The Problem of Self
When I prepare for the class I teach on Wednesday nights at church it always inspires me with great big thoughts. I was going to put this one into organized form and share it, but I never got around to doing that first part. But I'll do the second anyway.
II Timothy 3:1-5:
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in these verses. First of all, to be clear, when Paul talks about "the last days" he is talking about his own time. His command to Timothy to avoid these men makes no sense if he was predicting something that wouldn't come for centuries. When the New Testament uses the words "the last days" it refers to the time between Christ's first and second comings.
OK, so it refers to us, too. And it certainly describes our world. Interesting, in the Greek, the words "for men will be..." is "esontai gar hoi anthropoi..." The inclusion of the Greek article "hoi" means that Paul is saying that most (but not necessarily all) men (and women) will fall under this condemnation. Not just a few. Enough that you can state this as a general picture of the people in the world. What are people like in these last days? Like this. And it's not pretty.
Those Christians with a more humanistic philosophy that want to take a positive view of the nature of man have to ignore verses like this. Because the picture the Bible paints of the nature of man is evil.
But look at this vice list. Paul bookends the list with the root cause of the problem: people love themselves and not God. Everything else comes from that.
Love of self. Is that so wrong? The Greeks didn't thinks so. "Love of self" translates as philautos which the Greeks used in secular writings to mean what we generally mean by "self-respect." It was, to them, a virtue. Our culture is exactly the same: things like self-respect, self-confidence, self-esteem, are all seen as the keys to ALL virtues. The primary role of our schools is to instill in children self-esteem. One of the greatest evils our society recognizes is prejudices and insults that put people down and offend them. Which is why you never, ever say the N-word if you are a public figure. If you want the girl you have to just "be yourself," and believe in yourself.
Yet Paul puts it here at the head of a list describing the evils of mankind -- all the rest of which flow from it. Once again, mankind has called evil, good and good, evil. We have taken pride -- the source of ALL evil -- and called it the source of all good.
Which is why if anyone ever gives you any sort of advice -- informally, or formally in counseling -- that starts with love of self you are already going the wrong direction. But that is what we teach everywhere. Every form of psychology and sociology starts with it. Gotta' love yourself first. Because self must come first.
We have elevated self above God -- even in the church -- and made ourselves our idols. That is our first and most natural inclination: to make ourselves our own gods.
The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God."
But people will say, "You can't really love anyone else -- even God -- until you love yourself." Oh really? That is the absolute polar opposite of what Christ taught. He said:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.
He said:
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."
We are also called to honestly look at ourselves and who we are and to repent of it, and to become, instead, like Him. We love ourselves in that God loves us and we trust His judgment. And in that, we do not love all of ourselves, as the sinful and corrupt part of our nature is NOT loved by God, but only the potential child of His buried beneath it.
"Just be yourself." "You just have to find yourself." Rubbish. That's the last thing you should want. Because we know what we will find, and it is ugly and evil and death itself. What we need -- all of us -- is not to find ourselves, but to lose ourselves. Not to be ourselves, who we really are inside, but to put THAT man to death and live as Christ.
Which is what faith and repentance and salvation is all about. When you look at the sin in yourself and realize that God's judgment that "the wages of sin are death" is not only just, but good and wonderful. That the sinful man inside you deserves to die. That the sinful man inside you NEEDS to die. That what you want more than anything is for that man to die.
Because as long as he lives, you live in living-death. You think you are alive, but you are really dead because sin IS death and man IS sin. You can only really live after that man is dead.
So, you kill yourself -- spiritually speaking -- in baptism. Putting on Christ's death. Dying with Him on the cross and being raised up with Him. Being born again, this time of the water and the spirit instead of through the flesh and sin.
Here is a trustworthy saying:
If we died with him,
we will also live with him
Which is a message man doesn't want to hear. That self-centeredness -- that love of self -- is totally opposed to the self-denial and self-hate implied in the call to die to self and live for Christ. We want OUR plan to be the one worked out, not God's. We want OUR will to be done, not His. We want to get our way. We want to have our ideas of right and wrong be real. We want our moral judgment to be right. We want to determine all these things -- what should and should not be, what we should and should not do, who we should and should not be, etc -- because that means we get to be God.
When you tell people to "just be yourself" and to find themselves, you are, in essence, elevating what they want to the level of ethics -- saying that to be ethical you just have to do what it is you really want to do anyway. It removes any idea of outside control. Any idea of a moral code that people should conform to, even if it means giving up what you want.
You see that especially clear in the debate over the moral uprightness of homosexuality. The world's side has one and only one real argument for their side. It says, "I was born wanting this, I really want it, and so I should have it. And no good and loving God would ever tell me I can't have what I want."
Yet the essence of God is telling all of us we can't have what we want because what we want is evil. We need to have what He wants for us, because what He wants for us is good.
But self -- SELF -- is our first and greatest idol. It is the god we bow down to each and every day. Deny self? Hate myself? Give up who and what I am because I am to believe it is evil?
Why are most if not all people covered by Paul's vice list in such intimate ways? Because love of self rather than love of God is what defines our fallen state. We ALL fall under that list. I see myself there. You do to. The greatest of Christians can see themselves in that list, as we strive to rise above such things.
The title of this blog is about this very issue. Sacrificing my sexuality -- putting it to death. Putting self to death with all its wants and appetites. The problem, as always, is that the sacrifice keeps crawling off the altar. We die to it in repentance, but keep falling from life back into death over and over.
If not for the grace of God and His infinite patience and love, what a sorry, sorry state we'd be in.
II Timothy 3:1-5:
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in these verses. First of all, to be clear, when Paul talks about "the last days" he is talking about his own time. His command to Timothy to avoid these men makes no sense if he was predicting something that wouldn't come for centuries. When the New Testament uses the words "the last days" it refers to the time between Christ's first and second comings.
OK, so it refers to us, too. And it certainly describes our world. Interesting, in the Greek, the words "for men will be..." is "esontai gar hoi anthropoi..." The inclusion of the Greek article "hoi" means that Paul is saying that most (but not necessarily all) men (and women) will fall under this condemnation. Not just a few. Enough that you can state this as a general picture of the people in the world. What are people like in these last days? Like this. And it's not pretty.
Those Christians with a more humanistic philosophy that want to take a positive view of the nature of man have to ignore verses like this. Because the picture the Bible paints of the nature of man is evil.
But look at this vice list. Paul bookends the list with the root cause of the problem: people love themselves and not God. Everything else comes from that.
Love of self. Is that so wrong? The Greeks didn't thinks so. "Love of self" translates as philautos which the Greeks used in secular writings to mean what we generally mean by "self-respect." It was, to them, a virtue. Our culture is exactly the same: things like self-respect, self-confidence, self-esteem, are all seen as the keys to ALL virtues. The primary role of our schools is to instill in children self-esteem. One of the greatest evils our society recognizes is prejudices and insults that put people down and offend them. Which is why you never, ever say the N-word if you are a public figure. If you want the girl you have to just "be yourself," and believe in yourself.
Yet Paul puts it here at the head of a list describing the evils of mankind -- all the rest of which flow from it. Once again, mankind has called evil, good and good, evil. We have taken pride -- the source of ALL evil -- and called it the source of all good.
Which is why if anyone ever gives you any sort of advice -- informally, or formally in counseling -- that starts with love of self you are already going the wrong direction. But that is what we teach everywhere. Every form of psychology and sociology starts with it. Gotta' love yourself first. Because self must come first.
We have elevated self above God -- even in the church -- and made ourselves our idols. That is our first and most natural inclination: to make ourselves our own gods.
The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God."
But people will say, "You can't really love anyone else -- even God -- until you love yourself." Oh really? That is the absolute polar opposite of what Christ taught. He said:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.
He said:
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it."
We are also called to honestly look at ourselves and who we are and to repent of it, and to become, instead, like Him. We love ourselves in that God loves us and we trust His judgment. And in that, we do not love all of ourselves, as the sinful and corrupt part of our nature is NOT loved by God, but only the potential child of His buried beneath it.
"Just be yourself." "You just have to find yourself." Rubbish. That's the last thing you should want. Because we know what we will find, and it is ugly and evil and death itself. What we need -- all of us -- is not to find ourselves, but to lose ourselves. Not to be ourselves, who we really are inside, but to put THAT man to death and live as Christ.
Which is what faith and repentance and salvation is all about. When you look at the sin in yourself and realize that God's judgment that "the wages of sin are death" is not only just, but good and wonderful. That the sinful man inside you deserves to die. That the sinful man inside you NEEDS to die. That what you want more than anything is for that man to die.
Because as long as he lives, you live in living-death. You think you are alive, but you are really dead because sin IS death and man IS sin. You can only really live after that man is dead.
So, you kill yourself -- spiritually speaking -- in baptism. Putting on Christ's death. Dying with Him on the cross and being raised up with Him. Being born again, this time of the water and the spirit instead of through the flesh and sin.
Here is a trustworthy saying:
If we died with him,
we will also live with him
Which is a message man doesn't want to hear. That self-centeredness -- that love of self -- is totally opposed to the self-denial and self-hate implied in the call to die to self and live for Christ. We want OUR plan to be the one worked out, not God's. We want OUR will to be done, not His. We want to get our way. We want to have our ideas of right and wrong be real. We want our moral judgment to be right. We want to determine all these things -- what should and should not be, what we should and should not do, who we should and should not be, etc -- because that means we get to be God.
When you tell people to "just be yourself" and to find themselves, you are, in essence, elevating what they want to the level of ethics -- saying that to be ethical you just have to do what it is you really want to do anyway. It removes any idea of outside control. Any idea of a moral code that people should conform to, even if it means giving up what you want.
You see that especially clear in the debate over the moral uprightness of homosexuality. The world's side has one and only one real argument for their side. It says, "I was born wanting this, I really want it, and so I should have it. And no good and loving God would ever tell me I can't have what I want."
Yet the essence of God is telling all of us we can't have what we want because what we want is evil. We need to have what He wants for us, because what He wants for us is good.
But self -- SELF -- is our first and greatest idol. It is the god we bow down to each and every day. Deny self? Hate myself? Give up who and what I am because I am to believe it is evil?
Why are most if not all people covered by Paul's vice list in such intimate ways? Because love of self rather than love of God is what defines our fallen state. We ALL fall under that list. I see myself there. You do to. The greatest of Christians can see themselves in that list, as we strive to rise above such things.
The title of this blog is about this very issue. Sacrificing my sexuality -- putting it to death. Putting self to death with all its wants and appetites. The problem, as always, is that the sacrifice keeps crawling off the altar. We die to it in repentance, but keep falling from life back into death over and over.
If not for the grace of God and His infinite patience and love, what a sorry, sorry state we'd be in.
posted by Christian Husband at 9:25 AM
2 Comments:
There's always sooooooo much in your posts like this, it's difficult to pin down one comment. So I will try to keep this short (try!).
It took me a long to time to come to grips with who I am and what my nature is. And at times, yes, I have made myself god in my own eyes. Not knowingly, but eventually I recognized it. But the greatest thing about God is His loving outstretched arms that say, "I love you. I formed you. Come to Me, just as you are." And knowing that is what makes it possible to go to Him and lay my self back on the altar.
As for the homosexual aspect. I've had to think long and hard about this, because my son is living in that lifestyle. Within my own heart, I believe no one is born gay. It is a lifestyle they have chosen. Some people struggle with habitual lying, stealing, whatever. And some people struggle with the physical attraction to the same sex. God doesn't make us gay. We our born with a sinful nature that came into the world through Adam. We are all born with a sinful nature. We all struggle, but in different ways in different areas.
I'll reply to the "Intimacy" post here, since that one is over run with comments.
I'll comment by saying that I am ginning up a definitive post sort of dedicated to these two twin posts of yours, and try to somehow work in the Jambalaya post in as well so it doesn't feel left out.
There is a connection between intimacy and "self."
It's not so much about putting one ahead of another so much as distinguishing that there are distinct beings trying to connect. I am not God. God is not me. Yet I am somehow made in His image.
Being intimate with self necessarily precedes intimacy with any other. It's about control and responsibility. You can not control others, you can only try to exercise self-control. Remember your fasting post?
You're right that trying to be a god is at the root of all of our problems. Controlling the universe is a big job and if we try to do it it will be no wonder that we'll be depressed and antisocial!
I see the self-attachment you describe played out in what happens when we don't get our way. How do we react? Do we tantrum, blame, get defensive, steal, cheat, lie? Or do we learn and grow?
I'll see if I can tie this stuff together as its a work in progress.
D.
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