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Key insights from
The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred
Call to Self-Discovery
By David
G. Benner
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What you’ll learn
Many Christians talk about
the centrality of their relationship to God. But there are two involved in
any relationship. Christians focus primarily on God, but neglect the other
half of the relational pair: the self. The self is very commonly invoked in
the context of “sinner,” but this often obscures the facts that the sinner
is deeply loved by God and that the self is the very ground where God chooses
to dwell and connect with a person. This book attempts to reconnect
contemporary Christianity to the ancient understanding of the God-given
gift of the self and its necessity for authentic spirituality and deep
connection with God.
Read
on for key insights from The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to
Self-Discovery.
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1. Authenticity comes easily to everything
in nature except people.
The search for the deeply
authentic self might initially strike a person as antithetical to Jesus’
teaching that whoever tries to save his life will lose it and whoever loses
his life for Christ’s sake will find it (Matthew 10:39). There are many
unhelpful ways to search for self that will end in disappointment, but if
we look at Christian spirituality, we see that it deals a lot with self as
well as with God. The goal of spirituality is the transformation of the
self into the image of Christ. It takes self and God for spirituality to be
possible. It is in the self that God meets and communes with us.
Authenticity is a journey
for us because our identity doesn’t come naturally to us. Everything else
in nature knows how to be itself. The rose grows and blooms and releases a
beautiful fragrance. No one has to tell that flower how to be a flower or
give it tutorials about the best time to bloom. Flowers, trees, cats,
planets, and protozoa know exactly what to do. But it is more complex for
humans. We think, we overthink, we fear, we need, we desire, we vacillate,
and we choose.
What if there was a way
that being “you” came as naturally as being a rose comes to the rose? It
might seem counterintuitive, but that natural being resides eternally at
the core of you who are; it’s the unique expression of God’s divine image
that is deeper and more intrinsically you than the sin and adaptive facades
that cover it up. There are hundreds or even thousands of possible
identities one can assume, but there is only one true self, hidden and
available in Christ. It is the only identity that will stand the test of
eternity. All others are fabrications, but the authentic you is not
something you can consciously create; it is a gift from God that you
discover.
If Christlikeness made us
into cookie cutter clones, we would probably be in a cult. But discovering
the true self that God has loved into being and cherished since the
beginning (and before) is a process that unearths the individual uniqueness
already there. The more we look like Christ, the more we look like
ourselves.
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2. The knowledge of self leads us to
knowledge of God as much as knowledge of God leads us to knowledge of self.
To say that knowing (and obeying
and loving) God is central to Christian spirituality is not a hard sell.
What raises red flags for many is the notion that knowing the self is
equally important.
There is an ancient
tradition among Christians that took for granted the importance of understanding
self as well as understanding God—even if the modern church has forgotten
it. Look at what Augustine prayed: “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself
that I may know thee,” or Thomas à Kempis’ remark that, “a humble
self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning.”
John Calvin wrote in his
Institutes of the Christian Religion that knowledge of God and
ourselves constitute “the whole of the sacred doctrine.”
Taking the self out of
spirituality risks cultivating a faith that is grounded in abstraction but
not tethered to experience. A wide gap between theological abstraction and
the world of experience can leave us feeling fake, and tempts us to hide
our internal chaos beneath a pious veneer. The gap harms us and those
around us and can be especially dangerous in church leaders.
We have all heard stories
of a pastor or church leader who builds up a following, appears very
genuine and vulnerable with his self-disclosures, and, by all appearances,
is close to God and aware of self—and then something comes to light.
Perhaps it is a hunger that led to a lust that led to a clandestine affair.
Behind the carefully manufactured public false self was a true self this
leader never really got to know. That true self would have taught him about
himself and connected him to God, but the lack of self-knowledge devastated
him and intimate relationships with family, friends, and congregation.
Anyone could name this
pastor, but the name matters less than the all-too-common pattern his life
illustrates: a knowledge of God, but a superficial knowledge of self.
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3. The knowledge that transforms us is not
informational but relational.
Some kinds of knowledge
fill, others puff us up. If we pursue knowledge of God or knowledge of self
without reference to who we are in God, we will probably start drifting
toward the latter outcome. The actor Woody Allen saw a therapist for
decades, but any self-knowledge he’s derived from free association analysis
doesn’t appear to have freed or healed him. His neuroticism has become part
of his shtick.
If we spend more time
gazing at ourselves than at God, we risk dropping into the void of
self-obsession that only isolates us further from God and self. At the
other extreme though, to gorge ourselves on encyclopedic understanding of
the character of God doesn’t bring us any closer to relating to God or him
to us. Let us not forget Jesus’ blunt warnings to the Pharisees: They knew
God’s law by heart but it had yet to affect their hearts.
There is a dialogue between
knowing God and knowing self. Something is missing if you only look at God
or only look at self. If you don’t know yourself at all, you won’t really
know God either. If you are afraid to take an honest look at yourself, you
will be just as scared to look at God. When this happens, concepts and abstractions
become a refuge and theoretical understanding of God replaces experiential
knowing of God. But it’s not the purely theoretical knowledge that will
save us or transform us.
We don’t need to wonder
what God is like anymore because we meet him in the person of Jesus. Paul
tells the church members in Colossae that Jesus is the visible image of the
invisible God. So whatever our ideas about God might be, we have to check
them against what we know about Jesus.
Belief is one thing.
Relational knowledge is another. And we often make the mistake of
conflating introduction and relationship. A first encounter or moment of
conversion is not a relationship but merely the beginning of one. God
wishes to be known by you, to disclose himself to you. Even the best first
meeting with someone, with sparks of joy and strong connection, can hardly
be considered a relationship if nothing follows.
Transformative knowledge is
personal knowledge of God. When we pray, when we wait in stillness before
God and let ourselves be seen by him, accepting his acceptance of us, we
discover more of who he is. We discover him in relationship when we imagine
ourselves in first-century Palestine and follow him to the sites of
miracles and teachings. We discover him personally when we just watch him:
not with a desire to extract a moral lesson, but a desire to be with him.
It isn’t efficient, but genuine, loving relationships aren’t based on
efficiency either. Love is what we are after, and as we watch him, we
become like him.
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4. You will not change until you know that
you are deeply loved.
How does God feel about
you? How does he see you? Many people fear that God is deeply disappointed
with them, mad at them, or simply putting up with them. When Christians do
contemplate the human side of their relationship with God, “sinner” is one
of the most common descriptors. But that description verges on incorrect
when divorced from the cosmos-shifting phrase “deeply loved.” Yes, we are
sinners to the core, but we are sinners who are deeply loved.
The late philosopher Dallas
Willard pointed out that obsessing over specific sins can lead to a harmful
“gospel of sin management” that inadvertently keeps our eyes on our
problems rather than on Jesus. Deep spiritual change does not come by
trying to stop doing something wrong; it comes when we invite Jesus into
the deep, wounded places from which those sins spring.
One church leader
struggling with porn was doing everything he could to “crucify his desires”
and was convinced that his addiction was his main issue. At first glance,
it seemed plausible, given the damage it was doing to his marriage and
ministry. But it became increasingly clear that beneath the addiction was a
deep desire for intimacy, a pride and entitlement that he deserved more
respect and appreciation than he was getting, and a resentment when those
expectations were not met.
We tend to make sin a
matter of mere morality, but it is more accurate to see sin as something
more basic to our nature, something that is part of us rather than something
we do. Our ethical failures stem from our damaged nature, and it is this
damaged nature that needs to be healed. Jesus didn’t just take our sins on
himself; he took sin on himself: the entire cursed atmosphere in which we
are immersed. Like the church leader struggling with an addiction, we miss
true spirituality and transformation when we are so busy self-flagellating
over bad fruits that we never get to the roots that keep producing them. At
the roots, at our core wounds, Jesus is there, waiting for us, ready to
help us the moment we surrender them to him.
True knowing of God and
self begins when you view God and perceive how God sees you: It’s a look of
pure delight and adoration. The knowledge that you are deeply, radically,
and unconditionally loved is the foundation of transformation, the soil in
which growth takes place. New life begins when we can turn and honestly
face those parts of ourselves that we are not proud of, and trust that we
have been welcomed to sit at the table Jesus has set. We can love those
parts of ourselves out of hiding because God loved them first and loves
them still.
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5. Like us, Jesus had to discover who he
was in God.
God is wandering the garden
of every human heart, asking, “Where are you?” not to punish, but to pursue
us in love and bring our hearts back to his heart. It is when we say, “Here
I am” that we begin a journey back to love, naked and unashamed instead of
hiding behind bushes and clothes of fig leaves, as Adam and Eve did in the
first garden.
Jesus can identify with us
in this weakness of vulnerability. We forget this sometimes when we focus
so much on Jesus’ divinity that we lose sight of the fact that he was not
only fully God but fully human. One way Jesus identifies with us is a way
we might have overlooked: Jesus had to undergo his own process of
discovering who he was, and then embrace that true self that God knit
together in Mary’s womb.
Think about what that must
have been like for Jesus to read the Scriptures as a young boy and begin to
piece together that prophecies were pointing to him as the source of
fulfillment, for him to be reminded of what Simeon prophesied over him as
an infant. Think about what it must have been like to have Mary as a
mother. We know that she was highly favored among women and that her heart
was humble and open to God. His mother’s faith that Jesus was the Son of
God would become his own, too. She modeled faith and steadfastness that
would have been formative in the life of a young child.
Like the rest of us, Jesus
had to learn who he was to his Father in heaven. He had to learn how to
step into that identity. Like us, Jesus had a false self that he had to
face, but then also remembered who he truly was. In the wilderness, Satan
appealed to Jesus’ false self, those parts that would have been tempted to
succumb to the allure of power and prestige. In the face of rejection and
doubt, Jesus constantly pointed people to who he was in the Father. He
glorified God by being himself, and stayed connected by stealing away to
lonely places to be in his Father’s presence.
Jesus was completely
himself, steady in his conviction that he had the Father’s love and
approval. He knew who he was. When we embrace the unique self that God has
given to us, we experience freedom and relief because we are no longer
hustling and fabricating a self that we hope God, other people, and we
ourselves will approve of. We desperately search for our own fulfillment in
the false selves we build, but once we die to ourselves by giving up
on that search for fulfillment and happiness, we can discover who we are in
God. Then we will, paradoxically, find our truest self and deepest
fulfillment because we are discovering who God has envisioned us to be for
all eternity.
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