If you have your Bibles with you today, open up to Matthew 16:24. That is the passage, and by the end of the sermon, I promise I will get to it. If you have been here for a while, you know that we have begun a summer series called “Do not conform. Be transformed”. That series is based on the passage found in Romans 12:1-2, which basically says “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea with this series is that we would look at some of the negative patterns of this world that try to get us to conform to the culture’s way of thinking and the culture’s way of acting. The idea was that we would look at these patterns, and then we would look at the consequences of following these patterns and hopefully create a bridge to a biblical response.
Today what I want to look at is a pattern that I simply call “self”. If we look around us today, if we look around the world, we can probably get a pretty good indication that in the world or at least in America we are very self-centered people. We are self-absorbed. So much so that it almost borders on what we would call narcissism. Narcissism is kind of an extreme self-centeredness. It is based on this Greek mythological figure known as Narcissus. Narcissus was the young man who was so enthralled with the reflection of himself that he saw in the lake that he actually fell into the lake and drowned. That is what it means to be narcissistic. Very extremely self-centered. That is the dark side of self. Some people think of it in terms of self-esteem. But I want to correct that assumption because self-esteem is more of a healthy thing. When you have good self-esteem, you are often concerned with the people around you. You are not just looking out for yourself. With narcissism you are number one. You are the only person you are looking out for. You really don’t think other people have importance. The extreme view of narcissism is thinking that you are even more important than God Himself. You may recall a couple weeks ago I mentioned the idea that we are seeing a major decline in God as the center of our reality. We are taking him out of the center of our world. When you take God out of the center of your reality, you have to replace him with something. For many people, the best person to replace God with is self. That is what is happening out there.
In America today, we see different degrees of self-centeredness, different degrees of self-absorption. We see a general pattern of self. It is evidenced in so many different places. All you need to do is turn on the television set. What do you see? You see shows like American Idol. Dancing with the Stars. The Voice. America’s Got Talent. What are those shows about? Self-promotion. Or you look at a reality show that is based on a dysfunctional person or family, and for many people the only way they can become famous is to be part of some sort of a dysfunctional family. In some cases, you can get famous by just being associated with someone famous. You can be like a Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. It is just associating with someone who is famous. If you really want to make yourself famous, you could go on YouTube or Tic Toc and post your own video. Overnight you can become a worldwide sensation. Of course, we are all aware of Facebook and Twitter. Really those are really about self-promotion. If you want to create a name for yourself, simply go on Facebook or Twitter and you can have hundreds or possibly even thousands of followers overnight. We know that this pattern of self is not restricted to the internet or cable TV. All we have to do is walk through life and we bump up against all sorts of patterns of selfishness. You drive down the road and somebody cuts you off without even considering that you are driving next to them. Or maybe you are in the grocery store or the bank or a movie theater and somebody cuts in front of you in line. Or you could be like Debbie and I last Saturday night about midnight, which I am sound asleep because I get up very early on Sunday, somebody in the neighborhood decided to let off a round of firecrackers. They were just oblivious to what was going on around them. Of course we see it in the business world. We see it where people are so obsessed with climbing up the corporate ladder that they will do anything they can to keep others off that ladder. Whether it is lying, cheating, or stealing, they will do anything they can to make sure that they get the promotion and that they are self-promoted. We see it in ways where America has become kind of apathetic to the rest of the world around them. In America where you have tornados and hurricanes and that sort of thing or over in India where you have earthquakes or Japan where you have Tsunamis, we are just oblivious to that because, after all, that doesn’t affect us. As long as it doesn’t affect myself and my world, then I am not going to worry about it. We see an overall pattern of selfishness in the world and especially in America. When you have a pattern of selfishness in America, of course you need a magazine to go with it, so you have a magazine called Self. That is a true magazine and it sells a lot of copies because again it is focused on you and how you can make yourself better. When you have a culture of self, you are going to create phrases that allow you to continue to promote the idea of self. Phrases like love yourself. Believe in yourself. Go find yourself. The most current one, the most trending one is to “be yourself”. It It is all about being the person that you want to be. As I mentioned last week when I was talking about desire, I talked about how when you want to be anything you want or have any desire met, the culture is there ready and waiting to accommodate you. Unfortunately, sometimes they are there with their hand out because there is a price for becoming self. There is a price for latching on to some sort of a new identity. The culture, the marketers, their experts are allowing you to shape whatever identity you want again as long as there is a price. Nowadays, you can download any music you want 24/7. You can create the playlist of your own that is unique to who you are. You can get the hairdo you want. You can wear the clothes you want. You can put the makeup on. Whatever you want to create your own unique look. You can buy a nice car that somehow fits your personality. You can do that sort of thing. You can buy a certain beer or smoke a certain brand of cigarettes that is suited to who you are that allows you to be yourself. You can even purchase a t-shirt online that makes you think you are a pretty big deal. I know my kids are in the audience today, so Christmas is coming and I want you to know I am a pretty big deal so I want to see one of those under the Christmas tree.
If you are not satisfied with these little opportunities to create yourself, if it is just a little bit too difficult, you can actually engage in a whole fantasy world out there where you can actually create your whole new persona, your whole new being. You can do it through games such as Guild Wars or World of Warcraft. One that is really gaining popularity is called Second Life. Last night I texted my daughter Kristin to say what are the three most popular online games. Of course she knew what they were but the third one I had never heard of. It was Second Life. Apparently, Second Life is that is what it is. You go in and create your whole new life. You don’t like your life. You don’t like living in Bellevue, then go to L.A. You always wanted to participate in sports. Well make yourself a sports start. Did you ever want to travel to Italy? Go online and you can travel to Italy. Have you ever wanted to become a Browns fan? You can become Debbie and become a Browns fan. You can be whatever you want. I really didn’t believe it. I said, okay, what is this about? I went on YouTube and I found a brief introduction about what Second Life is about and I thought I would show it really quickly so you can get an idea of really what is going on out there. (Video shown here.)
That is pretty interesting. Did you get the expressions in there? Free yourself. Free your mind. Love yourself. Be yourself. During the break from the first service, I had somebody go online and Google how many people are currently on this site. 32 million. 32 million out there are creating their own worlds. That means they are having emotional affairs with people. They are getting hooked on different things. They are spending their entire life in this make-believe fantasy world. If you are not happy with your life, what it is saying is go change your life. Change your mind. Change your world. It is available for you 24/7. That is a scary thing. My point is that when you want to go out there and be yourself, the culture is more than happy to accommodate you.
The problem is, even though you want to be yourself, it is very difficult to pull off isn’t it. Because the minute we try to create ourselves as something different, somebody comes along and photocopies us or makes a carbon copy of ourselves. We are going along and thinking I listen to my own music. I dress a certain way. And all of a sudden you run into somebody and say there is somebody else who looks just like me. So it is very hard. So what you have to do then is you have to go and reinvent yourself. You have to go and do what rock stars do. How many different identities did Michael Jackson have to have in his career? From being part of the Jackson Five to Thriller and beyond. What about Elton John? What about Madonna? What about Cher? They had to reinvent themselves over and over again because if they didn’t they would drop in their approval rating. The reason we create our own identity is so that we can receive approval from those around us. If people get bored with the identity we created, we have to reinvent ourselves so we can feel loved again. That is a sad thing. It is a very difficult thing to pull off.
It is very difficult for what is called the Generation Me. It is kind of a broad category that takes into account the people that were born in the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. Basically, people that are 35 years or under. It is very hard for that group of people. Why? Because ever since they were children, what have they been told? You can be whatever you want to be. Just be yourself. Just go out there and find yourself. If you want to be an Olympian or a track star, go out and be it. If you want to be a doctor, go out and be a doctor. If you want to be a movie star, go out and be it. You can be whatever you want. The problem is that is a lie. You cannot be whatever you want. If you don’t have the body for an Olympic star, sometimes no matter what you do, you will never be an Olympic star. No matter how much you want to be a doctor, maybe you just don’t have the smarts to be able to pass the entrance test to med school. You want to be a movie star. Maybe you just don’t have the connections in Hollywood. You cannot be whatever you want to be. What happens when you get the ideal job, the job of your dreams that you have been looking for all of your life and you finally feel that you are about ready to be what you are called to be and all of a sudden three months later you get the pink slip in the mail that says we have to let you go or the business is closing down. What does that do to the sense of self? It shatters it. That is really what is happening in this Generation Me because they are facing this obstacle where they grew up being told to be whatever you want to be and then they go into the world and the world is not sitting there with open arms saying come on in. We will help you be what you want to be. Frankly, the world doesn’t care what you want to be. That is just the reality of it. The younger group, the 35 and under, they begin to experience goal frustrations. There is a writer that wrote a book actually called “Generation Me”. A lady by the name of Jean Twenge. She writes of this when she says “Generation Mes’ expectations are highly optimistic. They expect to go to college, to make lots of money, and perhaps even to be famous. Yet this generation enters a world in which college admissions are increasingly competitive, good jobs are hard to find and harder to keep, and basic necessities like housing and healthcare have skyrocketed in price. This is a time of soaring expectations and crushing realities.” That is a tough time to live for those Generation Me.
What happens when they can’t meet those expectations, when they cannot be all they want to be, what happens? They get frustrated. They get angry. They get depressed. In fact, I read recently that 15% of people are on some sort of antidepressant. Regarding suicide, apparently suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 15 and 24. Because they are frustrated. They lack any sense of identity. They can’t get the identity that they thought they were going to have when they grew up. Those frustrations, if they are not careful, carry over into other environments. They carry over into a marriage. People enter marriage with an idea that marriage is going to be wonderful and all-glowing and everything else. The problem is usually what happens in a marriage is you have two people coming in with two different sets of expectations. People that are coming in that still have this idea that they can be all they want to be. Then reality sets in. You have the kids. You have the bills to pay. You have the house. You have the car. You have the jobs. You have all this kind of stuff. What happens is those goals get set aside and one or both of the people in the relationship get frustrated and get angry. We know what marriage is about. A marriage is about compromise. Working and helping each other to achieve their goals. It might not be what they hoped it would be. What happens is some people just say I am out of here. You are hindering my goal. You are hindering my life. You are keeping me from being all that I wanted to be.
The question is, when you look at all this stuff, what has gone wrong with this great American experiment to be all you can be or to be yourself? Really what I think went wrong, I know there are a lot of things to consider, but one of the basic things I believe went wrong is that we tried to separate self from the soul. Last week you may recall I talked about what I believe to be the tri-part nature of a human being: body, soul, and spirit. I said that the body was the part that connects to the world. The spirit is the part that connects up to God. The soul is kind of the thing in the middle that is the seat of your personality. Your mind, emotions, your will and that sort of thing. It is the seat of your personality. What happens when you disconnect self from the soul, you basically become nothing. You become nothing but an empty shell of yourself. Another author, Eugene Peterson, who wrote the book The Message, writes on this one. He says “In our current culture, soul has given way to self as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. Self is the soul minus God. Self is what is left of soul with all the transcendence and intimacy squeezed out. The self with little or no reference to God or others.” That is a soulless self. That is a sad, sad thing. The point is that you cannot go into culture without being attached to God, without having a soul and try to find yourself. It is just impossible. Some people would say I know myself. I am my own self out there. I dress a certain way. I download certain music. I do this sort of thing. That is not your true self. What you have succeeded in doing is creating a false self. You have succeeded in creating a public self that you pull out and maneuver as you want again as you seek approval. In our haste to make these false selves, what happens is we leave our true selves behind. There is a true self within every person. A self that was not created by the marketers. Not created by the people that create Second Life or Facebook or anything of that. A true self that was created by God. We see that way back in Genesis 1:27 where it says “God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Think about it. God created man in his own image. You can meditate on that for years and never get to the meaning of that. I don’t think it has to do with physical appearance. It has more to do with the character of God. There is something inside of us that makes us special from all the other creatures that walk this earth. I think everybody intuitively knows that we are better than the animals. We have advantages over animals. Why is that? Because God has imprinted his very identity inside our soul. Deeply inside of our soul. So indeed yes we are special. We are special. Unfortunately, it is an identity, it is a self that the world often never even gets a glimpse at. Never even gets to look at. But it is a self that aligns with God. It is a self that really culture can’t get to. Culture can’t touch. Even if it could touch it and try to control it and try to manipulate it, it couldn’t because it is not controlled by culture. It is controlled by God. It is the self that does not seek the approval of men. It does not seek the applause of men because it is a self that again has had the stamp of approval on it by God himself. Most importantly, it is a self that is loved. Most people don’t love themselves, but there is a part in here that they know that God loves them. That is what makes that self better than any other self that you can ever create in the world.
As we start to wind this up, think about the idea that somehow people, Christians and not, have sold out their self. The have sold out their true self for some sort of cheap, plastic, imitation out there of self. A self that is just merely a shadow of the true self. You say, Chuck, what do we do about the situation? As I said at the beginning of the sermon, I am not going to leave you out hanging. I talk about the patterns and I talk about the consequences, but I also create a bridge back to a biblical response. If you know anything about me, you know that the biblical response always includes Jesus. Jesus holds the key to figuring out yourself and to getting back to your true self.
In the gospel of Matthew, the passage we talked about at the very beginning, he writes “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” I want to stop right there. He needs to deny himself or herself. The self that we are denying is the fake, artificial self. The self that we pull out when it is convenient. When we are out in the public. He says deny that self. Then he says take up your cross. We know that the cross was an instrument of torture. It was an instrument of increased pain for people designed to invoke the most pain that an individual could bare. We know that Jesus Christ died on a cross. That is historical fact. We know that he took the sins of the world upon his own self to do what? So that we would have freedom from the penalty and guilt of sin. That is what the cross is about. What Jesus did then by doing that is he took an instrument of pain and suffering and made it a symbol of freedom. That is why we wear a cross. That is what a cross represents to us. It represents a freedom from penalty from God but more importantly, a freedom from self and a freedom from our old self. A freedom from the plastic self. What do we have to do? He says take up the cross. Take up the cross means to place that false self on the cross, let it be crucified, and not only that false self. Every stinking thought that you have that made you begin to think that you could get yourself outside of God. Things like your past hurts that you haven’t been able to deal with and it’s causing you to go out and seek an online experience. Maybe the past pains, the insecurities thinking that you can never meet anybody in person because you are just not good enough so you go online to create this fake world out there. Your fears. All these things that add into creating some sort of a false, plastic self. That is what you are supposed to do is just put all that stuff on the cross and then when you are done with that, the next step is quite simple. Jesus says “Follow me.” Why follow Jesus? You know why, because Jesus is the picture of the true self. Thinking again about that verse in Genesis 1:27. It says we are made in the image of God. That doesn’t mean a lot to you because you think I don’t know what God looks like and I don’t really know that much about God. You might not know much about God, but you probably know a little bit about Jesus. If you don’t, just read through the four gospels. You could learn a lot about Jesus. What is interesting is there is a passage in the book of John that speaks of the idea. Even though we haven’t seen God, we see God through Jesus. I think it is John 1:18. It says “No one has ever seen God, but Jesus, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” The actual phrase is “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only who was at the Father’s side has made him known.” What he is saying is Jesus who is at the Father’s side has made him known. We know God. We know our identity through knowledge of Jesus. Jesus is the one who opens the doorway so that we can begin to know our true selves. He did it not only by the cross; he did it by the power of the resurrection. We know that Christ died on a cross, but we know after three days he didn’t stay in that grave. He rose again. When he rose again, he opened the doorway to our new self. The possibility of the true self. I think it is 2 Corinthians 5:17 that says “Anyone who believes in him is a new creation. The old is gone and the new has come!” What you get in those passages is you begin to see that God is at work. God has this huge blueprint out there. What he is trying to do is bring back all the creation back to its original design. He wants us to be a part of that creation. He wants us to be a part of that design. He doesn’t want us just to come to church on Sunday and even accept Jesus and then go live our own way just knowing that we got a free ticket into heaven. He wants you to know that you are part of his recreation process. He has designed for you to be again who you were really meant to be.
One of my professors, Mark Sayers, he wrote a book called “The Vertical Self”. He expresses this so clearly when he writes “You are a vital and irreplaceable element of God’s good creation. That is why he is so passionately committed to seeing you become the person you were meant to be. Your movement towards your true self, towards the whole person God wants you to be is part of his plan to remake creation according to his original design.” Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that exciting? God’s pursuing you because he wants you to become the person that you were meant to be. That you were designed to be. He goes on to say that this isn’t something that happens overnight. He says it is a movement. It is a movement towards your true self, towards the whole person God wants you to be. In other words, it is not going to happen overnight. It is a lifelong journey. You have been saved. You have been made righteous. That imprint is in you but now you have to work it out. The way you work it out is through the process of becoming holy. I know holy is somewhat of a dated term. When we think of holy, we think of priests or monks in a monastery and chanting or something. That is a distorted view of holy. Really what holiness is about in its simplest terms is to become whole. That is what holiness is. It extends from the same root. It means to become whole. When we talk about holiness, think of it in terms of you have this soul that really has some problems with it. It has all these problems of your past. These attitudes. These prejudices. These fears. All this stuff in there that doesn’t look like Jesus. What he does is he takes the old stuff out one at a time and he puts the things that look like Jesus inside. Gradually, over time, what is happening is you are being made whole. You are beginning to experience the true self. There is a lot more I could say about this, but to sum it up in a nutshell what it involves is laying down your life. Just what that song said. Lay down your life. Lay it down. That is the first step. Lay down your life which means that you are not your own. You were bought with a price and that price is the blood of Jesus Christ, which means you need to get off the throne. You have to remove yourself from the center of your reality and placing God back on the throne. Then just laying down and let him begin to do the work to make you whole. He does the work. I use the benediction a lot of 1 Thessalonians 5:23. It is God that wants to sanctify you through and through. What does it say at the very end? He will do it. He will do it as we submit to him, as we surrender to him, as we lay our lives down to him, he will begin to do that work in us.
In conclusion, God wants you to be yourself. For all the people that want to be yourself, God is ready and able. He wants you to be yourself. But he wants you to be the true self. He doesn’t want you to be the fake self. The self that you make up online in Second Life. He doesn’t want you to be the self that you make by the clothes you wear, the people you hang out with, the things you do, the things you buy. He doesn’t want you to be that self. He wants you to be the self that was made in the very image of him, of the creator. That is the self that he wants you to be. That is the self that he wants you to be. It means you have to lay down those false selves. The ironic thing as we look at the last part of the passage in Matthew 16:25. It says “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” What this passage is saying is if you try to hold on to the fake life, you are going to lose it anyway because you can’t take that fake life into the other life. You can’t. In some cases, you can’t even take it into another week because culture changes it so much. He is saying anybody who tries to save his life, you are going to lose it anyway. He goes on to say but whoever loses his life, loses that false life for Him will find it. As you are willing to lay down that life, put aside that false life and begin to pursue the true life in Christ, what happens is you will find it. When you find it, you will be able to experience it both in this life and the life to come. Let us pray.
