Thought Life
I will win. Why? I’ll tell you why—because I have faith, courage, and enthusiasm!
Today, I’ll meet the right people in the right place at the right time for the betterment of all.
I see opportunity in every challenge.
I am terrific at remembering names.
When I fail, I look at what I did right, not what I did wrong.
I have clearly defined goals.
I never take advice from anyone more messed up than I am.
I never let a negative thought enter my head.
I am a winner, a contributor, an achiever. I believe in me.
–“The Affirmation”
Sarah Courteau’s Wilson Quarterly essay, entitled “Feel Free to Help Yourself,” is worth reading. Courteau delves into some of the self-help thinking on offer today, quoting the above creed to show that positive thinking today is grounded in narcissism, not in helping others and making the world a better place. Self-help, 2013 version, seems to be about making yourself better, not others.
Corteau makes the point many would expect: as American society becomes less religious in a traditional, God-focused sense, it becomes more religious in a narcissistic sense.
It’s hardly a coincidence that self-help is booming at a time when America is less religious than ever before. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that nearly one in five of us claims no religious affiliation at all. But we’re still in need of guideposts—a Good Book or a guru—when our appetites, our relationships, our finances, or the general busyness of life get the best of us. Marketdata, a Florida research firm that tracks the U.S. self-improvement industry, puts the price tag for our collective appetite for self-help books and seminars and those ubiquitous infomercials for diets, speed-reading, and killer abs at $10 billion a year.
This is a piece worth considering. It captures a common mentality in our age, and it helps evangelicals understand some of what we’re going to confront when we preach the gospel. Many people today view their quest for wholeness and happiness in psychological terms. The way one finds happiness is by changing one’s thoughts in a relentlessly positive fashion. Did you see that in the above creed? “I never let a negative thought enter my head.”
Christians need to take note of this, and ponder it carefully. The Bible teaches us that in order to be made right, we must know that we have gone wrong. We are sinners. As sinners, we live under the sure and just threat of God’s judgment (Romans 3). This doctrine has always sounded offensive to unredeemed ears (1 Corinthians 1). Today, though, many oppose this biblical doctrine not from a theological angle, but a therapeutic one. The whole discipline of self-critique–which many people of many worldviews would have affirmed in years past–is now outmoded. It–poof!–doesn’t exist.
It’s funny, isn’t it, that Courteau’s brother quoted this creed to her after learning it in his workplace. Imagine that–being a manager at work and never constructively critiquing someone. How chaotic would that be?
But this is not theoretical. This is the way things are going. It’s considered personally damaging to tell other people to change. There’s a whole vocabulary, and a way of life associated with it, that is largely lost on many Americans today. Well-documented trends like grade inflation and inflated self-assessment speak a common word: we are in danger today of never opening ourselves up to correction. That, in turn, means that we would never change.
And that means that we would never taste the miracle of grace.
The church must be a counter-influence in a narcissistic age that plays peaceful but is in reality deeply hostile. It is hostile to correction and growth and maturity. It views constructive criticism and critique and any form of negative assessment as deeply injurious. Think back to the above creed: “When I fail, I look at what I did right, not what I did wrong.” This, to put it sophisticatedly, is bonkers. How else does one avoid failing in the future but by assessing one’s mistakes? When a plane crashes, is it mean for analysts to study possible causes of pilot error? Is that inhumane? No, right? Of course it’s humane. You don’t want others to suffer, so you seek correction.
Evangelical churches must feature a harmonious song of salvation in which we hear both the minor chord of confession of sin and the major chord of salvation by grace. If we do not hear the minor chord, the major chord makes no sense. It offers no help. It only tells us what we already know.
The church exists to tell people they are wrong in order that they might be made right. Psychological healing is real through the gospel. But it must come through an honest confrontation with sin that starts with our own hearts. Only when we know the bad news may we appreciate and embrace meaningfully the good news.
If Christians individually and corporately consider identification of sin wrong and injurious, we will lose our connection to scriptural salvation. Personally, then, we must embrace critique. We must not bridle and bristle when it is suggested, however gently, that we might have room for improvement, or–banish the thought–that we might have actually gone the distance and done something wrong. If we find our face flushing at the mere mention of even a possible wrongdoing, then we have drunk far more deeply of the spirit of the age than we know. Already proud by nature as sinners, we have fortified our walls with pride, dug moats by our pride, and have through pride aimed flaming arrows at any who would dare challenge our carefully constructed image of absolute moral consistency.
This is particularly true for married couples. Few things will more efficiently destroy a marriage than either relentless criticism or uninterrupted praise. Marriages, because they necessarily involve two sinners, must involve a lot of encouragement, yes, but also identification and confession of sin.
Our marriages, churches, and individual souls will not know preservation through our own efforts, though. Without God we have nothing, and will be nothing. Contra the last line of “The Affirmation,” I don’t believe in me. I believe in God, and his gospel power working in me.
He showed me that in Adam I was wrong, and that in Christ he has made me right (Romans 4-5). When it comes to me, that’s really the only affirmation worth repeating.
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