Category: Things that make you go hmmm

Acceptance vs Approval

All of us have met people who rub us the wrong way.  And there are always things that people do that we disagree with, some of them very strongly.  Not everyone likes tattoos or piercings.  When I dyed my hair as a youth leader I got a great many negative comments from people who thought that it wasn’t the right behaviour.  Society has a great many different behaviours and attitudes that we disagree with.   As Christians this is more evident as we try to follow a standard for life that the world doesn’t believe in or in many cases agree with.

I have found that many people get rejected in life because we cannot agree with their choices.  We see the behaviour and stop and don’t go any further to the person underneath the behaviour.  Because we cannot approve of the decisions or behaviours we are critical of them and judge them harshly.  I have seen it so often and it is something I have wrestled with for many years.  I came to know the acceptance of Christ and found that it wasn’t conditional based on my behaviour.  And all through the gospels we see Jesus reaching into the lives of people who were in direct disobedience to what God wanted for them, and every person who met Jesus felt His acceptance of them.

If we see acceptance as approval we will never be able to build bridges to the people we come in contact with.  There will always be things we cannot approve of.  Approval means I am in agreement with.  So if you lifestyle is not something I can agree with then I must stand in disagreement and criticize and judge.  It seems to be the behaviour of many people in our world.

Acceptance however isn’t the same as approval.  People can be acceptable even when their choices go completely against what we hold as values and standards.  Acceptance looks at the person, not the behaviour.  Acceptance can be communicated even when approval cannot be given.  Acceptance says you are valuable and your value isn’t increased or decreased by your performance.   This is exactly what Jesus did.  Romans 5:8 “But think about this: while we were wasting our lives in sin, God revealed His powerful love to us in a tangible display—the Anointed One died for us.” (Voice)  Jesus didn’t wait for us to get everything right so He could die for us, He accepted us completely and paid our penalty, even though He couldn’t approve of our behavior. 

Acceptance seeks to listen, hear and understand a person simply because they are worth it.  Approval just looks for agreement with.  Our message can only properly go out as we work to separate these two.  Acceptance needs to be communicated and lived regardless of who people are and the choices they are making.  Acceptance is how love is communicated, and is one of the most vital needs in a persons life.  We don’t need to know people approve of us.  At times it is nice, but we can live without people’s agreement.  We cannot live without acceptance.  Something in our souls withers and dies when acceptance is withheld.

We need to receive and communicate acceptance in order for our lives to be healthy and whole.  It is up to us to decide whether we are going to learn to accept people for who they are and the intrinsic value they have, or if we will fight simply for approval and only spend time with people we can be in agreement with.

The false self and God

true-identity.jpgWe were created for relationship.  Each and every person has built into us a need for others.  We need relationships in order to be healthy and grow.  Unfortunately we have given into the idea of independence and we can go it alone.  This was not the plan that God had in mind for us.  God created us for relationship and the primary relationship was meant to be with Him.  Everyday God would come and walk through the garden and interact and share with Adam and Eve.  And even though things got screwed up by the choices they made that removed us from relationship with God, He never let go of this one thing.  We were created for relationship, and God deeply desires a personal relationship with everyone.

Our problem is we don’t know ourselves and we are not willing to look within and see what is inside us we end up hiding from God.  We take large portions of ourselves and hide them away for fear of rejection, or because they are parts of ourselves that we don’t like, or are uncomfortable with.  We live a life based on the image of who we want people to see, or what I have begun to understand as a false self, or false identity.  We have learned to portray ourselves in a way that seems favorable and ignores anything that is uncomfortable about ourselves.  And every moment of every day of our life God wanders in our inner garden, seeking our companionship. The reason God can’t find us is that we are hiding in the bushes of our false self.

David Benner wrote “The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others. But because of the illusory nature of the false self, most of the time we are not aware that we are hiding. Coming out of hiding requires that we embrace the vulnerabilities that first sent us scurrying for cover. As long as we try to pretend that things are not as they are, we choose falsity.”

The problem is we don’t always recognize our false identity because we have lived with it for so long that we have become comfortable with and live according to who we made ourselves to be.  But that very thing we use to protect ourselves from others ends up separating us from God who deeply loves us.  We end up not knowing ourselves, and as a result we miss out on knowing God.  The worst part is we don’t even recognize that we don’t know God, because we design Him to suit ourselves.  So we think we know Him and we follow Him, but we are following a “god created in our image.”

What is worse is the very thing we use to hide ourselves ends up creating this very thing.  “Having first created a self in the image of our own making, we then set out to create the sort of a god who might in fact create us. Such is the perversity of the falspuppet1e self.”  We then pursue a life we are comfortable with and allows us to never examine ourselves to deeply, and we never really have to change.   Our false self will keep us in bondage and we will be happy to allow it until we realize that isn’t what God designed us for.

If we are willing to allow God to show us who we really are, and begin to work from there we can encounter the true God and see our lives transformed.  But it begins by being wiling to see ourselves differently.  If we close the door and refuse to look inward we lose the ability to truly know God.  Knowing God will always cause us to see ourselves and to know ourselves.  We cannot change what we do not know, and if we never allow God to reveal our true nature we will never allow Him to change us.

Even though it may be uncomfortable and even painful we must be willing to allow God to remove our shell and our false identity.  It begins by asking God to help you see what makes you feel most vulnerable and most like running for cover.  Our false self will try to protect itself and keep you hidden, but we cannot allow it.  The places we feel the most vulnerable is the very place that God wants to open our hearts to His presence and love, but He can only do this if we allow Him in.  So we need to ask God to help us look inside and to help us see the things that we use to defend ourselves from feeling vulnerable.  Then we need to ask God to prepare you to trust enough to let go of these fig leaves of your personal style.

The riches of God’s presence await us if we are willing to open ourselves up to His touch.

The tragic part of your journey

tragicInside every one of us is a desire to know ourselves.  Many are able to numb this desire by a great variety of pursuits and focuses which allow them to be distracted from the search for self.  This is the biggest tragedy.  The fact that people can go through life never knowing themselves, never seeing and realizing their potential, never coming to know and release the gift that they are into the world.

Everyone of us was created with purpose, and there is not a single person born who was a mistake.  Every person was created with meaning and purpose and gifting.  And far to many of us miss out on the blessing we are by not taking the time to seek out ourselves.  Our world has an ability to exert great pressure on us and without an inner sense of purpose we will always get squeezed out.  The choice before us is never one of becoming.  We will always become something.  Becoming is a certainty.  The question is always what will we become.  If we do not decide to search out and become ourselves, our world and our relationships will decide for us.

The problem with identity is that there is a false identity.  For every truth there is a false.  And we have all developed a false identity.  The mask that we choose to wear that makes us acceptable to those around us.  We all have a false identity.  One that we use to protect our vulnerabilities, and that drives us forward to gain the things that our souls are longing for.

It didn’t take us very long to learn in life that we could manipulate the way people saw us to gain something we wanted to have, or  to elicit a certain response from people.  We began to develop mannerisms that we used to gain the things or relationships we desire.  This is how we began to build our false identity.  Add to that the situations we grew up in and the expectations of those around us to fit in and measure up to and we have an identity that is built on illusion.  One that we have had for so long we don’t even think about it any more

Because our false identity is build on illusion it will always fight hard to protect itself.  One of the easiest ways to identify our false identity is to begin to name the areas of our lives that are the most sensitive to outside influences.  We all have irrational defense mechanisms that almost instinctively arise within us.  These are the defense mechanisms of our false identity.  “Because of its fundamental unreality, the false self needs constant bolstering. Touchiness dependably points us to false ways of being. And the more prickly a person you are, the more you are investing in the defense of a false self. Some people bristle easily if they are not taken seriously, thus betraying a need for others to see the self-importance that is so obvious to them. Others take themselves too seriously, perhaps being unable to laugh at themselves. Both reactions suggest ego inflation. Others have learned to mask these outward displays of defensiveness, but inner reactions of annoyance or irritation still point toward the presence of a false self.”  Benner, David G. (2009-09-20). The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery (p. 83). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

As you begin to know yourself and remove the false identities you no longer have a need to defend anything.  Because you are built on conviction instead of illusion there is no need to defend something that cannot be destroyed.  And this causes those around us who have not chosen to begin their own search for identity to become uneasy and defensive, and many times they will begin to attack the person we are becoming, usually without realizing they are doing it.  We are simply a threat to their sense of identity and they are responding because of the insecure nature of their false self.

Which means that there is going to be some pain along the way.  Unfortunately we cannot avoid it.  But it shouldn’t keep us from digging.  It should cause us to seek out those who are on their own journey of discovery, and we can then seek support from those who are working on the same things.  It is very important that we don’t make this journey alone.  As we begin to see ourselves for who we are it is a fragile state to be in, and we will need the support of others to carry us through the early stages of discovery.

A great benefit to us growing into who we really are is that we will inspire others to do the same.  As others see the strength and security growing in us they will begin to ask the same questions that got you started, so the journey is exceedingly worth making.  Don’t allow the tragic attacks of those around you stop you from discovering who you really are.  Otherwise you will add to the pile of people living out the greatest tragedy of never discovering who they are.