The Gospel of Self-Hatred

Part one of a three-part series on Spiritual Growth

A few weeks ago, I took to Notes (Substack’s Social Media App) to share a bottled-up opinion about the state of Christianity on the app.

Here’s the post:

When I initially posted, I wasn’t anticipating people to respond the way they did, but now that I reflect on the post, I understand. I unintentionally left what I said up to interpretation, speculation, and with a great need for further clarity.

So that’s what I’m doing today.

I will clarify what I don’t like and hopefully paint a beautiful picture of God’s relationship with us. This is going to be a three-part article. The first two address negative ways we we view spiritual growth and sin and the third will address what we actually should think and feel when we sin against God. The third will hopefully set the stage for the healthiest way of responding to our sinfulness and need for spiritual growth.

So, let me set the stage with my experience.

For whatever reason, I grew up with a deep sense of guilt and shame when I made mistakes.

Even in moments that I was “guilty by association” and I didn’t actually do anything wrong, I would feel shame for days. This extended into sports as well. I would dwell on things I did wrong and had a difficult time moving on. This was tough for me since I played a high-fail-rate sport like baseball!

I would love to say this all changed when I became a Christian my freshman year in college, but it actually exacerbated the situation. Now, it wasn’t just that I was “letting my parents/teammates/coaches down” or “making myself look bad.” It’s that I was making God look bad and letting Him down. Even though I was a good kid who stayed out of trouble growing up, I had such high expectations of perfection in my moral life that I internalized and overanalyzed almost everything I did. Becoming a Christian brought on a new calling—to be holy—which I took as a reason to overanalyze even more.

It’s important to note that I understood the Gospel.

I also understood my parent’s love for me.

What I didn’t understand was how the Gospel message or my parent’s love gave me the freedom to respond in healthy ways when I messed up. Of course, all of that would indicate I didn’t fully understand the Gospel or my parent’s love for me, but at the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So, I resorted to what I knew best: negative self-talk and guilt-shaming myself into better performance.

As you can imagine, this wasn’t an effective strategy for growing in Christ-likeness (or relationships, or anything else, really). It was quite the opposite, actually. After a noticeable sin, I would spend many days sulking and beating myself up before finally receiving God’s forgiveness and repenting of my sin. I would then be okay for a few days before repeating the cycle.

After years of that pattern, I realized I needed to change after finally coming to grips with a troubling reality: I hated myself.

I hated the “finished product” that I was because I had spent years telling myself how bad I sucked at being a Christian and a person because I thought it would help me be a better Christian. Looking back, it makes no sense. But in the moment, it made perfect sense. As Morgan Housel says in The Psychology of Money, “No one is crazy.”¹ I was treating myself that way because it was all I knew.

Because of all that, I’m hyper-aware of when someone is using that tactic to get me to do something.

It’s really a common practice in marketing.

The idea is that we need to hit a person’s “pain point” to get them on board with our product or to get them motivated to make the change they need to make. Touching on a person’s “pain point” is the hook that keeps them glued and if your product can “heal” the “pain” then the chances of them buying increases dramatically.

This is easy to abuse within Christian circles.

Anyone with the Holy Spirit inside of them has a “pain point” that “pain point” is the fact that we sin. It’s the biggest problem we have in following Jesus. If sin weren’t a problem, we would have no issue pursuing Christ and living the way the Holy Spirit leads us to live. The problem isn’t talking about the “pain point,” the problem is the solutions being offered to the “pain point.”

If the solution to our sin has anything to do with negative self-talk and forced behavior modification, then we’re going to drive ourselves into a pit that seems impossible to escape.

And you could say, “Well, aren’t we supposed to crucify and put to death our flesh?” Yes, 100%. Behavior modification, however, is not crucifying our flesh. It’s attempting to modify our flesh’s behavior and make it holy. It’s what Paul accused the Galatians of doing and said, “You’re being foolish!”

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
—Galatians 3:1-3

You’re foolish! Who has bewitched you!?

Not because they’ve actively sinned in some major way, but because their response to their sin was to try to be “perfected by the flesh” rather than allow the Spirit of God inside of them to put to death the works of the flesh. Behavior modification and guilt-shaming have no room in the Gospel and, according to Paul, is an indicator that we’ve been “bewitched,” meaning we’ve had some sort of spell cast upon us that leads us away from the truth of Jesus.

This is intense language from Paul, but we need to understand it. Behavior modification that stems from guilt-shaming and negative self-talk is entirely antithetical to the Gospel message.

But it’s also the easiest thing to get people to buy into because it’s practical. It doesn’t require faith. It doesn’t require desperation before God. It doesn’t require us to work hard in the Spirit. In fact, it’s the easiest thing to do because it’s giving us the opportunity to train a muscle we’ve already trained pretty well.

Behavior modification is really just trying to give life to your flesh. Which is why we often fall deeper into our sins after we’ve tried to modify our behavior. We’re strengthening our ability to listen to and obey our fleshly desires. Satan doesn’t care what those fleshly desires are—he just wants us to listen and obey someone or something other than the Spirit of God. The more we attune our ears to our flesh, the more likely we are to give into our flesh on a daily basis. We’ll do whatever our flesh wants to do. Sometimes, that will be “good” and “presentable” behavior; sometimes, it will be evil behavior. But the more we listen and obey our flesh, the better we get at listening and obeying our flesh.

Which takes us further and further away from Jesus and His abundant life.

The fullness of the Gospel invites us into a much healthier human experience.

Paul, and Jesus, thought life was better lived dead.

Paul

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
—Paul, Galatians 2:20

Jesus

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
—Jesus, Luke 9:23-24

Paul is clearly echoing the idea that Jesus is presenting—life with God requires us to lose our lives. A life of behavior modification, even though it gives the appearance of profitability at times, actually causes us to miss out on the life that Jesus wants to give us. It’s an attempt to bypass the difficulty of denying ourselves but just like anything else, we reap what we sow.

Paul illustrates the wrestle of what it means to be human in Romans 7.

It’s a tongue twister of a passage, but here’s Paul’s main idea:

I do what I don’t want to do.
I don’t do what I do want to do.

Within that passage, he says this:

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
—Romans 7:18

Notice the confessions:

• Nothing good dwells in my flesh

• I don’t have the ability to carry out what’s right

It’s clear that Paul wants nothing to do with behavior modification or working hard to “be better.” His idea of walking in holiness and living the Christian life is about being honest about who we are in our flesh—totally helpless. His response to His total helplessness comes later in the passage.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
—Romans 7:24-25a

Notice that he doesn’t say, “What a wretched man I am! I should be better!”

He doesn’t want to be better. He wants to be delivered from a body of death. And how is he delivered from that body of death? Through the one whose body was crucified three days before He was raised up again—completely defeating death and sin.

Paul’s idea of what it meant to really live was rooted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ—not an attempt to be some better version of himself. Romans 7 leads into Romans 8, which fully encourages the Christian to “set their mind on the things of the Spirit, not the things of the flesh.”

And truthfully, that’s what it means to live as a healthy human. Not as someone who has cleaned up their flesh and made it presentable to the world, but as someone who has killed their flesh and allowed the resurrection power of Christ to live from within them. Someone who’s led by the Spirit, not the good ideas and attempts of their flesh. The only person to live who was fully alive and living the fullness of the human experience was Jesus of Nazareth. When we repent and believe in His finished work on the cross and His resurrection, we receive His Spirit. It is foolish of us then to try to live our lives then in accordance with our flesh, denying His Spirit. If we want the fullness of life (John 10:10), we need His life flowing through our veins. This is only possible by putting our “life” to death while letting His life flourish in us.

This doesn’t even make sense, logically.

This process seems impossible. How are we even supposed to do that? Put to death our flesh? How though? Let the Spirit live through us? How??

Here’s the beautiful part about God. He’s going to do it through us, we just need to submit to His power. Let’s recall Galatians 3.

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?
—Galatians 3:1-3

Paul says, “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” He’s making a somewhat sarcastic remark about their thought process. You really think the miracle of salvation, which is only brought on by the Holy Spirit at work within us, is then completed by your own power? He’s implying that salvation begins with the power of the Spirit and is completed by the power of the Spirit.

Which means this entire operation of spiritual growth depends not on our willpower and strength to overcome sin but on our prayerful dependence on the Holy Spirit.

It means moment-by-moment prayers:

Holy Spirit, not I, but You.

Holy Spirit, put to death in me what is sinful so the life of Christ can flourish.

Father, I submit my will to You. Not my will, but Yours be done.

Jesus, give me the eyes to see Your life and way.

Holy Spirit, I can’t do this on my own. Let me live in Your power.

Father, fill me with Your Spirit.

Complete, total dependency.

And truthfully, it takes a warrior to do such a thing. When the writer of Hebrews is talking about overcoming sin, it says this about Jesus:

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
—Hebrews 12:3-4

Dane Ortlund gives us an incredible insight about Jesus and His resistance of temptation.

Jesus…endured all temptations and testings without ever giving in. He therefore knows the strength of temptation better than any of us. Only he knows the cost.
—Dane Ortlund, Gentle & Lowly

What was Jesus doing when He achieved this incredible feat of resisting temptation to the point of bloodshed? He was praying.

And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
—Luke 22:41-44

He wasn’t taking matters into His own hands. He was submitting His fleshly desires to the Father's will.

And that, my friends, is a roadmap to spiritual growth. Which brings me full circle to my original problem with our response to our own inadequacies.

We cannot respond to our sinfulness with negative self-talk or guilt shaming. We cannot respond to our sinfulness with behavior modification and forcing our flesh to be presentable.

Our response to our sinfulness needs to be, “Well, this part of me needs to die anyway, so I’m going to submit it to God.”

And that statement can either be associated with more guilt and shame or it can be associated with freedom. Which is what we’re going to address in the third article.

Next week we’ll discuss an opposite but equally unhealthy approach to our issues.

Have a great week,

Brandon

Photo by Jack Lucas Smith on Unsplash

1. This was a fantastic book that focused primarily on why people do what they do with money rather than what we should do with our money. This particular chapter was not about spiritual growth, of course, but it helped me understand why people do the things they do—it’s all they know.