Friday: Unity within the Personal Self
WEEK 16
FRIDAY
UNITY WITHIN THE PERSONAL SELF
Ephesians 4:11-13
We have looked at the first unity that came into being with the coming of the Holy Spirit—unity with God. The second unity was unity within the personal self. “And they were all filled with the holy Spirit . . . [and] began . . . to express themselves” (Acts 2:4 MNT). Now they could “express themselves,” for they had selves they could express. They were unified within. And unified within, they could express themselves without. Why were they unified within? Because they belonged to Another and not to themselves. Belonging to Another, they now began to belong to themselves. That is the inflexible paradox. They could live with themselves because they could live with God. If you won’t live with God, you can’t live with yourself. But if you do live with God without conflict, you can live with yourself without conflict.
You are no longer fighting with yourself. All self-hate and self-rejection are gone. You can love yourself now because you love something more than yourself. Self-hate is as bad as other-hate. Christianity delivers us from both. It makes you love yourself as you love your neighbor, Not less and not more but “as.”
The cults of self-expression try to make you express yourself while still centered in the self. That makes for artificiality and artfulness. A young man who had tried self-expression, trying to put on an ingratiating smile, found the real thing through self-surrender. Then a real smile came. He laughingly said, “I felt the corners of my mouth twitching nervously after I ceased putting on an artificial smile.” It was twitching from habit even after the artificial attempt to smile had been taken away. Now he could smile from the inside out; before he was attempting to smile from the outside in. Unnatural expression! When the Holy Spirit took over the group on the day of Pentecost, they could express themselves naturally because they expressed themselves supernaturally. In God they were themselves. Now they expressed themselves artlessly. They had natural joy, natural self-expression, because they were naturalized in God. They had selves they could express—beautiful selves.
O Lord, I thank you that I can be at home with you and with myself. My life’s music is now no longer off key; it is on key, and it plays divine music through a human instrument. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All self-hate, self-rejection, are gone. I gladly accept myself—in God.