Unpopular Take: Getting Close to Jesus Brings You to Yourself

The last so-labeled "unpopular take" from here for a while

I already wrote at some length about my choice of subtitle for my new book, Follower: How Getting Close to Jesus Brings You to Yourself. (I might also point out that since I kept that as a subtitle, I also wrote an entire book about it, and therefore probably don’t need to address it any further, but—clearly—I’m going to.) In that post I posited some reasons why the subtitle might, indeed, be articulating a take that’s unpopular. To sum up:

1. If you grew up highly churched and found yourself squelched, you might resent my insistence that the way to discover yourself is by getting close to Jesus.

2. If you’re still contentedly (or newly) churched, the focus on self feels idolatrous and highly problematic.

I sympathize with both of these misgivings, I really do. Especially the second one. Therefore it has not surprised me at all that I’ve gotten more than two or three private messages of respectful but unrelenting consternation that invariably go something like this:

I don’t want to come to myself. I want to follow Jesus and get close to Him…and further from myself. He said, “deny yourself…take up your cross and follow me.” Our society is already way too focused on self, and that’s a problem.

Like I say, I sympathize with this. I spent much of my youth and young adulthood in a desperate bid to erase myself while still alive so that God could “have His way with me” (as the saying went) and there would just be no part of Jenn that got in the way. I wrote poems about it. I prayer-journaled this request with tears. Yet the more I tried, the more obstacular¹ (to coin a word) I became.

Then in 2013, at the end of a required seminary class which subsequently morphed some years later into Stepping Into the Story, God confronted me with the fact that if He really is going to express Himself through me (a human created in His image to reflect Him to the world), if I successfully erased myself, there would be no sign of Him at all. Okay, maybe not at all—but not around or through me.

God is the essence of existence, and if God just wanted to make stuff and orchestrate everything Himself, He could have made a terrarium. And I guess He kind of did, but then He put some creatures into it which He made in His image, yet distinct from Him and from each other—so that He could express Himself in distinct ways with us. Not in spite of us. Not over and above us. With us. The fact that God’s image in us is marred by sin does not negate that we still bear it, or that God intended us to be different from each other. In fact, I would argue that it makes it necessary to come to our true selves. And that the only way that is possible is through closeness to God Incarnate, also known as Jesus Christ—the one who showed us what humans in general are to be like, and also the one who can show us what each of us in particular was created to be.

As for the time Jesus tells His followers that if they want to come after Him they have to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him, I don’t think what I just said precludes that, or vice versa. It’s certainly possible for a human being made in God’s divine image to create their own perfectly plausible version of themselves without Jesus. I’m just skeptical that that person will be the truest or intended version of themselves.

Sketch of Christ on the Cross by San Juan de la Cruz (St John of the Cross). public domain.

If we follow Jesus, He tells us the main thing we’re going to be doing with Him is carrying some kind of cross, which already goes against the grain of most if not all of us (particularly as it will more than likely be a cross particularly tailored to challenge the less Christlike or godly parts of ourselves). In that way, denying ourselves is a default part of the package. We literally can’t follow Jesus without learning to deny those parts of ourselves that get between us and Him. But as we do that, as those marred parts of us either heal or fall off like a spent scab, the more we become fully ourselves.

In days of old (I’m not sure how old, because I read lots of advanced books as a kid and I’ve just never been great at pinning lingo with era), people used to say a man who returned to sanity or reality had “come to himself.” I’m playing on that a little bit with the subtitle to Follower. But also, I think my subtitle is not only biblical, but something Jesus literally promised: Getting close to Him brings you to yourself.

Jesus followed up His “deny yourself” statement by telling the disciples that whoever tries to save their life—that is for whomever self-focus and self-preservation is the motivating life force—would lose it. We see that all the time. I absolutely agree that we live in a self-obsessed continent in a self-obsessed age, and it’s not doing anybody any favors. But then Jesus said whoever loses their life for His sake would find it again. The idea is not to give up our lives and never find them again. Great harm can occur at the hands of people who have no self-awareness. The point is to focus on Jesus and then we receive both Him and ourselves at the same time. And that’s when His dream comes true—of expressing Himself most fully with us, in all our distinctness, imaging Him.

1. In case it’s not clear, which it might not be, I mean I became more and more of an obstacle to my own holiness and Christlikeness the more I tried to take myself out of the equation.