Healing Our Image of God and Ourselves (part 1)
Thesis
God's love, presence, and forgiveness are the ultimate healers for our image of Him and ourselves.
Come Out of Hiding
Blaise Pascal wrote, “God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.”
So if we feel hateful towards ourselves, we naturally assume that God feels the same way. Isn’t even like that in our relationships?
Sometimes we don’t hate ourselves fully, but we have our moments of not being loving, graceful, merciful, compassionate with ourselves when we wrong God and others… In those moments the tendency is to act based on punishment (hate) and not on grace (love) toward ourselves.
The reality is that all of us have been hurt and wounded and our most common response to that is an expression of self-hatred: disappointment in self, feeling like we aren’t living up to our potential, shame, self-protection, selfishness, envy, jealousy, worry, fear, doubt, self-centeredness, numbing, striving, people pleasing, need to find value and approval in other or in what we produce/how we contribute, needing to measure our success, and the list goes on and on… Everything we do, we say, we hope, we project, we desire that doesn’t have God as the source of life and love is an expression of self-hatred. It’s the story of Adam and Eve repeated over and over.
We need to be mindful that all of these things don’t need to be conscious in us to be a reality; many times they are happening and we are not even aware, because we do it unconsciously, but our actions can show them. That’s why we need to be humble and teachable.
We cannot assume that God feels the same way we feel about ourselves—unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.
Jesus revealed to us what God is like.
He exposed our projections for the idolatry that they are and showed us the way to be free of them.
Despite the fact that God does not tolerate evil/sin, He does not withhold love from us because we have a sinful nature.
Our pride makes us feel unsettled about God's unmerited love for us. It’s too humiliating for us to receive such a gift without having to do anything. When feelings of resentment, outrage, worry, anger, or envy cloud our inner vision, we are less able to see the truth. But when we let that process of humiliation humble our hearts, our perception and understanding change, and where we used to see shame and condemnation, we now see grace, forgiveness, and love. It’s only at this point that we stop seeing the cross only as a dark and cruel scene, and start to see the beauty behind it.
Because of the way we feel about ourselves it is difficult to believe in a love like that; that’s even possible to be loved in such an unconditional way.
Jesus' love is completely different from our natural human way of loving. While we are captivated by what we like and find in the other (whatever that might be), Jesus loves people for what lies within Himself. Love is His nature; that means that He loves everyone no matter what they do or how they are, because He cannot deny himself. We perceive what is pleasant, enticing or alluring as a reaction to what attracts us; Jesus doesn’t. He is the source of love, therefore he takes action rather than reacting. He is the one who initiates love.
As difficult as it is for us to believe—because we do not fully give or receive love in this way among ourselves (we are learning that the more we surrender our pride to Jesus and humble ourselves before Him), we believe that God is more loving, forgiving, and cherishing than any other human being, because of Jesus, the Messiah's life, death, resurrection, and ascension.
That’s why we can say GOD LOVES YOU AS YOU ARE AND NOT AS YOU SHOULD BE.
God sorrows our fear of Him, our fear of life and ourselves.
Brannam Manning describes God’s sorrow in this way: “God anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency.”
Richard Foster in this way: “Today the heart of God is an open wound of love. He aches over our distance and preoccupation. He mourns that we do not draw near him. He grieves that we have forgotten him. He weeps over our obsession with muchness and manyness. He longs for our presence.”
God’s sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we have sinned or failed.
We either choose to live as victims of our traumas, limitations, frustrations, victims of our own wrong choices and targets of our own self-hatred; or we choose to live trusting in the Father’s immutable love for us.
It's one thing to know we're loved by God when our lives are in order and all of our support systems are in place. Then self-acceptance becomes relatively simple. But do we feel as loved when we sin, when our longings are unfulfilled, when our dreams come crashing down around us, when we lose someone we love, when our senses of security, protection, and acceptance are threatened or even lost? Do we still believe in our own worth? Do we still feel like God's children?
Nicholas Harnan wrote: “This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic feature of our humanity that most needs to be embraced in order to restore our human condition to a healed state.”
Our skepticism and timidity keep us from belief and acceptance, however, we don't hate God, but we hate ourselves. Yet our spiritual life begins with the acceptance of our wounded self.
God calls us to come out of hiding and to come to Him openly as we are in this exact moment. He is the father who ran to His prodigal son when he came back home.
God weeps over us when shame and self-hatred freeze us.
He loves us in a creative, intimate, unique, reliable and tender way.
CREATIVE: out of His love I came forth; through His love I am who I am;
INTIMATE: His love reaches out to the deepest in me.
UNIQUE: His love embraces me as I am, not as I am considered to be by other people or supposed to be in my own self-image.
RELIABLE: His love will never let me down.
TENDERNESS is what happens to you when you know you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone.
God accepts us exactly as we are. His love for us is so unconditional and free that nothing can change it, whether we believe it or not.
As Thomas Merton said “the reason we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with God is that we so seldom acknowledge our utter nothingness before him.”
The same love which called us into existence, now is calling us to come out of self-hatred and step into His truth.
One of the most shocking contradictions in the Western church is the intense dislike many followers of Jesus have for themselves. They encourage others to love people and God while they despise themselves. They are sick of their own mediocrity and disgusted by their own inconsistency.
The story is often told of a man who made an appointment with the famous psychologist Carl Jung to get help for chronic depression. Jung told him to reduce his 14 hour work day to eight, go directly home, and spend the evenings in his study, quiet and all alone. The depressed man went to his study each night, shut the door, read a little Herman Hesse or Thomas Mann, and played a few Chopin and Mozart classics. After weeks of this he returned to Jung complaining that he could see no improvement. On learning how the man had spent his time, Jung said, “ But you didn’t understand. I didn’t want you to be with Hesse or Mann or Chopin or Mozart. I wanted you to be completely alone. The man looked terrified and exclaimed “I can’t think of any worse company.” Jung replied, “Yet is the self you inflict on other people 14 hours a day and on yourself.
All of this to say, that self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.
Self-hatred, self-rejection and everything that flows from that place is the greatest trap from the enemy to our spiritual lives because it contradicts completely God’s voices that calls us “Beloved ones”
Coming out of hiding is the initiation rite into Jesus' healing mission. Success in itself is its own reward. Our foundation is the Truth that frees us, and our lives are grounded in the Reality that makes us whole.
The more deeply we are anchored in God’s love, the more generously we live our faith, and the more we become like Jesus. It is this love that enables us to love ourselves without hesitation or reservations. We accept ourselves as we are because Jesus taught us that God does so, and the Holy Spirit convinces us of the same.
Our focus shifted away from spiritual growth and toward simply loving God as Jesus did. Spiritual growth follows through naturally. We move beyond the burdensome demands we set on ourselves, beyond the idealistic claims of the ego that tell me who I should, must, and ought to be by living out being-loved.
One of the most beautiful things about knowing God is that it makes you care about yourself. Trust in Jesus cultivates free, confident people. Jesus' encounters with God shaped who He became, so ours will do the same.
That’s why prayer is so essential. The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)
Praying is similar to sunbathing. People notice when you spend a lot of time in the sun. Being aware of being loved offers a sense of lightness and brightness, and occasionally, for no apparent reason, a smile plays at the corner of your mouth. In prayer, you not only know but also realize God's love; you are in a conscious relationship with it.
In prayer—a place of encounter with God—we are faced with who God is and who we are; we are led by the Spirit of God to lose the illusions and idols we live by, which is both hard and freeing. Holy Spirit is always working in our favor no matter what.
“God’s love for us is so great that He doesn’t permit us to harbor false images [of Him and ourselves] no matter how attached we are to them. God strips falsehoods from us no matter how naked it may make us, because it is better to be naked in truth than closed in fantasy.” — Brennan Manning