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I hope this post finds good soil in you. It is a free flowing stream of conscious inspiration which will help serve as “tweener” between Romans 9 and 10.

Last week I riffed about “the true self” and how despite each of us being a self, it’s challenging to discover what is true about us. Guru’s, life coaches, and activists talk about finding our true self or being “who they truly are.” Self-help books, therapists, or life-style designers make livings on helping us to find our true self. I claim that it’s all fiction…our world calls “true” what is actually false…we live in self-delusion. People are self-defining, self-asserting, creating the character they want to play in life.

We’re all Pinocchio trying to be a real.

Apologies if this comes off priggish. Am I presupposing that I’m somehow a true self while I deconstruct everyone else’s ontological house of cards? Behind this post is not a man who has arrived, but one who exited the superhighway toward a wasted life, and is now flagging people off to the narrow single track to authenticity. In once sense, I’m not there yet, while in another, there is no place I’ve ever existed.

You are in the same boat. Everyone else is too. Each of us in different locations along the way. Some are consumed with a proud certainty of “who they truly are“, assembling the play dough of life into the best version of the image they have for themselves. “If I can only have….If I can just get…I’m striving to obtain my next thing…” This treadmill of hustle and attainment, constructs what seems very real and enduring, but isn’t.

Biology becomes geology.

Others are lying flat. A new generation has embraced an alternate delusion. Seeing through fictional world of egoic pursuits, they figure opting out of attainment means they are somehow more authentic than the “sell-outs” on the assembly line. The ideology of trading “doing” for “being” has much merit, but it’s current application is more prideful than the Gordon Gekko rulebook. Not only is it self-absorbed to not take part in a society and contribute to the lives of others who have and are sustaining one’s own life, but the exorcism of one ideological demon brings with it seven others which delude a sense of self ironically with identity politics. The new self is conflated with one’s sexuality, weight, race, or gender, and is an equal pseudonym to the one they sought to avoid.

The religious aren’t exempt. Religion can keep us from these two illusions, but will press us into a mold of the religious false self. We are told we are “real” so long as we follow the “code of conduct” and look down on others. The pride imbedded in the religious false self proves that Jesus was right when he said: “You travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

This is why my rant labeled everything as false…fake…and illusion. No one is free until Christ sets us free. Only our Maker knows our true name. We can argue this and insist that we are who we assert ourselves to be, but validating ourself is like comparing a counterfeit bill to another one. Making our big self the authority, is our favorite religion but the big discovery is that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for all who believe.” Everything fake is another religion, and Christ is the end of that.

Paul’s Gospel annihilates the self. Jesus’ Gospel does too, but not in some distorted suicidal ethos, but in “kenosis“, self-emptying, a giving away of the self. Not asserting oneself is an ideal which is imitated in many spiritual mantras, but Christ is the greatest historical icon of it. And we can possess the same mindset.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:5-7)

If it’s true that our surface level self is actually fiction, we can follow in these footsteps and test the results of divesting ourself for others. The false self is annihilated by giving it away. To help us give up this falsehood, we are given the gift of our sinful humanity which humiliates that part of us which thinks we become our real self by addition rather than subtraction. Whether our sins are tiny like lying, murder and sexual immorality, or whether they are big like pride, austerity, and the want for God…these painful, irrevocably besetting thorns, are beautifully necessary to bring “the us we think we are” to a vanishing point where God graces us with our true name…where self discovery converges with the discovery of God.

It’s our unwillingness to surrender the self we think we are which makes us fake. We must get to the end of our eminence front. So long as our pseudonym is all we have, then nothing of us remains if it’s lost, and this proves the point. We exist in our own prison of self creation, never venturing to the desert of true self discovery. Any challenge to our false identity threatens us because we can’t believe there is anything better.

But there is… way better.

If I can offer anything to my fellow journeymen in life: Whatever you must do to come to the end of yourself, do it. The end of our so called self is not the false pride of self deprecating surface level gestures. It’s not a self flagellating harm or hatred of the self we perceive ourselves to be. The end comes as we find the faith that somehow knows that at the end of this charade, we will find our true self who has always existed in the perfect wisdom and mind of God. That is where we find our name that was given to us before time existed, the name permanently inscribed in the book of life, never to be forgotten by God our Maker… which is none other than the name: Beloved.

How do we get there? Neither religion nor irreligion. But through identifying with Christ which is done by simply noticing that Christ’s life is replaying itself, retelling His story, in and as our very life. Each of our lives bear this christological aspect so that no one can go through life and miss God. Our suffering points the way. It’s been said that for God to exist He must give away existence and for us to exist we must receive that existence. Thus our true existence is the existence of God, uniquely on display as our life, purposeful and necessary to germinate and give ourselves away to a world who needs us. Faith is how. Faith is the means. Not faith in religion. Not faith in a practice. Not faith in anything but the Christ who has called us all out of our dark deception and into his marvelous light. Faith is how we descend…it’s how we die… it’s how we bear our cross that takes us to the annihilation point where we end and God begins.

Jesus put it this way:

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:24-26)