43. Why Am I So Hard On Myself?

"Why am I so hard on myself?" 

Have you ever wrestled with that question? If so, you've found just the right episode to help you understand it. 

There's a voice that gets to you before you're even fully awake. It tells you you're behind, you're failing, you should've done more by now. And most of us never argue with it. We think it's just honesty.

This episode is about the most important sermon you'll hear all week: the one you preach to yourself. Drawing on Psalm 42, where a man in the middle of a spiritual drought stops listening to his own despair and starts talking back to it, we look at the difference between honest lament and the quiet self-contempt so many believers have mistaken for humility. With help from Howard Thurman's idea of "the sound of the genuine" and the old pastoral wisdom of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, this is a conversation about taking back the pulpit in your own mind.

This is for the believer who extends grace to everyone but themselves. For the one who'd never speak to their kids the way they speak to themselves. For anyone tired of waking up already accused.

You are not the exception to grace. And the voice telling you otherwise is preaching a sermon the cross made illegal.

Scripture: Psalm 42 and 43, Romans 8:1, 1 Samuel 30:6.

If this episode meets you where you are, share it with someone who needs it, leave a review, and follow the show so you don't miss what's next.

Connect with us via our Instagram: @faithformed_pod

Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

Order your copy of my latest book, "The Purpose in the Pause", here

Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo, what's up, people? Look, I'm sorry. First and foremost, I'm sorry. I know the episode is normally published by now. However, I traveled over the weekend. I had a speaking engagement with CIY. And then I got home on Sunday, and it was our anniversary, and I didn't get home until late. And so I wanted to spend that time with my boo of 23 years. But I'm up early Monday and I'm getting it recorded. And so it'll be out to you soon. I love you. Thank you for rocking with us. And without further ado, here is episode 43 of Faith Formed. Thank you for your patience. There's a voice that gets to you before you're even fully awake. And you know it. Before your feet even hit the floor, before the coffee, before you've said a word to anyone, it's already talking. And it doesn't introduce itself. It doesn't say, Hi, I'm the voice of shame, and I'll be running your morning. Nah. It just starts, and most of us we don't argue with it. We don't even notice it's it's a voice. We just think it's us. Therefore, we think it's just the truth. So you lie there and it preaches. You're behind. You're failing. You should have done more by now. Everyone else has it figured out. You said you changed and you didn't. Again. And here's what I want you to sit with for a second. You believed all of that this morning. You didn't examine it. You didn't cross-reference it against anything. A sermon got preached in your head before you were conscious enough to consent to it. And you took it as gospel. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. About how I can be generous with everyone in my life and merciless with one specific person. Me. About how I'd never let anyone talk to my kids the way I talk to myself. And somehow I've decided that when I do it, it's just honesty. I'm Justin Belt, and this is Faith Formed, a podcast about honest faith for people who don't have it all together. And we're trying to build a faith with this podcast that actually holds up. And today we're talking about the most important sermon you'll hear all week. The one you preach to yourself. Because you're the most influential preacher in your own life. And most of us have never once examined the pulpit we're preaching from here. Before we get into the episode, do me a favor and leave us a review. Hopefully, five stars, wherever you're catching this podcast this morning. And we appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you. Alright. So the idea for this episode came as I was thinking about where I wanted to go after the formation trilogy. If you're just joining us, I recently did a nine-episode arc, nine episodes, where we talked about purpose and clarity and vision. And it was a labor of love and I think being faithful to what God was asking me to do with this podcasting space. And I was thinking and journaling, and I couldn't quite settle on anything. And then I started thinking about the church plant. And I had all of these different thoughts come to me that I knew weren't the truth, but I listened to them anyway. And as usual, when they came, I kind of found myself paralyzed. And I think that was kind of God showing me you're not the only one who deals with this. You're not the only one who hears the voice. You're not the only one, son. So let's go in this direction. So this is not a series at all. This is just a one-off episode that I hope is designed to recalibrate your ears to what you're hearing. Because, in truth, you know, the most influential preacher that you're going to hear this week is not, you know, uh Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell or or Darius Daniels or uh YPJ or Pastor Mike Jr. or whoever the preacher in your local church is. It's not. Your local pastor is plenty influential, right? But you don't hear them every day. You only hear them on Sunday mornings or Sunday evenings. The voice that you wake up with in the morning, that is the preacher that is preaching a sermon to you every day. And I know this because I deal with the same thing. And I think that we need to, I think God would have us understand what we're hearing, what we're listening to, and learn how to flip the script. That's why this episode is, I believe, so important. So important. And so I want to start by something that took me a really embarrassingly long time to understand. You're always preaching to yourself. Like there is no neutral, there is no version of your inner life where nobody's talking. The question was never whether you'd preach a sermon to your own soul today. The question is only what the sermon's about, and whether you wrote it or you just inherited it from some other source. Now, when I think about it, most of us inherited it. We're running a script we didn't write in a voice that isn't even ours, and we've been doing it so long that we've stopped hearing it as a voice at all. It's just the weather or the climate in our heads. It's just how it is. And I think that this is where a lot of us get faith wrong. Quietly, for years. We think the spiritual life is mostly about what we believe about God. And it is about that. But it's also about what we believe about ourselves in the presence of God and what we say to ourselves on his behalf. Because you can have impeccable theology on paper and be preaching heresy to your own soul every single morning. You can believe in grace as a doctrine and deny it to yourself as a practice. Some of you are nodding your heads, because you know exactly what I'm talking about. And here's the thing that I keep coming back to. The Bible is full of people who feel. David feels, we know that for sure. Job feels, Jeremiah feels. The Psalms are maybe the most emotionally honest documentary in human history. But there's a moment in Psalms where something different happens, where a man stops just feeling and starts talking back to what he feels. Do me a favor and open up Psalms 42 with me. Psalms 42, which is ascribed to the sons of Korah. And it opens with one of the most beautiful images in all of Scripture. It says, As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. In Latin, that sikud cervus desiderat fantes a quarum. We used to sing that in high school choir. That's how I know it. So we quote that part. We put it on coffee mugs, we put it on t-shirts, but we usually stop reading right where it gets honest. Because this is not a man speaking from a mountaintop. This is a man that's in a drought. Notice the deer isn't panting because it's having a nice afternoon by the stream. The Hebrew word here, the word for longing, it's used only here in the old in the whole Old Testament. And it means a deep, desperate, audible craving. This this is a creature that will die if it doesn't find water. And then in verse 5, something shifts. And I don't want you to miss it because if you blink, you'll read right past the most important pastoral moment in this Psalter. He says, Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. So let's stop. See, he's not just talking to God in this verse, he's not talking to his enemies. He turned and he started talking to himself. He effectively grabbed his own soul by the collar and he asked it a question. And then he gave it a command. Hope in God. The Hebrew word for downcast there is the word shakach. It means to sink, to bow down, to be pressed low. It's the same root used elsewhere for a pit, for the grave, for the place things sink and don't come back from. So this isn't a mild discouragement. This guy's soul is sinking toward the grave, and he looks at it sinking, and instead of going down with it, he speaks to it. And here's what I think is just a cool part to this verse. He does this three times. Psalms 42, verse 5, Psalms 42, verse 11, and then again in Psalms 43, verse 5, which in the Hebrew is really the same Psalm continued. So 42 and 43 are really just one psalm. And he says, Why are you cast down? Hope in God. He didn't say it once and feel better. That should encourage you right there. He had to keep preaching the same sermon to his soul over and over because his soul kept sinking back down. The feeling didn't obey the first time, so he said it again. The feeling didn't obey the second time, so we did it again. Man, that that is that has to be encouraging to you, because it's encouraging to me, because sometimes I think that because the feeling doesn't turn around the first time, because the voice doesn't shut up the first or second time that I'm a failure, that maybe this thing is actually true, and that you know the discouragement is the real voice, but but no, like he literally had to tell his feelings to fall in line three times before things actually began to shift. There's an old preacher named Martin Lloyd Jones who wrote about this verse, and he said something that since I saw it, I haven't really been able to shake. He said, The essence of the spiritual battle is this. Are you going to let your soul talk to you, or are you going to talk to your soul? Most of our unhappiness, he says, comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. Oh, that's good. I'm gonna read that again. Most of our unhappiness, he says, comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. The psalmist's whole breakthrough in this psalm is that he stops listening to the sinking and he starts speaking to it. He takes himself in hand, he says, in effect, why are you behaving like this? Like what is going on with you, man? Hope in God. Hope in God, and that that's not denial. I don't want you to hear that as denial. Your reality is your reality. Your scars are your scars. He's not pretending that everything's fine. He literally just told us that his tears are his food and he feels forgotten. He holds the honesty and he preaches truth into it at the same time. That's the whole thing. That that's that's the spiritual move that I want you to come away with in this episode. So now before I go any further, I need to make a distinction for you. Because this is where I think a lot of us, myself included, go wrong. And we go wrong in a way that really feels holy to us. See, there's a difference between lament and self-contempt. They can sound almost identical from the inside, so you have to learn to tell them apart, or you'll spend your whole life mistaking one for the other. We've talked about a lament a lot on this podcast because lament tells God the truth about your pain. God is a big God, He can handle the truth about your pain. Lament says, This hurts God. I don't understand God. Where are you, God? How long, God? And lament is what the psalmist is doing in the first four verses of Psalm 42. It is raw and it's faithless sounding. And God put it in the Bible, which means God is not afraid of it. And if God was not afraid of it then, you can bet that God is not afraid of yours now. Because lament is honest, and honesty is always welcome at God's table. You don't have to lie to kick it. You ain't got to lie to kick it. You can go to God truthfully. Okay? Now, self-contempt is something else entirely. It doesn't tell God the truth about your pain. Self-contempt tells you a verdict about your worth. So while lament says this is hard, contempt says, and it's because you're worthless. While lament says, I feel like a failure, contempt says, you are one, and everyone can see it, and you should have known better. So here's how to tell them apart. Lament moves toward God, it's addressed to him, even when it's angry, it's reaching for him. But self-contempt moves you away from God and turns you in on yourself, it curves you inward, it doesn't reach for anyone, it just sits in the dark and it continually reads off the list of charges against you. And I'll be honest with you, because that's the only way that I know how to do this. I I have spent a lot of my life calling self-contempt by a holier name. I call it humility, I call it taking responsibility, I call it holding myself accountable, I call it being honest with myself. And some of it was those things, but a lot of it, if I'm gonna tell you the truth today, was just the accuser using my own voice, literally hijacking it. And I let him preach because I thought a man who beat himself up was a man who was taking God seriously. But in the truth, it's it's not. He's just a man or a woman who's confused the voice of the enemy for the voice of the spirit, and those two voices do different things. The spirit convicts, yes, but conviction is specific, it names a real thing and it points you toward grace, toward change and toward home. It says that right there, bring that to me, man. I can heal that. But see, the enemy condemns condemnation is global, condemnation is a blanket statement, it doesn't name the thing, it names you, it names me. It doesn't point toward grace, it points toward despair. It says, This is just who you are, and there's no use, like no use at all, so why bother? Romans 8, one of our favorite chapters in the Bible. Romans 7 and 8 are just powerhouses to me. But Romans 8 opens with seven words that should end the argument. It says, Therefore is therefore now no condemnation. There is therefore now no condemnation. None, not less condemnation, no condemnation. And yet so many of us wake up every morning and preach a sermon to our souls that Romans 8 says no longer is legal. We're proclaiming a verdict that the cross already overturned, and we gotta stop. I've gotta stop. You've gotta stop. Do you feel me? I need I need you, I need you to hear this. I need you to walk away with this understanding that the contempt that you feel for yourself is not holy. The contempt that you feel for yourself is not God speaking to you, because God holds no contempt against you, because God loves you. And so that voice that is speaking against your purpose, that voice that is speaking against your your calling, that voice that is speaking against the vision, the voice that is speaking against your worth, it's garbage. It is a pile of hot, stinking, heretical garbage because God does not say about you what your self-contempt says about you. It is the accuser who has hijacked the microphone, who has jumped into your pulpit, and who is going hard against the one that God loves, and God looks at that, and God frowns, and God looks at you when you believe it. And I'm convinced that God cries because he knows that you and me are believing lies. We are believing the kind of lies that keep us stuck in the loop. We are believing lies that hijack our destiny and tells us that our destiny is a lie. And I believe that God this morning is banging on the doorway and windows of our hearts saying, Stop falling for the lies. Stop preaching the sermon to yourself and bring your lament to me, son. Bring it to me, daughter. Because preaching to yourself or listening to the false preacher, the heretical preacher, the false prophet spewing hate and lies and trash to you, that's only gonna pull you farther away from me. Alright. Re-center, Justin. Re-center. I want to I want to bring in a voice that that's helped me because he understood something about the inner life that many of us never get taught. And you've heard me reference this voice many times, Howard Thurman, black pastor, incredible theologian, Christian mystic, and that's not a you know mystical thing. Uh, it's a name that they came up with. He mentored a generation of civil rights movement. He he used to talk about what he called the sound of the genuine, and he said this there is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It's the only guide you will ever have. Now, let's sit with that for a second. The sound of the genuine Thurman's whole conviction was that underneath all the noise, all the voices, the World hands you, all the verdicts and labels and the things people decided about you, in all of that noise, there is a truer sound, and that truer sound is the voice of God telling you exactly who you are: a child of God, held by God, known by God, not a project, not a disappointment, a son, a daughter. And and Thurman said something else that I think is the diagnosis for what so many of us are living with. He said, Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny. Yo, let me read that again. Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his or her inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny. So if you let another voice determine the quality of your inner life, you've handed that voice the keys to your destiny. Alright. Now, here's the part of that that convicts me. We usually hear that and we think about other people. The critic, you know, the coach who never played you, the parent who never approved, the the boss who never said a kind word to you, the church that wounded us, the person that's the person whose voice we still hear, right? And that's real. That's real. But for a lot of us, the voice that's determining the quality of our inner life isn't another person at all. It's us. We are the other voice. We're the one who took the keys to our own destiny and handed them to the cruelest possible version of ourselves. And then we strap into the passenger seat and let that cruelest possible voice drive. See, Thurman grew up being told constantly that he was a holy child of God. And he said it became the foundation of his entire identity, the thing that let him stand up straight in a country that was built to bend him low. He knew the sound of the genuine because someone preached it to him until he could preach it to himself. And I'm convinced that that's the work. Learning the sound of the genuine well enough that when the counterfeit voice starts up at 6 a.m., you recognize it. You go, nope, nope, nope. Mm-mm, not doing that. That's not the genuine. That's not God's voice. God does not stutter when he says he loves me. God does not put a qualification or a consideration on the fact that he loves me. The voice telling me I'm disqualified is not the voice of the one who qualified me. And you talk back. So what do we actually do with this? Because I don't want to hand you a beautiful idea and send you home unharmed. Here's what the psalmist teaches us. You preach back. You don't listen. You don't hallelujah it. Nope. Nope. No. You preach back. When the false preacher starts preaching the false sermon, the inherited one, the sinking sermon, you don't lie there and take it. You sit up in the bed of your own mind. You stand up in the church of your own mind among the pews of all your thoughts. And you preach a better sermon. Out loud if you have to. And I mean that literally. There is something about saying it with your actual mouth, with your whole chest, that the silent thought can't fight as easily. And the sermon you preach back is not, I'm great, I'm amazing, I got this. That's not the genuine either. That's just self-contempt's twin brother. And he'll abandon you the second that things get hard, because he's not built like that. The sermon you preach back is the gospel. It's there is no condemnation for those who were in Christ. And I am in Christ, so this voice has no jurisdiction here. It's I am a holy child of God, not because of my performance, but because of his. It's uh blessed be the God of our Lord, our God and our Father, Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places, right? It's the psalmist's exact words. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Hope in God. And you might have to say it three times. You might have to say it a hundred times. The psalmist said it three times in two Psalms, and I don't think he was done when the ink dried. Because this is not a one-and-done deliverance. We always talk about deliverance from all these other things, but what about deliverance from yourself? Because here's the fact this is a daily war over who gets the pulpit. Every morning, somebody's gonna preach to your soul. The only question is whether it's going to be you with the truth or the inherited voice with the lie. And I'm still learning this, and I want to be completely honest about that. I'm not standing on the other side. I'm never standing on the other side talking at you. I'm in it with you. I caught myself doing it this week. I heard the sermon start, and for a while I just lay there and let it preach like I have for so long. And then somewhere in the middle of it, I got sick of getting beat down. Somewhere in the middle of it, I remembered the deer panting for water. I remembered the pit and the man who talked back, and I made myself say out loud in a quiet room, hoping God. It felt strange, felt like I was going crazy for a minute. But I said it anyway, and the strangest thing happened, which is that nothing magical happened, but that false preacher lost the pulpit. It had to stop preaching because I was preaching back louder, I was preaching back truer, I was preaching the voice of the genuine into the noise of the fake, the false, the liar, the accuser. And that false, that false preacher had to stop preaching and leave the pulpit because someone else had taken it. Family, that's the win. Not that you feel better instantly, but that you recognize it, you pinpoint it, and then you stand up and you walk up those stairs and you take the pulpit of your soul back. So here's your charge. And I want to be direct because you need something that you can directly carry out of the door from this episode. Stop listening to yourself. Stop it. And start talking to yourself. You have listened for long enough. You have been a passive congregant of a sermon you never agreed to hear. And today that ends in the name of Jesus. You were not an exception to grace, you were not a failure to God, you were not someone who makes God regret sending Jesus to die on the cross. You were not disqualified, you were not the verdict that voice keeps reading to you. You are a holy child of God, bought at a price, held by hands that will not let you go ever. And a voice that tells you otherwise, any voice that tells you otherwise, whether it's from someone else or from you, is preaching a sermon that the cross made illegal. When it starts up tomorrow morning and it will, you will take the pulpit and you will preach back right at it. You will say it out loud if you have to, and you'll say it again if you have to, and you will keep saying it. Because that is what the man who wrote Psalms 42 did, and God thought it was worth preserving forever so that we could see it and we would know how to combat the false preacher, the false prophet, spewing lies and accusations. Family, talk back to your soul. Hope in God. Father God, we come to you tired of a voice that you didn't even commission, that many of us didn't even know that we were carrying. So many of us have been preaching condemnation, this false gospel of condemnation to ourselves for years and called it honesty. And we're so used to it that we forgot it wasn't yours. So for the one listening who wakes up every morning already accused, already beaten down, who can't remember the last time they were gentle with themselves, God, would you let them hear the sound of the genuine today? Your voice, the real voice, the one that says child, not failure. Ah before the believer who knows grace as a doctrine, but has never once let it touch the part of them they hate the most. God, would you bring it there to that exact place? The place they think is beyond it. God, show them that that place was covered too by the cross, by the blood, for the ones so exhausted from beating themselves down that they have nothing left for anyone else. Would you take the pulpit in their mind that they're handed that they've had handed over to the accuser? And would you preach over them? Would you sing over them louder, a truer song until they can preach it back to themselves? God, we hope in you, not in our performance, not in our feelings, but in you. Be the voice underneath all the other voices and teach us to talk back. In Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So if this one landed, you already know somebody else who needs it just as much as you do. Somebody who's been merciless with themselves and just calling it humility. Do me a favor and send it to them. Yeah? Don't explain. Just send it. That's how this show finds the people that it's for. And again, if Faith Formed has been doing something in you, the most concrete thing, the most the thing that you can most do for us is leave a review. Because it only takes a minute at the most. And it is so genuinely appreciated by me. Yeah? And it's how people stumble onto this in a sea of many voices. Subscribe or follow to wherever you're listening so that the next one shows up without you having to look for it or stumble upon it or find it by accident. Alright? Go take the pulpit back. Right now. And I'll see you next week. Y'all be blessed. Peace out.