Someone once asked me, “Are you willing to be fully known?” Being out and about with company in public and feeling like I had to give a swift answer, I said yes. What I meant to say was, “Absolutely not!” If he had asked, “Do you want people to know the real you?” my answer might have been yes, and I would have meant it.
Our real selves, said C.S Lewis1, are waiting for us in Christ. When a man surrenders himself fully to Christ, he doesn’t become less of who he is but more truly himself. He doesn’t become less real but more real. Salt on its own is pretty unbearable, said Lewis, but when added to food, it intensifies and brings out its true flavour.
So it is with the man who gives himself over to God. He doesn’t become less, but more. More of what God created him to be.
We are told to think that being original and being unique are important and so we work hard on ourselves to be original and unique. But in literature or art, no man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original—and doesn’t even notice it. Even in social life, you’ll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you make. That principle runs all through life, from top to bottom.
Born into this world as we are, what you and I call ” being ourselves” is simply a strange blend of nature. We are a mixture of our parents, our sin, various desires, hopes, fears and experiences. Call it self-actualisation, call it self-realisation, call it self-help. We are all on some restless, humanistic search to become something. Something we think we are, ought, or want to be.
But Jesus teaches us that it is only when we surrender all of this that we start to become the men, women and children He has created us to be.
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 10:39)
This makes sense when we understand that God is the author of every one of us. He made us, or, as Lewis would say, like characters in a story, He invented us. He made each one of us to be something. Something that He delights in. Something singular and unique. Something that can be found only in the true man, Jesus Christ. For what we truly are is not derived from nature but from the life and mind of the author of all life, God.
On this take, sin is nothing short of making war on our true selves. Sin, along with all its appetites and promises, is designed to dismantle the real you—the person made by God and in His image.
The real you is not waiting to be discovered in some self-help book, some career, or even some tradition. The real you is waiting for you in Christ, and it is only as you are drawn into His life that your life begins to take on its own beautiful shape.
On the other hand, it’s just no good at all, says Lewis, going to Christ for the sake of developing a fuller personality.
As long as that’s what we’re re bothering about, we haven’t even begun because the very first step toward getting a “real self” is to forget about the old self.
There is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable.2
Jordan Peterson
The real self, the new self, will come only if you’re looking for something else or, as with all true love, looking at someone else. And that something and someone else is the life, and character, and joy, and freedom, and peace, found only in Christ.
Look for yourself, and you’ll get only hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin. Give up yourself, and you’ll find your real self. Lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fiber of your being, and you’ll find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him, everything else thrown in.
C.S Lewis
This self-forgetfulness is what the gospel invites us to do. The gospel invites us to come to Christ and be born again. Not of the flesh, or of nature, but of the Spirit.
In a fallen world, this means giving up completely on maintaining any kind of approved reputation by the world’s standards.
Lewis once said that we are like children, happy to play and make mud pies in the gutter because we cannot imagine a day at the beach. So it is with those who are yet to lose their life in Christ.
Perhaps Lewis was reflecting on the Apostle Paul who said,
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)
Do I want to be fully known? Yes, I want to be fully known and to know my true self in Christ.
I want to be found. But I cannot find myself. He must find me (Luke 19:10), and I must come to Him (Jeremiah 29:13). There, and only there, will the real me be found. There, and only there, in obedience to Jesus can my own soul find its greatest joy and resting place.
1 The New Man, Beyond Personality, the third series. Originally broadcast on BBC radio on 21st March 1944.
2 https://youtube.com/shorts/qSVYLKIuuI4?feature=share
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