Most of us think we understand biblical spirituality; we think we have heard it all before. Yet the more I learn, the more I realise that biblical faith radically surprises you, just when you think you understand it. The Bible is like a never-ending river of spiritual resources, like on of those computer-generated fractals that keeps going deeper and becoming more vivid. The Bible has radical ways of teaching us about the redemption of our desires and the path towards holiness and shalom.
Take the story of a couple with marital difficulties where the spouses seemed to be bored and take each other for granted. Their counsellor advised them to make a radical experiment. He told the wife to dress up, head down to the bar, and sit at a table. The husband was ordered to enter the bar separately and sit away from his wife, watching her. The husband began to notice that men in the bar were sneaking glances at his wife. Some men even made advances toward her. When one man initiated an attempt to seduce her, the husband, enraged with jealousy, rushed across the bar, his heart pounding with passion and anger. Suddenly, the husband no longer saw the woman he had become so familiar with; instead, he saw this woman whom other men were trying to seduce. Likewise, the wife no longer saw a man who had become bored with her; now he was a lover, fighting off other men just to have her. The couple, whose sex life had been almost non-existent lately, who had fallen out of love with each other, were so filled with passion that they couldn't even make it home and ended up making love in their car. The point is: jealousy, brought under the Lordship of God, that is in its correct place, can be holy.
Similar truth applies to sexual desires or lust in general. Our culture tries to turn the physical into a commodity. Instead of seeing beauty as a fleeting pointer to a reality beyond, lust turn us onto a dead-end street. The antidote to list is to put beauty in its divinely ordered place, to treat it as a calling card from the redeemed world to come. Sexuality is about so much more than just the act of sex; it is about the whole person. We need to learn to stay on the path of holiness, moving closer and closer to our true self.
To find our true selves, we first must give up our lives. We see this most clearly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The victory for humanity, the defeat of evil, death, sin, flesh, sarx, and injustice, comes through the giving up of life. This is the last but hardest part of our journey toward our true selves. It is the final step - to become our real selves, we must die to those parts of us that are not truly us. As Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it" (Mark 8:35).
Once you begin to shed your media masks and false public self, you begin to walk the path of holiness and shalom toward your true self. You will find that you begin to see sparks of eternity in your own life. You will see tiny signs each day of how you are becoming more like Christ. But you will also begin to see that spark, that potential, in others. You will often see it in people who cannot see it in themselves - perhaps in a family member or friend. But other times you will look down into the mud and much of contemporary life, and behind the public selves, the media masks, the actors in your life movie, the people turned into products, you will look into the eyes of others and you will see that undeniable spark of the image of God. And you will find your fingers fumbling in your pockets to find a white stone, with a new name on it. Everything within you will wish that you could pass them that smooth, cold, tangible reminder that Jesus stands holding a white stone with their true name written on it.
And so I wish that I could reach into my pocket and hand you a white stone. But I cannot, so this book is my white stone to you. A stone that also works as a key, opening a doorway out of the cramped, stale confines of the horizontal self, filling you with the gusts of fresh air perfumed with the scent of eternity.
Conclusion, I want to recruit you to become part of a revolution of the vertical self. More than ever individuals need to see themselves as God sees them. So many of the problems in our culture stem from a misunderstanding of our true identities.Let's not beat around the bush; if you are to shake off the effects of living under the horizontal self, and if you are to journey toward your true self, you will need people to keep you accountable and that journey together with. Three people would be a good number, even though it could be more or less. Now, here is where the magic lies. Just imagine if the three people that you choose go on to each choose another three people and so on. You have the power of multiplication at work, and before you know it you have affected hundreds of people. Keep multiplying and you are talking about a movement of people discovering their true identities in Christ. Be creative and find ways that work with your personality type. So it does not matter how you do it; what matters is that you do it.
Let the movement toward our true selves begin!
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.151-171
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Summary of Chapter 10: "Meeting Your Future Self"
As Christians, we need to practice a holiness rooted in the biblical notions of creation and re-creation. For too long, Christian holiness has been defined by its dualism, the tendency to divide to divide the world into good and bad, spirit and matter, saint and sinner. You are a vital and irreplaceable element of God's good creation. We don't need to find ourselves; rather, we need to rediscover our original purpose by imitating God's creative endeavours in making the world a better place. God invites us to join him in making the creation whole. We possess tremendous power; we can improve the world and our lives through cooperation with God, or we can bring injustice, destruction, and death into the world through our insistence on relying not on God but on our own abilities and powers.
It is interesting to note that when some people in the Bible encountered Jesus, they were given a new name, like the name we will be given on the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17. Therefore, if we are to rediscover who we really are, we must find the blueprint of who we are meant to be in the person of Christ. We have two choices before us. We can attempt to find a sense of self in the patterns of this world, or we can put our trust in the source of our true identity. Just as in Paul's day, our culture today offers competing visions of self. The "powers and principalities" exist in our time just as they did when Paul was writing.
The same choice confronts us today, and the ramifications of the choice we make can be just as serious. We can bring upon ourselves a kind of self-judgement in which we fall into a forgetfulness of God, an ignorance of the fact that God is the source of all life. Cut off from this source, we find our behaviour becoming less human and more animalistic. This is what happens when we give ourselves over to what Paul describes often as "the flesh". When Paul, writing in Greek, penned the world we translate as "flesh", he used the Greek word sarx. To describe our physical bodies, he used the word soma, which is most often translated as "body".
Thus, the path of holiness is about ridding ourselves of sarx that is, anything in life - attitudes, relationships, actions, desires, or worldviews - that carries with it the spirit of death and corruption, that moves against God's intention for the world. Imagine Paul's plea to rid ourselves of our flesh as a plea to rid ourselves of that which is not our true self. For example, casual sex carries with it the spirit of sarx. By sleeping with people with whom we have no binding relationship, we end up using them as commodities through which to satiate ourselves. This outcome may not be immediately apparent; in fact, a casual sexual encounter may initially seem thrilling and satisfying. But that misses the point. The spirit of sarx is corrosive, i.e. its effects wear at us over a long time. Treat others as commodities rather than humanising them, and ultimately you find yourself becoming dehumanised by others or by yourself.
We all desperately want to move toward our true selves, but our desires, egos, and impulses derail our attempts. Our culture doesn't have the answers for the conflicts that we feel over our desires. Sometimes we feel power urges to yell at people, to have sex with people we are not married to, or to eat large amounts of junk food that we know isn't good for our bodies. Thus, we find within ourselves a battle. Part of the problem lies in the way we, as Christians, have dealt with our desire: we have been encouraged to either ignore them or completely repress them. Yet when we repress something, we know it usually returns with more force or pops up in another place or in another form. However, the Bible offers a completely different approach: the redemption of our desires. The point is that God has placed our human desires in us for a purpose; they are not to be destroyed but harnessed. For example, sex can be an uncaring, selfish and empty act between to self-loathing individuals, or it can be the pinnacle of a lifelong commitment that becomes a spiritual act of worship.
Those of us who are determined to take seriously the challenge of spiritual growth see our desires as a chance to find our true selves. Biblical spirituality recognises that our temptations are unique to our personalities. For example, some of us are able to drink alcohol with no ill effects, while others of us find that alcohol harms our health, impedes our ability to make wise decisions, and affects the way we treat others. Some people have no problem enjoying healthy friendships with people of the opposite sex, but for others, the world of those relationships is a minefield of sexual and emotional entanglements. In most cases it seems that we challenged and tempted in the areas in which we are meant to grow. While we can't avoid challenges and temptations, we can choose how we respond to them when they arise.
As C.S. Lewis wisely wrote: "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospel, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday to the sea. We are too easily pleased." God has much greater pleasures in store than the very short-term exciting pleasures of sin that corrode our true selves over time.
Scripture provides us with four great themes that aid us as we attempt to bring balance to our impulses and desires. They help us to redeem our desires so that we can move toward our future selves:
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.102-150
It is interesting to note that when some people in the Bible encountered Jesus, they were given a new name, like the name we will be given on the white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17. Therefore, if we are to rediscover who we really are, we must find the blueprint of who we are meant to be in the person of Christ. We have two choices before us. We can attempt to find a sense of self in the patterns of this world, or we can put our trust in the source of our true identity. Just as in Paul's day, our culture today offers competing visions of self. The "powers and principalities" exist in our time just as they did when Paul was writing.
The same choice confronts us today, and the ramifications of the choice we make can be just as serious. We can bring upon ourselves a kind of self-judgement in which we fall into a forgetfulness of God, an ignorance of the fact that God is the source of all life. Cut off from this source, we find our behaviour becoming less human and more animalistic. This is what happens when we give ourselves over to what Paul describes often as "the flesh". When Paul, writing in Greek, penned the world we translate as "flesh", he used the Greek word sarx. To describe our physical bodies, he used the word soma, which is most often translated as "body".
Thus, the path of holiness is about ridding ourselves of sarx that is, anything in life - attitudes, relationships, actions, desires, or worldviews - that carries with it the spirit of death and corruption, that moves against God's intention for the world. Imagine Paul's plea to rid ourselves of our flesh as a plea to rid ourselves of that which is not our true self. For example, casual sex carries with it the spirit of sarx. By sleeping with people with whom we have no binding relationship, we end up using them as commodities through which to satiate ourselves. This outcome may not be immediately apparent; in fact, a casual sexual encounter may initially seem thrilling and satisfying. But that misses the point. The spirit of sarx is corrosive, i.e. its effects wear at us over a long time. Treat others as commodities rather than humanising them, and ultimately you find yourself becoming dehumanised by others or by yourself.
We all desperately want to move toward our true selves, but our desires, egos, and impulses derail our attempts. Our culture doesn't have the answers for the conflicts that we feel over our desires. Sometimes we feel power urges to yell at people, to have sex with people we are not married to, or to eat large amounts of junk food that we know isn't good for our bodies. Thus, we find within ourselves a battle. Part of the problem lies in the way we, as Christians, have dealt with our desire: we have been encouraged to either ignore them or completely repress them. Yet when we repress something, we know it usually returns with more force or pops up in another place or in another form. However, the Bible offers a completely different approach: the redemption of our desires. The point is that God has placed our human desires in us for a purpose; they are not to be destroyed but harnessed. For example, sex can be an uncaring, selfish and empty act between to self-loathing individuals, or it can be the pinnacle of a lifelong commitment that becomes a spiritual act of worship.
Those of us who are determined to take seriously the challenge of spiritual growth see our desires as a chance to find our true selves. Biblical spirituality recognises that our temptations are unique to our personalities. For example, some of us are able to drink alcohol with no ill effects, while others of us find that alcohol harms our health, impedes our ability to make wise decisions, and affects the way we treat others. Some people have no problem enjoying healthy friendships with people of the opposite sex, but for others, the world of those relationships is a minefield of sexual and emotional entanglements. In most cases it seems that we challenged and tempted in the areas in which we are meant to grow. While we can't avoid challenges and temptations, we can choose how we respond to them when they arise.
As C.S. Lewis wisely wrote: "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospel, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday to the sea. We are too easily pleased." God has much greater pleasures in store than the very short-term exciting pleasures of sin that corrode our true selves over time.
Scripture provides us with four great themes that aid us as we attempt to bring balance to our impulses and desires. They help us to redeem our desires so that we can move toward our future selves:
- Bringing our desires under Christ's lordship: Humility is a forgotten art in our culture of self-promotion and self-obsession. By admitting that we are works in progress, we create a space of humility. We are saying that when it comes to becoming fully human, we don't have all the answers; those answers are to be found only in God.
- Bringing our desires under covenant: The Bible calls us to covenantal relationship with other believers, with the poor (Prov 31:20), with the marginalised and despised (Lk 10:25-37), with creation (Gen 1:28-31), and even with our enemies (Lk 6:35)
- Testing the worthiness of our desires: A great way to test the worthiness of our desires is to examine whether they reflect a respect of the image of God in others and ourselves. Our culture has moved away from the idea of respecting the image of God in others. Instead, it turns others into mere social images and robs them of their humanity. Therefore, we must ask ourselves whether our desires are helping us cultivate the image of God in us. Scripture is the standard against which we can hold our desires to ensure that we are respecting the image of God.
- Testing the fruitfulness of our desires: We can tell something is in correct balance when it produces fruit. An excellent test of our desires and impulses is to ask whether they are cultivating godly fruit in others, our desires and actions should add to the betterment of this world.
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.102-150
Friday, March 1, 2013
Summary of Chapter 9: "Say Hello to Your Future Self"
We must look beneath the surface of the public personae the media masks, and the false selves. We see a desire for truth, albeit misguided. We know that deep down we desire to connect and be ourselves with people who are whole, people who echo a sense of the eternal. Certain individuals are intriguing to us because they seem to be alive. Survey after survey tells us that confidence is the most attractive quality we find in other people. We value a sense of knowing one's self and a sense of mystery that hints at both tranquillity and strength.
As people with a horizontal view of self, we spend so much time cultivating our outward appearances and shaping our public performances that we neglect our interior lives. That is to say, we neglect our souls. As theologian and writer Eugene Peterson said: "In our current culture, "soul" has given way to "self" as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. "Self" is the soul minus God." If we are to rescue ourselves and our culture from the crisis of self, we must re-image ourselves in the image of God.
Our culture associates being bad with fun: the term naughty is now associated with sexual pleasure; ice cream advertising encourages us to give in to temptation; motorcycle ads tell us to be bad. Why should you try to be good in a world where being naughty is the way you have fun? In fact, having fund by being naughty is almost celebrated as a counter-cultural act of freedom fighting. Time and time again, popular culture pits the pleasure-seeking "good guys" against those killjoys who wish to stop the party people from having a good time (which is normally equated with getting high, losing your virginity, throwing a wild dance party, or all of the above).
The struggle to be "bad" in the face of a mythical enemy who wants you to conform is almost a political struggle. This cultural myth means that our societies change little. The hard work that is required to change unjust laws and policies, or the long-term commitment to community development that is needed to help the poor, does not look very "sexy" when compared to the mythology of a "party on" revolution of being bad. Thus, social systems don't change and the irony is that the false freedom fight of pleasure only serves to keep unjust structures in place.
Some past saints were influenced by a worldview that saw the material world as evil and as something to retreat from. That is why so many of them fled to the desert or the wilderness or to monasteries. While some of these saints became literal martyrs, others saw their separation from the world for the sake of holiness as a kind of martyrdom. Thus, it is little wonder that many young adults look at holiness as a form of social death.
Sadly, Christians have proven that sin can and does happen in the Christian ghetto; it just usually happens behind closed doors. Such dualistic views of holiness seem millions of miles away form the reality of our lives and our spiritual capabilities These views are based on a worldview of escape and detachment. Biblical faith, however, gives us a spirituality based on struggle and engagement.
Therefore, we require a more robust approach to holiness, one that takes seriously the temptations we face daily, one that recognises that we are able to act in destructive ways, one that does not require us to flee the mission field to which Jesus sent us, and one that does not require us to abandon our ordinary lives to achieve spiritual growth. To walk the path of holiness and to find our true selves, we need to rediscover a biblical holiness grounded in the value of creation.
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.78-101
As people with a horizontal view of self, we spend so much time cultivating our outward appearances and shaping our public performances that we neglect our interior lives. That is to say, we neglect our souls. As theologian and writer Eugene Peterson said: "In our current culture, "soul" has given way to "self" as the term of choice to designate who and what we are. "Self" is the soul minus God." If we are to rescue ourselves and our culture from the crisis of self, we must re-image ourselves in the image of God.
Our culture associates being bad with fun: the term naughty is now associated with sexual pleasure; ice cream advertising encourages us to give in to temptation; motorcycle ads tell us to be bad. Why should you try to be good in a world where being naughty is the way you have fun? In fact, having fund by being naughty is almost celebrated as a counter-cultural act of freedom fighting. Time and time again, popular culture pits the pleasure-seeking "good guys" against those killjoys who wish to stop the party people from having a good time (which is normally equated with getting high, losing your virginity, throwing a wild dance party, or all of the above).
The struggle to be "bad" in the face of a mythical enemy who wants you to conform is almost a political struggle. This cultural myth means that our societies change little. The hard work that is required to change unjust laws and policies, or the long-term commitment to community development that is needed to help the poor, does not look very "sexy" when compared to the mythology of a "party on" revolution of being bad. Thus, social systems don't change and the irony is that the false freedom fight of pleasure only serves to keep unjust structures in place.
Some past saints were influenced by a worldview that saw the material world as evil and as something to retreat from. That is why so many of them fled to the desert or the wilderness or to monasteries. While some of these saints became literal martyrs, others saw their separation from the world for the sake of holiness as a kind of martyrdom. Thus, it is little wonder that many young adults look at holiness as a form of social death.
Sadly, Christians have proven that sin can and does happen in the Christian ghetto; it just usually happens behind closed doors. Such dualistic views of holiness seem millions of miles away form the reality of our lives and our spiritual capabilities These views are based on a worldview of escape and detachment. Biblical faith, however, gives us a spirituality based on struggle and engagement.
Therefore, we require a more robust approach to holiness, one that takes seriously the temptations we face daily, one that recognises that we are able to act in destructive ways, one that does not require us to flee the mission field to which Jesus sent us, and one that does not require us to abandon our ordinary lives to achieve spiritual growth. To walk the path of holiness and to find our true selves, we need to rediscover a biblical holiness grounded in the value of creation.
Source: Mark Sayers (2010), The Vertical Self, p.78-101
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