Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Staring down my false self

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Exodus 20:2-5
You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God.

Religion, self, the Bible ... all quickly become idols when they overturn the relationship we have with God: God is the creator, and we are not.

A teacher told us, "You can't kill the false self with the false self." But Paul gives us an idea about how the false self dies: "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who made himself "nothing," taking the very nature of a servant. He humbled himself and became obedient to death."

But like the words "god" and "self," the word "nothing" is a bottomless well. Even our "nothings" are something. Making false gods is as natural and unconscious as breathing in the world after Eden. We are helpless to avoid idolatry on our own. Mostly without even knowing it we make our "self" into a god. When we seek a way out we turn to "nothing," but it inevitably becomes something we dare not let go of.

In the words of the Gospel we have discovered what are called the 12 Steps. The first three steps distill down to 1) I can't do this, 2) God can and 3) I think I'll let him.

Thomas Merton tried all his adult life to talk about this. His words inevitably corkscrew around themselves. These things are impossible to say, really. A couple years before Merton died he spoke of his fear of the kind of ignorance " that is based on acceptance of an illusion about myself. The ignorance that comes from the decision to regard my ego as my full, complete, real self and to work to maintain this illusion against the call of secret truth that rises up within me, evoked by others, by love, by vocation, by providence, by suffering, by God.

"I fear the ignorance that makes the inner core of selfhood determined to resist the call of truth that would dissolve it, ignorance that hardens in desire or willfulness, ignorance that comes from submersion in the body in surrender to the need for comfort and consolation.

"To be opaque and dense with opinion, with passion, with need, with hate, with power, is to be not there, to be absent, to non-exist. Logic and reason which are centered on what claims to be a religious truth can be as deep a source of blindness as any in the world, sex included." Paul cries out from the bonds of sin, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

My path is criss-crossed with self-made solutions and with failure. But Paul's answer is the one he always gives, and we can always remember in a prayer of gratitude and recognition: "Thanks be to God, who delivers me from Jesus Christ our Lord."

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in you, Christ Jesus, 2 because through you, Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has SET US FREE from the law of sin and death. Exhausted in our efforts, we weep with joy and surrender to your freedom, saying yes yes yes through our tears. As it is said, so it is done. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Devotions Archive

Staring down my false self

Sunday, March 8, 2015