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:

1. 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.
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. 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