It has happened in many ways. Through Christy’s energy and life, through the joy of raising my children, through getting incredibly effective and powerful personal counseling, through good spiritual direction, through a lot of great books – I am slowly learning how to open up to life again. But it is taking a very long time – much longer than it needed to – because I have until recently done this journey mostly alone and have had to figure things out, make my own mistakes, and find my own way. If you pay close attention to what we’re talking about in the coming weeks, you can save yourself literally decades of time. It’ll still be a journey, but you can avoid a lot of unnecessary detours.
Each journey is unique, but one thing is certain. You are not the person God created you to be. You too have received the wound. You too are wrapped in layers of a false self, which you initially set up for protection, but which now imprison you. Pink Floyd’s term for this protection that eventually becomes prison was The Wall. Sigmund Freud’s term was the ego. The Apostle Paul’s term was the flesh. It doesn’t matter what you call it. All that matters is that it’s suffocating you – closing you off to the freedom and spontaneity you were created to enjoy, and keeping you from knowing who you really are. Thomas Merton said, “I love to clothe this false self. I wind experiences around myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself visible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow. And when those things are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness.”
So what is the way out? How do we begin to dismantle the false self and allow our true self to emerge? There are four things you must do. First, you must pay attention to your interior in silence and solitude. Find a way to do this that works for you, but the silence and solitude are not optional. All ways that can work will involve solitude and silence. Walk in the woods and allow yourself to feel things. Ask yourself what God might be saying to you in those emotions. Write in a journal, not just about how angry or bored or disappointed or frustrated you are, but about what those things might be saying to you. Learn to listen to others in a new way, like I was saying last week – not just for agreement or disagreement, but learn to listen to your life, to your emotions and experiences and impressions. Learn to stop putting responsibility on other people for how you think and feel and to start assuming that your feelings and thoughts belong to you alone. They are your burden, and they are your gift! Pay attention to them.
Second, find trusted companions. As I’ve said, much of my journey has been alone, but a few trusted friends have guided me at critical times and encouraged me to take steps that I would have been way too afraid to take without their love and encouragement. Find books by authors that challenge you to look at who you are, and these can be both fiction and non-fiction. Just find something that challenges and guides and motivates you. Get a few trustworthy people around you and lean on them. You’ll find that learning to lean this way will in itself be a critical part of your journey out of the false self and into the true self. Pray and ask God to send this person into your life for this season, and see what turns up.
Third is to move out of your comfort zone. My friends, there’s no better way to say this than to simply tell you that moving out of the false self and into the true self will often feel like dying. It is a letting go of the person you know yourself to be.
Though that person is not who you really are, it is who you have become comfortable with, and who you have presented to yourself and to the world as “you” for probably decades of your life. By now it is the only you you know. You don’t know who you’ll be without the false self. And I can’t exactly answer that for you, but when you get too afraid, go back and watch those home movies. See your joy and your love and your freedom and spontaneity and know that your true self will be an adult version of that. Not less you, but MORE you.
John 10:10 (MSG)
10. ...I came so [you] can have real and eternal life, more and better life than [you] ever dreamed of.
But you’re gonna have to move out of your comfort zone, even in terms of religion, which people normally use as a way of not having to ever change. My friends, for nearly all of us, spirituality will begin with accepting Christ into one’s heart, with moving into this very safe and comfortable place called religion, where everything is black and white and always very clear. That’s where the journey begins. But if we are paying attention, at some point we come to see that religion, despite the good things it accomplishes, is also being used to defend and prop up our false self instead of showing us the way out of that false self. This is why religion can often be dangerous. There is no better way to hunker down behind the false self than to declare that I have arrived, I’m right where God wants me to be, and any movement from that place is sacrilegious, or heretical, or inappropriate. If we are to know God, we must shed the false self, and that especially includes those parts of it that are hiding behind religion and hoping we won’t even think to look there. This is how we use God to run from God. Jesus called us to die – to shed the false self. Instead we usually embrace religion, build our false self around religious ideas, and actually avoid the very death Jesus called us to, and we avoid it in the name of Jesus. To know God, you will have to move out of your comfort zone. It will not feel comfortable – it will often feel like dying. And nothing -- not even your religion – gets to be exempt from this process.
If you are not fairly regularly going through periods where you feel that parts of you are dying and falling off, then whatever you may say about your spirituality, the truth is that your false self is propping up your spiritual life, and you are using God to run from God.
Fourth, you will need to pray for courage. You will see things you don’t like about yourself, and will need to pray that God will help you see yourself through the eyes of grace and love the way God does. You will see flaws you haven’t seen before and will need to pray for the courage to stay on the journey instead of retreating back into the false self of denial. You will need courage. But with courage, which God will give you if you ask him, you will feel the earth begin to tremble under your feet (which is scary), and the layers of your false self – until now the very foundation of your life – beginning to develop huge gaps and melt away. As this happens, you will find that you are becoming MORE yourself – freed of excessive concern with the opinions of others, freed from the need to compare and compete, freed to love, to care, to stop judging, freed to love yourself without arrogance or pretense, freed to become again – in your heart – though you are no longer a baby – that carefree, loving, vulnerable, open, playful, spontaneous child of God you were created to be.
Ephesians 4:22-24 (NIV)
22...put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;
23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds;
24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
