What’s the core of the problem that’s happening inside of us?
We’re living divided lives.
I lament because we live divided lives internally and this manifests itself in a world that is divided externally. We live divided lives and do not face the shadows of our own soul and thus are not able to face what divides us in the world socially, racially, culturally and socio-economically. We lived divided lives and are not faithful to the true self, which God has placed inside of us pre-fall.
This divided life is called the false self.
The false self. What is this and where does it come from? The Apostle Paul writes in Colossians 3 about the false self; “But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these; anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”
In his seminal book, The Deeper Journey; Robert Mulholland defines the false self in 8 categories:
Fearful self; we fear that our lack of a true center for our identity will be revealed and that weakness exploited by others.
Protective self; when we rely solely on our own resources for our identity, meaning, value, and purpose, our false, like Cain, constructs a “city” for itself.
Possessive self; our false self sinks many of the tendrils of our identity and value into possessions. Possessions are seen as a means of protection against the loss of material security.
Manipulative self; always seeking to leverage its world and all those in it in ways most advantageous to our own security, prestige and, especially, agenda. Biblical Example: Annanias and Sapphira
Destructive self; it’s indulging in the pleasures of life at the cost of our interior world. Others are valued largely for the benefit they can provide for us.
Self-promoting; always promotes us and our agenda above all others. The best of our behaviors become stained with the need for approval; the ultimate goal of the action is not the purpose integral to the action itself but the promotion of our value.
Indulgent self; our false self must find joy and pleasures elsewhere. They provide satisfaction and pleasure but to further authenticate our identity. The false self's primary purpose in life is the gratification of our desires.
Distinction making self; it is characterized by a need to categorize others in ways that always give us the advantage.
Like me when you first read these eight categorizations of the false self, you probably cringed. The false self is deeply entrenched in us. It is the “flesh”, which Paul also talks about. If we are in Christ, we know that a new self or new being has come inside of us because of the Holy Spirit’s power. But, at the same time, there’s another war happening inside of us called the false self. Paul describes this inner battle in detail in Romans 7. He has a desire to do good, but at the same time there’s another battle at war within him called the false self, which prohibits him from doing any good.
Theologically we live in between the Garden of Genesis 1 and 2 and the city in Revelation 21, we are live in a duality of worlds. God’s kingdom is breaking in and at the same time we feel the depth of sin and brokenness. This is what we are living in right now and why the false self is so hard to overcome.
The false self for me is like a heavy cloud that is at times covering me in a thick layer. Sometimes it feels very heavy and other times when I’m walking in the Spirit and my belovedness, it doesn’t feel like it exists. But it’s always there, lurking, and preying on me to do its thing. And the reality is that we are powerless to the false self. We cannot overcome it on our own!
And this false self is why we live divided lives. I lament that this division exists in all of us. We all live divided lives. Jesus, in his first message with his disciples in Matthew 5, points out they are murderers and adulterers. The same is true of us if we’ve ever had enmity in our heart towards others or looked lustfully at another person.
The reality is this, the reason the world is divided is because the division lies within ourselves. A wise person once said, “Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.”
There’s a reason the church is stressed out, burned out, serving others from an emotional vacancy, There’s a reason our churches are divided along cultural, racial and economic lines. There’s a system in our country that created this. It’s a system that created white flight and it needs to be named and repented of.
We all live lives that are fine. Fine being, “frustrated, insecure, neurotic and emotional.” We want to live with this allusion that everything’s fine. Ask people of color and you will quickly find out that everything’s not fine. If we close friends of color in our lives, you will quickly discover that there’s a huge problem racially.
I lament that for me, my inner life is divided with the false self of codependency. It’s my thorn in my flesh from unresolved family of origin issues that will be with me until Jesus comes again to restore all things.
Our churches are becoming inept at inviting people into their brokenness and the brokenness in our culture. We live in a performance driven society and this has affected our churches in many ways. We typically only show 10% of what is really going on in our lives. We always put our best faces on for people. The gospel invites us to invade every part of our brokenness, not just the top 10%. We must learn to be honest with God, others and ourselves about what is going on.
As Robert Mulholland writes in The Deeper Journey as he talks about the journey from the false self to the true self in Christ; “Repentance is not being sorry for the things you have done, but being sorry you are the kind of person that does such things. I began to realize that underneath the thin veneer of my religiosity lived a pervasive and deeply entrenched self-reference being which was driven by its own agendas, its own desires, its own purposes, and that no amount of superficial tinkering with the religious façade made any appreciable difference. Then I happened to read those familiar words: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just so that he might forgive us our sins and might cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9). I realized for the first time that God’s purpose for us was not simply to forgive sins but to transform our false self—to cleanse all its unrighteousness, to make us righteous, to restore our true self in loving relationships with God and in being Christ like in the world.”
Reflect on these words, “Repentance is not being sorry for the things you have done, but being sorry you are the kind of person that does such things.” It’s one thing to repent of the way our false selves control our lives at times, it’s an entirely other journey into the depths of our lives to understand why our false selves do such things. To journey into our divided lives takes courage, patience, and deep reliance upon the Holy Spirit.
What is this division of the false self that exists in our lives?
We are not aware of what’s happening internally as we love and serve others and oftentimes serve from a place of emotional deficit, rather than as God’s beloved child.
We have a tendency to live a life different from our own. We present a mask to others of a person that we are not.
We try to impress others and are driven with a need to constantly prove ourselves.
We are not faithful to the true self that Christ has placed in us.
We are not honest about the pains of the past and how they play out in the present.
We live from other people’s expectations.
We have become so consumed with the American dream of comfort and control that it leads us to being overworked, stressed out, worried about everything and not resting in Christ.
We have bought into the lie that things, people and jobs will give us the peace our wicked hearts so long for.
We become convinced that “they” are the problem.
Loving Freely is committed to the work of Christ’s reconciliation internally and externally. We cannot live into Christ’s ministry of reconciliation externally if we are not willing to allow Christ to enter deeply internally into our divided lives.
In Redemptive Theology, Christ is in the process of reconciling all things to the Father. This includes humans to God, to each other, to creation and in this case, in the deep interior parts of our lives.
Before we live into the ministry of Christ’s reconciliation externally, we must allow Christ to first reconcile us internally in this inward center. I believe this is why Jesus sums up the entire Jewish law of 613 commands with this: “Love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” We cannot truly love others freely until we’ve allowed God’s love to heal the broken parts of our inner world.
Abba Father has called me to be a peacemaker in the church to heal from the past trauma of racism, and I regularly sense from the Holy Spirit, “Danny, I’ve called you to heal the church, but you can’t do it if there’s unhealed trauma in you.”
We cannot live into the ministry of reconciliation if you are not being reconciled internally. The reality is that we cannot truly love others well until we learn what it means for Christ’s love to be made true in our own inner world. We cannot love our spouses or children well if we have not learned to discover that God really loves and delights in us. Again, the reality is this, the reason the world is divided is because the division lies within ourselves.
Howard Thurman in Jesus and the Disinherited says, “His message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people. He recognized fully that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them. Jesus says this with almighty clarity. Again and again he came back to the inner life of the individual. With increasing insight and startling accuracy he placed his finger on the “inward center” as the crucial arena where the issues would determine the destiny of his people.”
Ghandi is famous for saying, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” This is extremely relevant for the Christian committed to the work of reconciliation and justice. Recently my wife said to me, “Go change the world for Jesus.” As I reflected on those words, I felt the Spirit whisper to me, “You must allow the change to happen in you internally before anything externally happens.” I must allow Christ to reconcile my divided life before I attempt to live into Christ’s ministry of reconciliation externally.