12: Know Yourself: Identity and Self-Image
12
KNOW YOURSELF
Identit y and Self-Image
“Know yourself” was a tag phrase among Greek philosophers who saw self-knowledge as the beginning of wisdom. And certainly there is no real wisdom without it. We see why self-knowledge is something that most serious people today, with most serious people in every age, do in fact desire and seek. You will constantly be unsure of yourself if you know you do not know who and what you are.
The late Peter Sellers, comedian and character actor, was asked to tape the Bible. He said no and in a moment of honesty explained why: “For a job like that,” he said, “you have to know who you are, and I don’t know who I am.” All of us find ourselves interesting and puzzling (the self-centeredness and lack of integration that flow from original sin ensure that), and as a result self-exploration fascinates us. That is why books of popular psychology sell so well.
I recall how long ago we sixth-formers (twelfth-graders, that is) devoured a programmed-learning paperback titled Know Yourself As You Really Are. (Sample of contents: do you like your baths hot or lukewarm? If the former, turn to page so-and-so. If the latter, go to page whatnot and answer the questions there.) Myers-Briggs and similar personality-testing routines are today’s counterpart, though they focus more on how one acts than on who and what one is. Also in my teens I read Freud and Jung and got into palmistry. (Left hand shows what you were born with; right hand reveals what you are making of yourself; reverse the formula for left-handers.) Then a phrenologist read my bumps and told me I needed to increase my word power 100 percent. What was I after in all of this? Self-knowledge. Was I odd to want it? I do not think so.
But now, after more than half a century as a Christian, I judge that very little of the self-knowledge we need comes to us from secular sources, despite the psychological preoccupations that perhaps did more to shape twentieth-century minds than any other cultural factor. Yet it would be wrong to say that modern psychology has not taught us anything that matters. On the contrary, it has shown us a great deal about our relationships and how behaviorally they make or mar us. In that connection, it has also highlighted for us the fact that we all carry inside us an idea or image of ourselves (as hero, victim, rebel, helper, or whatever) that more or less self-consciously we live out, feeling that this is our identity.
Coaches in sports always knew this, perceiving that those who see themselves as winners do better than those who expect to lose. The coach considers passionate pep talks of the “you-can-do-it” sort as vital to the success of the trainees. Is he right? Yes. Counseling pundits confirm that in all departments of life our view of ourselves programs our behavior, so that our ideas of what we can and can’t do become self-fulfilling prophecies. How true that is!
A bright person I know suffered ten years of academic disaster through internalizing the assurance, dumped on him in grade two, that he was a no-good at schoolwork. His image of himself as a klutz kept him from trying because it told him he would fail and drove him to develop a new identity as the one who played the fool. This kind of thing quite often happens.
Embedded in our self-image is our sense of worth. The psychologists have brought this into focus and thereby helped us all to understand each other better. As in some communities it is said that if you’re not Dutch, you’re not much, so, as we now realize, the world is full of emotional cripples, some of them Dutch, who deep down feel they are “not much,” despite being brainy, competent, and by worldly standards successful. In my youth we spoke of them as having an inferiority complex; now we say they have a low self-image.
Children starved of affirmation and affection at home regularly take into adult life a low self-image—a sense of lacking value, being a nobody, counting for nothing. Parents and schoolteachers, the prime authority figures in most children’s lives, can do them enormous harm by denying them praise, encouragement, interest, and help forward, the four strands of love in the sense that is relevant here. In the absence of such love, criticism of children for not coming up to expectations or family standards turns the knife in the wound, and the stronger the child’s imagination and capacity for fantasizing, the more bitter and more alienating the experience will be. All parents, in particular, need the deep wisdom of the apostle Paul in Colossians 3:21: “do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” Nagging one’s spouse, children, and friends is a sure-fire strategy for damaging both the relationship and the other person—two ventures in destruction for the price of one.
Low self-image, and the feeling of worthlessness that goes with it, is not a rational judgment, but an emotionally charged attitude that functions like dark-tinted spectacles through which one’s mind gazes as one thinks about oneself in relation to others. A Peanuts cartoon I saw tried to laugh it off. (“You look dreadful.” “Well, I feel inferior.” “Don’t worry, lots of people have that feeling.” “What, that they’re inferior?” “No, that you’re inferior.” No prizes for guessing which of the above are Lucy’s lines.) But those who have such feelings cannot laugh them off like that. The feelings come to stay; they express the pain and compensatory strategies of woundedness, and they do us harm in two ways.
First, a low self-image spawns inhibited, compulsive, and obsessive behavior of many sorts. Insecurity, instability, lack of self-respect, spinelessness, quarrelsomeness, cynicism, pushiness and bluster, isolation and withdrawal, hatred of those—races, classes, or individuals— who remind us of those who we feel failed and hurt us, power trips and power plays, passive and predatory relationships, drug-dependence and addictions, and promiscuity, both heterosexual and homosexual, may all result directly. Some take crazy risks in relationships because they still crave at any cost the affection once denied them; others handle relationships savagely and contemptuously because they no longer hope for genuine affection from anyone and so resent as would-be exploiters any who offer it. And while a low self-image is fairly easily diagnosed from the behavior it breeds, it is in essence an inner lameness that counselors can do little about.
Second, a low self-image puts obstacles in the way of full-hearted receiving of the gospel message. Hostile feelings toward authority figures get extended to God and make it harder to believe what the Bible says about his love. Self-pity caused by inner hurt reinforces the sinful self-centeredness that marks us all and makes it harder to develop a God-centered outlook and live a God-centered life. The ache to be sympathized with and, as we say, stroked prompts a shrugging off of all witness to our being faultier and guiltier and more offensive to God than ever we dreamed, and so makes it harder to take sin seriously. As on the horizontal plane of human relationships, so on the vertical plane of our relationship to God, the heart-pathology of the low self-image is fairly easily diagnosed from the deficiencies described, but to heal it is beyond the counselor’s power.
But as I say this, I run ahead of my own argument. For all genuine knowledge of ourselves as God sees and knows us is a supernatural divine gift. It is not the counselor’s or preacher’s skill that gives it, any more than it is just to those with a low self-image that it is given. Here we must face up to the basic Christian axioms of the double source and the double knowledge.
The doctrine of the double source is that it is through the Word and the Spirit together—the Bible truth, that is, illuminated to the mind and applied to the heart by the Holy Spirit—that understanding of divine things comes about. Without the Word, the facts about Christ and God’s promises of salvation through him would not be known; without the Spirit, the reality of Christ calling us to himself, and the acuteness of our need of him as our Savior, Lord, and Friend would not be known either.
The doctrine of double knowledge is that we only begin to know ourselves truly as the sinners and hopeless, helpless cases that God knows us to be as we become aware of how holy and good, how great and gracious, how just and at the same time how kind God himself is. The more we know of God’s graciousness, the more we shall be aware of our neediness, and the more we sense his greatness, the more we shall know our smallness. John Calvin gave us classic statements of both principles in his Institutes (see I.i. and I.vi-ix).
In a nutshell, then, there is no self-knowledge without some knowledge of God, and there is no knowledge of God apart from Bible truth (the Word) sealed on mind and heart by the Counselor-Helper-Teacher whom God sends (the Spirit). All of us, whatever our self-image and sense of identity may be, are in the same boat at this point.
What do we learn when, through the Word and the Spirit, we begin truly to know God and truly to know ourselves?
First, we learn how Christ changes for the better our ruined relationship to his Father. Throughout the New Testament the apostolic message centers on this. The New Testament Gospel announces the reality of divine love to sinners and shows us that love expressed and embodied in the most literal and direct sense in the ministry of Jesus Christ. It tells us, to start with, that Jesus Christ is God—God the Son incarnate, who died, rose, lives, and reigns to save us. It teaches us to see him as the mediator—the one and only peacemaker and reconciler— between God the Father and the human race. It sets him before us as the one with whom his disciples share fellowship now, as they will continue to do forever in heaven; as the one through whose atoning death our guilt is washed out, and we ourselves are adopted into the Father’s family when we believe; and as the one in whom by a unique, mysterious, permanent, unitive incorporation into his life as the risen Lord, we are bonded to him and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit in a way that transforms us. The Gospel proclaims Christ’s solitary glory as the only Savior, in this breath-taking sense, that the world ever has seen or will see.
Shot through with a drumbeat emphasis on the holiness of the Trinity and the certainty of judgment to come for everyone, and warning that all without Christ face disaster on judgment day, the New Testament Gospel teaches us to measure the love shown in Christ by setting three things together. The Gospel points out how guilty, perverse, and nasty our holy Creator sees us to be; how far the Father went to save us, giving his holy Son to taste the hell we deserve in order to secure our rescue; and how wonderful is the full forgiveness, lasting acceptance, clean slate, and adoption into the divine family that is Christ’s free gift in his Father’s name to penitent believers. The New Testament Gospel takes us lower in self-abhorrence and despair than inferiority feelings ever do and raises us to an awestruck joy that those with a “good” self-image, left to themselves, would never know. And from this repaired relationship, as is surely very clear, a changed view of ourselves must result.
However unloved and worthless we spiritual Cinderellas may once have felt, and however much self-hate, self-condemnation, and self-pity we may once have nursed, we must now see that by loving us enough to redeem us at the cost of his shame and agony on the cross, Christ the Lord at his Father’s will has actually given us value. So we must no longer tell ourselves that we have no value and matter to nobody. We matter to him!
And we must also see that by securing our complete forgiveness, Christ has obligated us to forgive ourselves for whatever haunts us from the past. He has made it sin for us not to do this.
And we must further see that by giving us a destiny of future glory, Christ has made it sin for us to cherish feelings of hopelessness, however powerfully we felt them in the past. It would be irreverence and unbelief to indulge ourselves in feeling hopeless when Christ has given us a hope that is sure, certain, and immeasurable.
So at every point the old way we thought and felt about ourselves must be driven out by a new one that is to last for the rest of our lives. Whether it was self-confidence or self-despair, pride or a low self-image, that shaped our sense of who we are, we are to think of ourselves very differently now that we are “ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,” and adopted children of God. As our habits of behaving will need to be changed, so will our habits of thought.
But before we take that further, there is another point to be made about New Testament teaching, as the Spirit opens it up to Christian hearts.
Second, we learn how Christ changes for the better our ruined nature as the Father’s image-bearers. This also is a key part of the apostolic message.
Believers, says the Gospel, are new creatures in Christ. Born again, we enter a new kind of life: We have come alive to God. Dying to sin—that is, passing from under its rule—as God changes our hearts, we rise in and with Christ into a Spirit-indwelt state marked by the discovery within ourselves of the inner inclinations of the Godman as we meet him in the Gospels. These inclinations are to love and serve and honor and obey and please and glorify and exalt our heavenly Father, a purpose that in our case embraces God the Son, our Savior, also. The Holy Spirit, who implanted these inclinations by regenerating us (we are “born of the Spirit,” John 3:6, 8; “born of God,” John 1:13; 1 John 3:9), now indwells us to enable us to fulfill them in daily living. The Spirit is God “who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). Through the Spirit’s ministry Christ himself is mysteriously but really in us (Col. 1:27), living his risen life in our everyday lives. What this means in practice is that we are helped to resist sinful urges that still rise up within us (few bad habits can be quickly broken) as we are moved to show forth the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—Gal. 5:22-23). This fruit is in truth the character of Jesus now being reproduced and growing to maturity in his followers. As he prompts us to such behavior, God the Holy Spirit is transforming us from the inside out, repairing the ruination that sin has effected in our moral being.
Our race, says the Scripture, was made to bear God’s image in a dual sense—to be his representatives on earth, his deputy managers as we might say (Gen. 1:26, 28), and to match his moral character in our attitudes, actions, relationships, values, and goals (Col. 3:9-10). But Adam failed, and now we are all born more or less rebellious, disintegrated, and incapable of fulfilling our double destiny. Our reconstruction, however, is in hand. The train stations of England are solid structures of Victorian brick or stone, which one feels might last forever, but today’s airports on both sides of the Atlantic undergo constant reconstruction, with new additions, and that illustrates the divine work of which I am speaking.
The miracle of God’s saving grace gives us a new identity that our self-image henceforth must express. Our natural self-image is an emotionally charged composite made up of our deepest sense of who and what we are, what we must and must not be, and how we expect to get on in the world of activity and relationships. The seedbed in which it has grown is our sense from the earliest days of other people, other things, and pressures and claims that demand to shape us. Our spiritual self-image, however, will now grow out of what is the biggest reality of life to us, namely our new relationship with God. This new reality is to absorb our natural self-image as a business firm absorbs the company it takes over—that is, by first assimilating and then remolding what was previously there, ending what was not fit to remain and setting something better in its place. The new self-image is to be fourfold.
First, in relation to God, we must see ourselves as inheritors. In antiquity the childless rich adopted as sons grown males of proven worth to uphold the family name and in due course to receive and manage the family fortune. The Gospel tells us that God in grace not only pardons us sinners, whoever we are and whatever mess we have made of our lives so far, but also adopts us into his family as his sons and heirs, to be glorified in due course alongside Christ himself (see Rom. 8:15-17). (“Sons” there should be understood as part of the picture because in ancient times women did not ordinarily inherit; the New Testament shows that in salvation the distinction between men and women is irrelevant, and both become heirs of the grace of life.) The doxology that opens Peter’s first letter focuses on the coming inheritance: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you . . .” (ESV).
Of this inheritance dying Mr. Stand-fast, at the close of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, speaks as follows:
. . . the thoughts of what I am going to, and of the Conduct that waits for me on the other side, doth lie as a glowing Coal at my Heart.
I see myself now at the end of my Journey, my toilsome Days are ended. I am going now to see that Head that was Crowned with Thorns, and that Face that was spit upon, for me.
I have formerly lived by Hear-say and Faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him, in whose Company I delight myself.
The first layer in our new self-image should be joy, amazement, anticipation, and a sense of privilege at being a fully instated inheritor of such glory as this.
Second, in relation to this life, we must see ourselves as travelers— not permanent residents but pilgrims going home, here to serve but not to settle down. Secular materialism, which surrounds us today, is earthbound, treating this life as all there is and seeking to foist on us a value system based on that assumption. But Christians must resist this pressure, and the first step in doing so is to learn to see ourselves as persons on a journey, who should keep moving because none of the places we pass through is the home where we belong. The two parts of Bunyan’s masterpiece (full title, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream, Wherein Is Discovered the Manner of His Setting Out, His Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country) stand as the all-time classic on this idea of life as a journey. (Have you read it yet?) The second layer in our new self-image should be the traveler’s sense of the temporary nature of his stay everywhere he goes and of his enjoyment of each place or condition as he passes through—a sense, in other words, that this world, wonderfully good and enjoyable as it is in so many ways, is not the home that is his destination.
Third, in relation to worldly pulls, sin’s promptings, and Satan’s prowlings, we must see ourselves as fighters. We are soldiers of Christ who cannot hope for a quiet life or an easy passage, but we advance by battling opposition with the armor and weapons that Christ supplies. We make headway across rough terrain by tackling the difficulties head-on. Bunyan’s presentation of this truth in the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress remains as realistic as it is vivid. It is perhaps relevant that twelve years in prison for being an outspoken nonconforming preacher of the Gospel had been part of his preparation in God’s providence for writing it. The third layer in our new self-image should be a sense of commitment to unenjoyable but unavoidable conflict with all the different kinds of evil, recognizing that behind them all stands Satan, the devil, Christ’s bitterest enemy, malicious, deceitful, and set to ruin all the work of God and destroy all the Christians in the world if he can.
Fourth, in relation to other people, and more particularly to other Christians, we must see ourselves as carers, bearers, and sharers. I put those words together not because they rhyme, but because I need all three to express the New Testament idea of how those who live for God must learn to live for others. A life of solitary withdrawal in order to concentrate on one’s personal relationship to God is not the godly way. Because uncaring individualism was strong in the first-century Graeco-Roman culture, just as it is in the West today, the New Testament teachers needed to be strong in enforcing neighbor-love in the world, which becomes brotherly love in the church—and strong they certainly were. “By this we know love, that he [Christ] laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16 ESV). “Brothers, if anyone is caught in some transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. . . . Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ . . . as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:1, 2, 10 ESV). “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (Heb. 13:16 ESV).
Passages like this (and there are many such) fully warrant our three rhyming nouns, as do Jesus’ own recorded teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, his story of the Good Samaritan, and his farewell discourse (see Matt. 5:38-48; 7:12; Luke 10:25-37; John 13:12-15; 15:12-17). Caring for others and seeking their welfare, bearing their burdens in order to help them, and sharing what we have with them as our practical expression of love for them are a mandated integral part of the Christian way of life. So the fourth layer in our new self-image should be a sense of being bound to spend and be spent in the service of others, in our families, our churches, and our wider communities of whatever kind.
Here, then, is the fourfold matrix of Christian reality out of which our new self-image must crystallize. But how is this to happen? One’s self-image, as we saw earlier, is an emotionally charged inner sense of one’s identity, potential, and relational prospects. We saw that our image of ourselves is important because it tends to program what actually takes place. A poor self-image inhibits and restricts and produces uncertainty and pessimism and expectations of proving inadequate, so that one dare not hope for worthwhile achievement, and most of the time one runs scared. By contrast, a good self-image yields constant confidence that one can do better, so that in fact one does. What, then, we ask, will turn our knowledge of the vocational quadrilateral, as we may call it, that must shape our identity and behavior into a liberating, motivating, encouraging sense of ourselves—in short, a good self-image by the counselors’ standard.
The secret is an open one: It is the same as the secret of joy that we explored earlier in this book. Everything depends on our learning to think in a particular way as a matter of habit. We have to acquire the habit of reminding ourselves over and over of the truths of the quadrilateral, and of telling God over and over in words of worship from our heart how good it is to be living such a life. We have to get into the way of basking and soaking and swimming in the love of the holy Three, of reckoning up the total of our wealth in Christ, and of repeatedly savoring the taste of the new wine that through the Spirit is our privilege to drink every day. Such meditations will have an effect parallel to that of our regular three meals a day, of which someone wrote:
It’s a very odd thing,
As odd as can be,
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.
As regular meals, duly digested, put flesh on our bones, so the regular digesting of God’s grace set forth in the Gospel stamps a Christian self-image on our hearts. Expose yourself to the sun, and your skin tans; expose yourself to God’s love, and a godly self-image, cognitively shaped and emotionally charged by the gifts of his love, becomes more and more a part of you. True as it may be that we shall never know fully who we are till we get to heaven, we already know in a decisive way where we are and where we are going, with our God as our friend and companion. This knowledge determines henceforth how we think and feel about ourselves. The Bible tells us it should, and the Holy Spirit within us ensures that it does. That we should thus know our new identity in Christ, and that a new, good, godly self-image should grow out of it, is one of the best and most brilliant of God’s plans for you and me.
One thing more remains to be said. At the heart, not indeed of our self-image but of our self-knowledge, there remains a profound ignorance. With bated breath, one feels, John wrote: “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2 ESV). The promise that we shall see our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as he is offers a wonderful prospect for believers, as any lover who over a period of time has been limited to phone conversations with the loved one will understand. But I would underline as specially significant for us, in light of what I have been saying, John’s acknowledgment that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.”
There are two reasons why. The first is that we do not know and cannot truly imagine what Jesus’ glorified humanity, which we are to see and be conformed to, is like. The second is that, when all is said and done, we know so very little of what we ourselves are now. Due to original sin, despite all the work of grace so far, we remain deeply disintegrated beings. We are largely out of touch with the unconscious, subconscious, preconscious aspects of ourselves that psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists try to dredge up and study, just as we are out of touch with most of the physiological processes that go on in our bodies. As was said at the start of this chapter, we all want to know ourselves thoroughly, and the promise that in heaven we shall “know as we are known” (1 Cor. 13:12 KJV) indicates that one day we shall. As in Christ we shall be fully integrated, as he is, so in Christ shall we be fully self-knowing and self-aware. But we cannot at present imagine what that will be like.
In his letter to Pergamum, our Savior promises: “To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Rev. 2:17 ESV). God-given names in Scripture are regularly revelations of the relationship to God and the role in his plans of the person named. So the promise clearly implies that we shall be shown in full exactly where we fitted in to what God was doing in his world. This revelation can hardly come without our being shown also how God knew us and shaped his dealings with us and his use of us in light of what he saw that we were—in other words, in light of our selfhood and makeup and traits and vulnerabilities as he knew them all along. And when I know these things as God knows them, I shall at last know fully who I am. The new name on the white stone will include this knowledge. It also belongs to God’s plans for you and me.
So the word of wisdom about our true and full identity in Christ is: Wait—and see! By God’s grace I settle for that; I hope you do, too.