Imagine that I could convince you that breathing was bad for you. I would let you continue to know that you had to breathe to, you know, stay alive and stuff, but I’d make you want to breathe as little as possible.
Without you knowing it, I’d be ruining your life. You’d breathe enough to exist, but not enough to truly live.
I believe this is what has happened to many Bible-believing believers. As a people, we have decided not to breathe.
What do I mean? For people who seek to live by the Spirit, self-knowledge is the air we breathe. The key to knowing God truly and deeply is to have intimate, detailed self-knowledge.
But because the desire for self-fulfillment is one of the widely acknowledged deceptions of contemporary culture, many Christians believe that self-knowledge is bad for you.
Jesus said to deny ourselves and follow him, and we take that as an admonition to resist dwelling on ourselves. We allow ourselves enough self-knowledge to stay alive—learning our taste in food and clothes, and discovering what we’d like to do for a living—but not enough to be transformed.
The irony is that we gobble up self-help books as quickly as publishers can churn them out. Like those of the general culture, our bestselling authors offer simple solutions to the problems in our marriages, our professions, our bodies, and our relationships. But many of these books try to help people without addressing the key to self-transformation, which is a deep and abiding familiarity with the self.
Linked to God Knowledge
For many of the heroes of Christian history, self-knowledge was linked directly to God-knowledge.
Consider the words of John Calvin: “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.”
Consider the famous prayer of Augustine: “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”
Thomas á Kempis wrote that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep knowing.”
Thomas Merton’s inimitable prose captures this dialectic most beautifully:
“There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself, and if I find my true self I will find Him.”
Most of these insights were first revealed to me last fall as I read Dr. David G. Benner’s slim book The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, (InterVarsity, 2004). It has changed my life.
I read Benner’s book during one of the most difficult months I’ve ever experienced. A friend had given me Benner’s book many months before, but I was put off by the title. It sounded like psychobabble; if I wanted that, I could watch Oprah.
Nevertheless, I picked it up one day last fall, and within pages knew I was in unexpectedly rich territory. Benner explains that we cannot hope to see ourselves as God sees us until we see ourselves as we really are.
Most of us live with major blind spots. We might think we’re familiar with our key sin issues, or the reasons behind our deepest habits and ways of being, but we’re only familiar with symptoms, not core problems.
Try this exercise: At the end of the day, spend 10 minutes meditating on every aspect of your day. Consider your thoughts, your decisions, your actions. Consider your feelings in given moments. Consider all this prayerfully, and see if you don’t learn something profound about who you really are and who God really is in your life.
Patton Dodd is an editor for Beliefnet and the author of My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion (Jossey-Bass). His writing has appeared in a range of publications including the Financial Times, Newsweek, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture.
