It’s Not About You

Do we have a problem with individualism in our society? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

My wife recently wrote a blog on a realization that she had. Now for those who don’t read her blog, I really encourage you to do so. She is not writing on apologetics like I am, but I do think she’s a skilled writing and quite gripping and has a way of drawing the reader in emotionally. To get to the point, she made the point in this blog that with many of her struggles, she had been doing what many of us do. She had been focusing on herself.

There is a car sales place around here that has an advertising slogan and I understand why they say it, but I hate to hear it. The slogan is to come to their store “Where it’s all about you.” Personally, I have enough of a problem with everything being about me already.

This also carries over to our Christianity. Consider for instance the four spiritual laws. Now I am not condemning Bill Bright who came up with these, but they do show our modern Western individualism. The first one is how God loves you and has a plan for your life. Where is the emphasis there? It is on the individual. Imagine in the time of Christ a decree going out from Rome when a new Caesar took the throne that said “Caesar loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life!”

The real message is in fact that God is becoming king through the person of Jesus and He will call the world to account. Paul argues similar in Acts 17 at the Areopagus. God has overlooked ignorance in the past but is now calling the world to repent and this has been shown by the resurrection of Jesus. The message of the Gospel is of course applicable to our lives, but it is not about us. It’s about God in Christ.

And this gets us to a problem in our society and it’s not just a Christian problem, though Christians have bought into it. It is a social problem. We are all about ourselves. In some ways, you could say this is an inverted idea of what honor and shame were meant to be like, though there are vestiges of that still around.

Christian scholar Jackson Wu has said one such example is our modern social media. We want people to speak well of us on social media. We like it when people “like” us on Facebook or share our posts or tag our names approvingly and we like it when people share our tweets or comment on our blogs or things of that sort. It could be said that this is a way that we go about trying to gain honor in the eyes of others.

The difference is we also have a self-esteem movement where we make it all about us and we are special just for being us and since we’re special, we should deserve special privileges. Christians and atheists both often have this idea that the Bible, for example, should have been written with modern Western audiences in mind and who needs to bother studying scholarship or anything like that to understand it? God would surely want to make His message clear.

Well no, you don’t get special privileges. If you want the truth, you actually have to do the work. Too many of us want to shortcut around this and do theology and Biblical interpretation by our experiences and what we think God is telling us. It is amazing how many of my fellow Protestants I know who get after the Pope for claiming to speak for God and yet have no problem sharing regularly what they think God is telling them.

So what do we do?

First, get over ourselves. One humbling aspect to realize is that whoever you are in this life, that whatever it is God wants to do, He does not depend on you to do it. He can always find someone else. The future of humanity does not depend on you. Of course, you must do your part and you should, but you are not the emphasis of the story. It is not what God is doing for you that matters most. It is what you are doing for God that matters most.

Second, build up the humility to learn to listen to others and realize that you can be wrong. If we put our experiences and feelings and what have you in a place where they cannot be wrong, we will never grow in the knowledge of God and in healthy Christian living. This also means humbling yourself to say “I might actually have to do some work to learn about God.” You have to do so to learn about your spouse or your friends or someone you’re dating. Why think God, someone infinitely more different from you, would be easy to learn about?”

Third, we need to watch for individualism in our lives. How often are we making everything all about us? The more we realize that this is going on, the more we can catch it. We can take a break and say “It is not about me.” You can realize that God owes you nothing and every good gift He gives you is grace. If you realize this, it will make evil much easier to deal with. We often make the mistake of holding anger against God because He didn’t give something He never promised to give.

Finally, we must always be making sure of things on our end. Of course, salvation is not by works, but there is more than salvation. There is also sanctification and learning to become more righteous. We should always be examining ourselves first and seeing if we can live more holy lives in response to what is going on. We cannot hold God for ransom and a temper tantrum or refusing to worship Him will not diminish Him. Of course, we can bring our complaints to God and our requests, but while He promises to listen, He has no obligation to do what we want and if He did, we can imagine our world would be more chaotic than it is.

It might be a good sales pitch to say everything is all about you, but it doesn’t work with the Gospel. The Gospel is all about God in Christ. It is not about you.

In Christ,

Nick Peters