Surrender & Self-Less-Ness

October 27th, 2005

I spent most of my professional years in my career study 'The Self'. Now, after almost 30 years since I first started, I have no more idea what that is than any one else who has studied the concept. It is the proverbial blind men and the elephant, all see it for the part in vision and all declare, 'there, that is an elephant!'. Popular ideas though on afternoon talk shows and women's magazines concentrate on 'self-esteem' , almost never defining it or realizing that recent research shows that the more of 'it' one has, the less becoming a person they will be towards others! Other studies look at body image, body boundaries, self-definition, and a whole bevy of terms which would warm only the heart of William James who laid the foundation of that impending ziggurat.

That ziggurat, not unlike the one built at Babel, amounted to the same end and purpose: man seeking divinity for himself, to 'work' his way to the heavens, and the end of that way: chaos and confusion.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.Genesis 11:9

That scattering is well known: if we travel outside of the 'known' we often cannot communicate, we have suffered confusion since failing to be the proverbial 'family of man' and often doing things very differently from one another. We have now gone so far as to reap the same confusion in the House of God: the number of bible 'translations' or paraphrases grows daily, doctrine doesn't really matter, and everyone is most interested not in the love and excellence of Jesus but in what they can get for themselves.

One of the great distinctions in the Mind of Christ vs the mind of man, is that towards the self. Self may also be roughly equated with 'soul': the Greek word 'psyche' refers to the soul based upon Greek legend, and though it would cause Psychologists to shudder, psychology is more rightfully the 'study of the soul' than the less spiritual rendering 'self'. to be continued.....

The great tragedy of our modern version of Christianity, is that the natural or world's view of man has far taken over the the true Gospel concept of self or soul: that while it identifies us to ourselves and others, and provides a sort of 'glue' across time to keep stability in our lives, it is the putting away of self
, the dying to self, and surrender to God's way and not ours, which brings the hallmark of the Gospel: God's ways are far above ours, and bountifully worth knowing.