The Spirituality of Me

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pg. 243)

It is an odd phenomenon to observe followers of Jesus, suddenly obsessed with their wonderfully saved souls, setting about busily cultivating their own spiritualities. Self-spirituality has become the hallmark of our age. The spirituality of Me. A Spirituality of self-centering, self-sufficiency and self-development. All over the world at the present time we have people who have found themselves redefined by the revelation of God in Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection, going off and cultivating the divine within and abandoning spouses, children, friends and congregations.

Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice (pg. 143)

Grace demolishes the idea of need-fulfillment. Need-fulfillment is a law that has no possible final satisfaction. Human need is limitless on its own terms. It is a bottomless well, a pail with a hole in the bottom. Grace nullifies this. The need for personal fulfillment is not met in Christianity. It is destroyed.

J.I. Packer and Carolyn Nystom, Praying (pg. 126-27)

A life of repentance is, in reality, a life of self-denial. When Jesus talked about self-denial he was…telling us that we have to say no to “carnal self,” that is, to our inner selfhood that has been shaped by sin into the mold of an ugly, self-serving egocentricity. This carnal self seeks to lead us along its own path…Sin in our system enslaves our natural self-love to unnatural pride, so as to keep us from loving God and others. So God exposes to our consciences, our self-absorption and self-centeredness, our tendency to focus entirely on ourselves and our own concerns.

Aaron Orendorff

Any vision of the Christian life that focuses directly upon the self – that speaks constantly my spirituality, my ­sanctification, my growth in grace – is doomed from the start. This is not to say that self-examination is itself a bad or corrupting practice, far from it. One of our greatest needs as deceived and deceptive people is to see ourselves as we are, not as we would like to be nor as others might see us, but as we truly are – unadorned, unpretensed and naked. Our trouble arises when the quest for self-knowledge – or worse “self-improvement” – becomes an end in itself rather than a means. All our spiritual striving must culminate not in us being better people, abstracted from the concrete realities of relationship and location, but better community members – better husbands and wives, better sons and daughters, better employers and employees, better friends, better neighbors, better listeners, better encouragers, better critics and ultimately better worshipers.