Don't be True to Yourself

If I had a spiritual Gong that I could hit over and over again until people finally started to take notice it would be to get people to abandon the ridiculous notion in our culture today that you should be true to yourself.  Its so oft spoken and repeated that people believe this idea to be as true as the sky is blue or as infallible as the sun rising every morning.

But its stupid.

Yes I said it - its *stupid*.

I am confident in saying this because our thoughts for the most part are not our own.  We are, in a very significant manner, the sum total of the ways we have been influenced throughout our lives.  How our parents raised us, what we were taught in school, what our friends liked, what artists we follow, what movies we watch, what news sites we read and so on.  Thoughts that *appear* in us are very often echos that come up from imprints - sometimes conscious and other times unconscious - that these sources have made upon our hearts.

The above observation is readily evident to anybody with both a moderate desire to understand the world and one working eyeball.  The Bible takes it deeper by declaring that an individual's thoughts are also the product of past choices they have made.  We can be defiled (Matthew 15:18-19) by things we have said in the past and reap corruption (Galatians 6:7-8) from things we have done in the past.  Even further than that we see Scripture declaring that we can live in spiritual atmospheres that have strongholds that can result in thoughts being put in our heads that we need to take captive (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

So at the end of the day what is going on in our heads is an indiscernible misty mix of natural and spiritual influences.  How does one in the midst of this foggy maze really find who he is?

The answer is he doesn't.

He doesn't because he can't.

But perhaps that isn't the end of the world.  Maybe learning that self-discovery is a fools errand is what we need to start looking elsewhere.  And not just outside ourselves but more specifically lifting our eyes upward.  2 Corinthians 3:18 says "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His image."

Is it possible that even if you discovered who you were at this very moment that it would be a disappointing vision of yourself in comparison to who you would be once you saw God?  1 John 3:2 sure seems to say so.  It reads, "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."

Let us take our eyes off ourselves and fix them on Jesus for when we see Him we shall become like Him.