Tag: Life with God

Know God / Know Yourself

Business people standing with question mark on boards

Knowing yourself is something that usually goes overlooked in our society.  It goes overlooked more often in our churches.  For years I was taught that we deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow Jesus.  These are the words of Jesus in Matthew 16 “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  And I have always understood it to mean that everything I am disappears and I follow Jesus.  I know many others who have had the same understanding.  I don’t matter, and I must follow Him.

It is a wrong interpretation of the words of Jesus.  Because the goal of Christianity is for us to know God.   The Westminster Catechism states “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”  But our ability to know God hinges on our ability to know ourselves.  Thomas à Kempis argued that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning,” and Augustine’s prayer was “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”

God desires to be known by us.  The whole of scripture is the story of God reaching out to humanity and revealing Himself to us and calling us to know Him personally and completely.  He has gone to great lengths to show His love and character for us and to invite us to come closer and know Him more.  One of the major limiting factors of this is our lack of understanding of ourselves.  When God reveals Himself to us, He also reveals us.  The goal of Christianity is for the life of Christ to be made manifest in us, or for us to be like Jesus in what we do, say and think.  We do this by knowing God and allowing Him to show us the areas of our lives that are not like Him.

Which means that we need to know ourselves, and be willing to look at the things about ourselves that we often try to ignore.  “Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.  John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Benner, David G. (2009-09-20). The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

David Benner also wrote “Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality.”
Unfortunately this is the state that most Christians live in.  We have an appearance that we work on, especially when we are gathering with other Christians, and only we know the taugustinerue reality of the condition of our hearts.  Which is why the world objects to Christianity saying that “we are a bunch of hypocrites.”  We can deeply know God, as promised by Scripture, and we can know ourselves.  Jesus thought you and I were valuable enough to die for.  As we grow in our understanding of ourselves, and allow God to speak into our lives and show Himself the transformation will be glorious, and people can say of us as they did Peter and John “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.” Acts 4:13 NLT  The journey is never ever to late to take.

Share the journey

shapeimage_2The journey to become who we were created to be is a powerful and life changing one.  It is unfortunately one that many people miss out on taking.  They become whoever their world, situation or friendships demand, and miss completely out on the adventure they were created for.  Once you start the journey, your life begins to shift, and things that you thought were once important often begin to fade away because your filters for life have changed.

As you journey you get to see yourself and others differently, and you become more accepting of others because you are becoming more secure in who you are so when others are different they no longer cause you to be uncomfortable or threatened.  It truly is an amazing journey that all of us should be on.  The world would be a much different place to live if we did.  As we journey we write about who we are becoming and the changes we are making because we understand ourselves better when we write about it.  Our journals begin to record the milestones along the way and we understand ourselves and our environment better.

Just as important as journaling is for us to understand ourselves, is sharing your journey with someone else.  Finding someone you can be honest with, and who can be honest with you is invaluable to discovering yourself.  We can come to some understanding by writing, but it pales in comparison to the depth of understanding we gain by sharing our journey.  Finding someone you can trust openly and begin to share your struggles, insights and victories helps you to process deeply who you are and their questions and insights as you share help you discover what changes you could be making.

Someone once said You don’t truly understand something until you try to teach it to someone else. The process of sharing anything that you think you understand deepens you level of understanding because you have to take that mess of information, sort it out, repackage it and organize it in a way that someone else can understand.   By having to help someone else understand your journey you open the door to you understanding you.

When we are trying to explain something to someone else, we are forced to ask ourselves the most important question in leaning… in gaining true understanding… “why.” When we have to answer the question “why,” superficial understanding won’t do. We have to know something deeply in order to not just say how, but why.  Why we are is just as important as who we are and who we are becoming.  Only by sharing the journey with someone else can we truly and deeply understand ourselves.

Mapping the journey

journalingJournaling is something that I used to hate doing.  It was always something that others mentioned that would help me in my life and encouraged me to do.  But every time I tried I struggled to make it worth while.  It always seemed like a diary to me and I had absolutely no use for a log of my daily events.

Recently I came to understand journaling in a whole new light.  It was never supposed to be a diary.  There was no need at all the log events that happened in my life at all.  Unless that is something that you want to do.  Journaling was meant to be a way to sort out your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes this is linked to an event, but doesn’t need to be.  If we want to truly know ourselves then this is something that is necessary to the process.

Dawson Trotman said “Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips.”  As we put our thoughts down on paper, or computer screen, we can process what is happening in us.  Without doing this we will miss out completely on knowing who we are, and who we are becoming.  Life simply passes and we struggle to get by.  Journaling allows us to place markers along the journey.  Things we have learned about ourselves and the way we see the world.  Discoveries we have made about life, and the struggles it brings.  As we process what is happening to us and within us, we grow.

You wouldmemory map never plan a trip without deciding first where you wanted to go.  A destination is very important in every journey.  But just as important is knowing where you are now.  You can plan a trip from London to Sydney, and have everything lined up for the journey and it will do you absolutely no good when you are currently in Toronto.  Journaling is a way for us to see first where we are at personally.

It allows us to look within and see things about ourselves we would have never noticed otherwise.  It allows us to be honest with ourselves because there is no one to impress.  It is simply us looking in a mirror and writing what we see.  Just as important is the writing where we want to go.  Without a destination to work towards the place we are in now can be painful and not have any purpose or hope.  A destination makes the start worth while.

When we journal we simply are mapping our journey of self-discovery and becoming.  As we journey we mark memorable and life altering moments and discoveries, and allow ourselves to process what is we are discovering and clearly understand who we are becoming.  This allows us to not simply exist, but to really live life and achieve our potential.