Foundation - Secondary Relationship - Self

Get ready to dive into the realm of Self.  What it means to know yourself and God. Nick will uncover how this understanding drives the commandment and our interactions with others.  So settle in and remember Stay Curious my Friends. 

Transcript

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Today we're gonna talk about self. Um and I'm gonna fill in some of the blanks that I that I haven't reached just yet in some of the other videos. So if you've been following with me, um this will hopefully clarify some things and maybe help us to grow. I really want to go back to the foundational, more fundamental verse where so much of this discipleship comes from, and I think it's pivotal because Jesus says it's pivotal. In in one of the um synoptic gospels, when the great commandment is is referenced by Jesus, he says that all of the law and all of the prophets hinge on these two commands. So that word um great commandment is something I want to touch on right now. Uh that word pivotal or hinge is the word pivotal. Like that if you were to have a door and you had hinges on that door, that door's not gonna move or not gonna work unless those hinges are operational. So everything hangs on the hinges. Both the operation and the weight of everything is on those hinges. Well, these two verses that are actually one verse in the great commandment by by what Jesus says is pivotal to almost everything else. Therefore, it is pivotal to our discipleship. And this is the reason why I want to bring this up when today's topic is self. That the verse, one of the verses goes like this Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength, and all your soul. And the second is like it, that you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You see my emphasis? Do you hear how many times you are in that command? How many times the word your shows up? So when I this is one of the areas or one of the mistakes I feel like are when I hear these sermons, I hear it all the time. And pastors will boil this great commandment down to love God and love others, which is true, but it's missing a very significant part. Another way a pastor might say it, and I've heard it numerous times, is love God, love others with all of who you are, which again is is true, but it misses some of the meat. And I like to call it the love sandwich, that on one side you have love God, and on the other side you have love self and love others, but there's this meaty section in the middle that says withal. And it's repeated four times. I think that's significant. So we will have another video that is more specifically tuned into those four withals, but today I want to lean into the second side of that great commandment to love yourself as or love others as you love yourself. See, if I'm gonna remind you of the three root systems or primary relationships that uh the great commandment unfolds or dives deeper, and that is the love of God primarily in the three spaces or the three, like the the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and the Father, are the three root systems that come from the your love of God, and then on the other side, we talked about it already, is the love of others. But today we're gonna talk about self and why is this important? Because Jesus says it's important, he actually repeats it several times, and here's the irony that I have experienced in my discipleship with myself and helping others to draw closer to their maturity and their relationship with God. That this is one of the most difficult spaces, and it usually happens because of this, that we have a spectrum that goes from selfish to selfless. And somewhere along the line, we this is where we find ourselves. And here's the problem: the extremes are not usually good. That on one side I can be extremely selfish, that all of my emphasis is on me and my growth, and my this, and me, me, me, me, me. Um, and that never ends well for anyone. And then on the other side, you have completely selfless, which is the people pleaser, the person that everything is about others, and I deny myself so that I can serve others, but that's not what this verse says. That's not what this verse means. That's not what this section says. That it says to love others as you love yourself. Conceptually, one of the one of my favorite places uh, or one of my first places that this really began to make sense to me is in the book C. S. Lewis writes called Mere Christianity. And he uses this analogy and he says, when you love your others as you love yourself, you have to ask yourself, how are you loving yourself? Do you love the bad things you do? Do you love it when you when you sin against God or when you sin against yourself? No. No, actually, a lot of those things can create shame and guilt, and and those often become things that that hurt us and harm us, but we never stop caring for ourselves. We never stop nurturing ourselves. We we give ourselves sometimes too much grace because Paul says, When shall we continue to sin so that grace may abound? So we go, yeah, I'm just gonna keep doing what I want because Jesus died for me, and that's what grace is, right? He keeps giving me what I don't deserve. Yeah, but Paul says, be very careful there. And then on the other side, like you serve so much. There's a spot in Corinthians where where Paul actually, when he's writing to the Corinthians, says, you know, be careful when you bear another's burdens, lest you fall into that same trap. That's where this overabundance of selflessness can be harmful. See, there's a balance, and you often find health in between the extremes. But there are times in your life where where you absolutely have to care for yourself. Maybe you have to pull away a little bit because you're you're hurting and you're you're struggling. And there are other times when when you're not necessarily hurting and struggling, and you have an abundance of energy or wealth or strength or time, and you should be serving others rather than serving yourself. See, that's what this other side of this passage means. To love God, then love others as you love yourself. Jesus is a perfect example of this. He gave so much time to everyone in his um sermons on the mount, in his personal time spent with the disciples, his one-on-one time spent with the disciples, and the time he spent eating with sinners and almost being rejected by the social norm of the day that says that you don't do that. But he gave so much of his time, but he also spent a lot of time alone. He spent a lot of time replenishing. He often went away to the mountain to pray and to and to be alone and to minister to some extent self-care. So, what I want to challenge you with right now is to see that that there's a balance, that you can love yourself without being selfish, and you can love others without forsaking or denying your own health or well-being. So in my, I mentioned it before, but in the resource that I created Engage, there is a uh um like an example of this through what I what I call the one-anothers in the Bible. I'm not the only one that uses that term. There's a lot of one-anothers. And one of the ways that you can kind of test your love for self is actually by looking through the lens of how God tells you to love one another. So, how do you love one another? Well, you bear their burdens. Are you bearing your own burdens? Um, you love one another by forgiving them. Well, are you willing to forgive yourself? Do you you love others by being generous? Are you generous with yourself? Do you do you see yourself as worth being um invested in? Or are you only investing in others? You see, there's a balance. And I think we see this also in other secular ways. And one of the ways that I've heard it is if a plane is about to crash and the oxygen mask comes down, who do you put it on? Do you put it on your child first or your neighbor first? No, you put it on yourself. Because if you don't take care of yourself, you're not gonna be able to take care of the person next to you. Another way that I like to help articulate this is you can't give what you don't have. If you wanna be a person of grace, then you have to learn to receive the grace that you want to give. If you want to be a person of mercy, then you have to receive the mercy that you want to give. If you want to be a person who is generous, then you have to receive the generosity of others so that you can be generous. You see, you have to build yourself up so that you can be equipped to give it away. So as you read through the Bible and as you read through those one another's, I want you to ask yourself am I loving myself like God is instructing me to love others? So there's a quick challenge, but there's something else that is that I think is vital when it comes to loving yourself. And that's self-awareness. You can't love yourself if you don't know what you need. You can't nurture yourself if you don't know where you need to be nurtured. You you need to enter into yourself, and there's lots of ways that you can do that. One of the ways that I have learned to become more self-aware is personality tests. I personally love um personality tests. There is not one test that is the number one, a go to that one and it'll always be beneficial. Actually, I like the myriad of tests that I've taken because each one of them has helped me to discover something significant about myself. And as I discover some those things that are significant about me, it helps me in my relationships with others. Um, a couple of examples, I'll I'll write them over here. Um, Myers Briggs is a really good um personality test. Um I might spell some of these wrongs, but because this one I'm not sure how to spell, but um NEO Graham. So forgive me, um, is another one. Um one of my favorites, honestly, is uh Clifton's strength finders. Um I love learning about my strengths, but also what are my potential weaknesses? So it's got 32 or 36 strengths, I don't remember the number right off the top of my head. Um, but it gives you an idea of what your top five strengths are, and if you if you really want to know, it'll tell you what your bottom five strengths are, and those will help you to see some things. For me, one of the most enlightening moments when with the strength finders is my top is belief. If I truly believe in something, I am gonna dive in wholeheartedly. But the second I start to question the validity of my belief or the reason why I'm doing something, it makes it very difficult for me to continue to invest in that thing. One of the things that really struck me is that my top can be somebody else's bottom. That there are people in this world that have beliefs, and their beliefs don't motivate them like mine do. I am either all in or I'm struggling if I don't believe in something. Where other people, they can be all in and not fully understand why they're doing it. They can go. But they have strengths that balance mine out, and this is how we're built in society that we have different strengths and different weaknesses. And when you put us all together, we expose the character and nature of God in the in the most clear and the most full way. And I think it's a beautiful picture of the body. So this is just one of a few of the ways that you can become self-aware. But the point is this: if you don't know yourself, how can you care for yourself? And you need other people in your life that can reaffirm and and keep the guard, help you to keep the guardrails up and and to and to drive you closer to God and and help you to understand yourself a little bit better. You see, these two aspects of loving God and loving self are are key in our growth. And I'm gonna give you a little bit of an assignment in a few moments for the intentional step, but I want to give you a glimpse as to how long this has been a conversation. So I wasn't sure if I was gonna do this, but I said it here just in case. Um, in 1978, A.W. Tozer says this what comes into our minds when we think about God is of the utmost importance. It is the most important thing about us, he says. Well, why? Because it's important to know who God is. It impacts how we interact with God and how we interact with the world. If we don't believe that God is real, we're gonna live as though God is not real. If we believe that God is just a genie in the sky, then all of our prayers are gonna be selfish about just answering the prayers. If we rub the prayer or the genie the right way, he's just gonna give us what we want. And sometimes we look at God as though he is an authoritarian father who is just doing all he can to squash our fun and to kill our joy, and we're gonna live in rebellion or in oppression of our souls if we believe that to be true about God. But there's another very uh influential writer that I also want to um quote, and he's he's one of my favorites. I had the page here, and then apparently I lost it. Oh, going the wrong way. So this is part of the authentic part of our uh uh our thing here. All right, so here it is. Um, mind you, this quote is actually from 1941. So it's like roughly what, 37 years before Tozer quoted. Um, what the most important thing about you is what you think when you think about God. And it is from C.S. Lewis in a sermon that he gave. It's one of his most popular sermons called The Weight of Glory. And he says this He says, I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. Sound sound familiar? But God himself, it is not. Indeed. How we think of him is of no importance, except insofar as it is related to how he thinks of us. You see, there's this tension between between how do I un what do I understand about how God views me, and what do I understand about God Himself? And and I tend to lean a little bit into C.S. Lewis, but I would have loved to have been in a room with C. S. Lewis and A.W. Tozer and here and heard that the argument or the debate or the conversation around this. But I also want you to see one more one more quote, because this was not new in C. S. Lewis' day. This was not new in Tozer's day. Um, here's a quote from uh John Calvin from 1530. Or without the knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, insofar as it ought be determined, true and solid wisdom consists almost entirely of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. But as these are connected in many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two uh precedes and gives birth to the other. You see, John Calvin was dealing with this same thing in his own theology. That what is more important? What we know about God or what we believe to be true about ourselves? And I think the answer is yes. Both are important. Because you can't rightly understand yourself if you don't rightly understand what God says to be true about you, that you are worthy, you are worth it. You are worth the blood of the Son of Man who shed that blood on a cross for you. If you don't believe that to be true about yourself, there's a problem. That you are an adopted heir, if you have received that blood-bought sacrifice on your behalf, that you are his son or you are his daughter, you have the right to enter into his throne room with humility and sit on your daddy's lap. You have the right to pray, Abba, Father, just like Jesus did, because you are his son or his daughter. If you are not, if you did not receive this gift of grace that Jesus gave you on your behalf, then you need to know that it's there for you. You need to know that it's an option for you. There is nothing that you have done that disqualifies you from the love of God, and there is nothing that you will do to ever disqualify you from his love. He said that you are worth it. And even though some of us have dads or moms or situations in our lives that tell us the opposite. I personally had a dad that didn't really show me a lot of worth in my life. He didn't. Speak those words to me in a way that helped me to see that I am loved by him. He is not my creator. That that I had to learn that that was not my reality. That I was worth it. Because my heavenly father says I'm worth it. And I had to start to believe that about myself. And when I did, it helped me to understand God better and it helped me to understand me better. See, when we enter into both of those spaces equally, we will waver between what we need most in the moment, but that's what humility is. It's rightly understanding who you are in Him. Not thinking too highly of yourself, not thinking too lowly of yourself, that this idea of understanding yourself should never land in self-pity and it should never land in self-aggrandizing. So, what is your intentional next step? Well, for you, I just want to ask you to become more self-aware. And we've talked a little bit about um loving God and loving others, and maybe it's taking a Myers-Briggs test, maybe it's um studying the Enneagram, maybe it's doing a strengthfinder's assessment. Do something to discover something new about yourself. Go to one of your friends or maybe a spouse and say, Hey, what do you love most about me? What do you wish that I could see about me? Just get curious. Because this is something that I think is true, that you will never reach the end of discovering who you are, discovering what God thinks about you, and then figuring out your gifts and your strengths and your weaknesses and your traumas and how they are. You can grow through them, get healthy through them, and then serve others through them. Yes, your strengths and your weaknesses can be used for the glory of God. So this is my challenge for you today. Enter into what does it look like to love yourself? Be curious. Google the one-anothers of the Bible and read the lists that show up. And then ask yourself am I loving others? But am I loving myself in the same way? Am I forgiving myself? Am I caring for myself? Or am I neglecting myself? And am I doing it so that I can be empowered to love others, or am I doing it just to be selfish? I can't answer those questions for you. I struggle with those questions myself every day. Some days I feel like I get it right and I and I and through inflection and prayer in the power of the Holy Spirit, I end my day and I put my head on the pillow and I go, hey, that was a good day. And other days I hit my head hits the pillow and I regret my decisions and I and I beat up on myself. So there's my challenge. Love yourself. Love God and love others.

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