Many Christians talk about the centrality of their relationship to God. But there are two involved in any relationship. Christians focus primarily on God, but neglect the other half of the relational pair: the self. The self is very commonly invoked in the context of “sinner,” but this often obscures the facts that the sinner is deeply loved by God and that the self is the very ground where God chooses to dwell and connect with a person. This book attempts to reconnect contemporary Christianity to the ancient understanding of the God-given gift of the self and its necessity for authentic spirituality and deep connection with God.

The search for the deeply authentic self might initially strike a person as antithetical to Jesus’ teaching that whoever tries to save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will find it (Matthew 10:39). There are many unhelpful ways to search for self that will end in disappointment, but if we look at Christian spirituality, we see that it deals a lot with self as well as with God. The goal of spirituality is the transformation of the self into the image of Christ. It takes self and God for spirituality to be possible. It is in the self that God meets and communes with us.

Authenticity is a journey for us because our identity doesn’t come naturally to us. Everything else in nature knows how to be itself. The rose grows and blooms and releases a beautiful fragrance. No one has to tell that flower how to be a flower or give it tutorials about the best time to bloom. Flowers, trees, cats, planets, and protozoa know exactly what to do. But it is more complex for humans. We think, we overthink, we fear, we need, we desire, we vacillate, and we choose.

What if there was a way that being “you” came as naturally as being a rose comes to the rose? It might seem counterintuitive, but that natural being resides eternally at the core of you who are; it’s the unique expression of God’s divine image that is deeper and more intrinsically you than the sin and adaptive facades that cover it up. There are hundreds or even thousands of possible identities one can assume, but there is only one true self, hidden and available in Christ. It is the only identity that will stand the test of eternity. All others are fabrications, but the authentic you is not something you can consciously create; it is a gift from God that you discover.

If Christlikeness made us into cookie cutter clones, we would probably be in a cult. But discovering the true self that God has loved into being and cherished since the beginning (and before) is a process that unearths the individual uniqueness already there. The more we look like Christ, the more we look like ourselves.

To say that knowing (and obeying and loving) God is central to Christian spirituality is not a hard sell. What raises red flags for many is the notion that knowing the self is equally important.

There is an ancient tradition among Christians that took for granted the importance of understanding self as well as understanding God—even if the modern church has forgotten it. Look at what Augustine prayed: “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee,” or Thomas à Kempis’ remark that, “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning.” John Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion that knowledge of God and ourselves constitute “the whole of the sacred doctrine.”

Taking the self out of spirituality risks cultivating a faith that is grounded in abstraction but not tethered to experience. A wide gap between theological abstraction and the world of experience can leave us feeling fake, and tempts us to hide our internal chaos beneath a pious veneer. The gap harms us and those around us and can be especially dangerous in church leaders.

We have all heard stories of a pastor or church leader who builds up a following, appears very genuine and vulnerable with his self-disclosures, and, by all appearances, is close to God and aware of self—and then something comes to light. Perhaps it is a hunger that led to a lust that led to a clandestine affair. Behind the carefully manufactured public false self was a true self this leader never really got to know. That true self would have taught him about himself and connected him to God, but the lack of self-knowledge devastated him and intimate relationships with family, friends, and congregation.

Anyone could name this pastor, but the name matters less than the all-too-common pattern his life illustrates: a knowledge of God, but a superficial knowledge of self.

Some kinds of knowledge fill, others puff us up. If we pursue knowledge of God or knowledge of self without reference to who we are in God, we will probably start drifting toward the latter outcome. The actor Woody Allen saw a therapist for decades, but any self-knowledge he’s derived from free association analysis doesn’t appear to have freed or healed him. His neuroticism has become part of his shtick.

If we spend more time gazing at ourselves than at God, we risk dropping into the void of self-obsession that only isolates us further from God and self. At the other extreme though, to gorge ourselves on encyclopedic understanding of the character of God doesn’t bring us any closer to relating to God or him to us. Let us not forget Jesus’ blunt warnings to the Pharisees: They knew God’s law by heart but it had yet to affect their hearts.

There is a dialogue between knowing God and knowing self. Something is missing if you only look at God or only look at self. If you don’t know yourself at all, you won’t really know God either. If you are afraid to take an honest look at yourself, you will be just as scared to look at God. When this happens, concepts and abstractions become a refuge and theoretical understanding of God replaces experiential knowing of God. But it’s not the purely theoretical knowledge that will save us or transform us.

We don’t need to wonder what God is like anymore because we meet him in the person of Jesus. Paul tells the church members in Colossae that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God. So whatever our ideas about God might be, we have to check them against what we know about Jesus.

Belief is one thing. Relational knowledge is another. And we often make the mistake of conflating introduction and relationship. A first encounter or moment of conversion is not a relationship but merely the beginning of one. God wishes to be known by you, to disclose himself to you. Even the best first meeting with someone, with sparks of joy and strong connection, can hardly be considered a relationship if nothing follows.

Transformative knowledge is personal knowledge of God. When we pray, when we wait in stillness before God and let ourselves be seen by him, accepting his acceptance of us, we discover more of who he is. We discover him in relationship when we imagine ourselves in first-century Palestine and follow him to the sites of miracles and teachings. We discover him personally when we just watch him: not with a desire to extract a moral lesson, but a desire to be with him. It isn’t efficient, but genuine, loving relationships aren’t based on efficiency either. Love is what we are after, and as we watch him, we become like him.

How does God feel about you? How does he see you? Many people fear that God is deeply disappointed with them, mad at them, or simply putting up with them. When Christians do contemplate the human side of their relationship with God, “sinner” is one of the most common descriptors. But that description verges on incorrect when divorced from the cosmos-shifting phrase “deeply loved.” Yes, we are sinners to the core, but we are sinners who are deeply loved.

The late philosopher Dallas Willard pointed out that obsessing over specific sins can lead to a harmful “gospel of sin management” that inadvertently keeps our eyes on our problems rather than on Jesus. Deep spiritual change does not come by trying to stop doing something wrong; it comes when we invite Jesus into the deep, wounded places from which those sins spring.

One church leader struggling with porn was doing everything he could to “crucify his desires” and was convinced that his addiction was his main issue. At first glance, it seemed plausible, given the damage it was doing to his marriage and ministry. But it became increasingly clear that beneath the addiction was a deep desire for intimacy, a pride and entitlement that he deserved more respect and appreciation than he was getting, and a resentment when those expectations were not met. 

We tend to make sin a matter of mere morality, but it is more accurate to see sin as something more basic to our nature, something that is part of us rather than something we do. Our ethical failures stem from our damaged nature, and it is this damaged nature that needs to be healed. Jesus didn’t just take our sins on himself; he took sin on himself: the entire cursed atmosphere in which we are immersed. Like the church leader struggling with an addiction, we miss true spirituality and transformation when we are so busy self-flagellating over bad fruits that we never get to the roots that keep producing them. At the roots, at our core wounds, Jesus is there, waiting for us, ready to help us the moment we surrender them to him.

True knowing of God and self begins when you view God and perceive how God sees you: It’s a look of pure delight and adoration. The knowledge that you are deeply, radically, and unconditionally loved is the foundation of transformation, the soil in which growth takes place. New life begins when we can turn and honestly face those parts of ourselves that we are not proud of, and trust that we have been welcomed to sit at the table Jesus has set. We can love those parts of ourselves out of hiding because God loved them first and loves them still.

God is wandering the garden of every human heart, asking, “Where are you?” not to punish, but to pursue us in love and bring our hearts back to his heart. It is when we say, “Here I am” that we begin a journey back to love, naked and unashamed instead of hiding behind bushes and clothes of fig leaves, as Adam and Eve did in the first garden.

Jesus can identify with us in this weakness of vulnerability. We forget this sometimes when we focus so much on Jesus’ divinity that we lose sight of the fact that he was not only fully God but fully human. One way Jesus identifies with us is a way we might have overlooked: Jesus had to undergo his own process of discovering who he was, and then embrace that true self that God knit together in Mary’s womb.

Think about what that must have been like for Jesus to read the Scriptures as a young boy and begin to piece together that prophecies were pointing to him as the source of fulfillment, for him to be reminded of what Simeon prophesied over him as an infant. Think about what it must have been like to have Mary as a mother. We know that she was highly favored among women and that her heart was humble and open to God. His mother’s faith that Jesus was the Son of God would become his own, too. She modeled faith and steadfastness that would have been formative in the life of a young child.

Like the rest of us, Jesus had to learn who he was to his Father in heaven. He had to learn how to step into that identity. Like us, Jesus had a false self that he had to face, but then also remembered who he truly was. In the wilderness, Satan appealed to Jesus’ false self, those parts that would have been tempted to succumb to the allure of power and prestige. In the face of rejection and doubt, Jesus constantly pointed people to who he was in the Father. He glorified God by being himself, and stayed connected by stealing away to lonely places to be in his Father’s presence.

Jesus was completely himself, steady in his conviction that he had the Father’s love and approval. He knew who he was. When we embrace the unique self that God has given to us, we experience freedom and relief because we are no longer hustling and fabricating a self that we hope God, other people, and we ourselves will approve of. We desperately search for our own fulfillment in the false selves we build, but once we die to ourselves by giving up on that search for fulfillment and happiness, we can discover who we are in God. Then we will, paradoxically, find our truest self and deepest fulfillment because we are discovering who God has envisioned us to be for all eternity.