dying to self + hating myself

growing up saved

There are good things about the world I come from. I was loved. I was safe. But sometimes when I look at old pictures, I get a little sad remembering the messages that little girl was internalizing. I hated myself. Truly and genuinely despised who I was. I believed everyone else hated me too, but most damagingly, I believed that God hated me. How could he look at me with anything but contempt? I was selfish. I was a liar. I was a sinner. I wasn't meek or mild or obedient. I wasn’t the kind of girl I was supposed to be. I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t kind. I didn’t make good decisions. I was irresponsible and impulsive and always thought about myself before I thought about anyone else. God was waiting with his finger on the “hell” button, just waiting for the chance to send me there.

I was desperate to please him but I consistently fell short and I thought I was the only one. I understood that I was the focal point of a spiritual war - Satan and God were in a battle for my soul. My sin would find me out and the enemy would stop at nothing to stop God’s plan for my life.

Every night, I’d lie in bed, listing all of my sins to God because my third grade Sunday school teacher told me if I died and hadn’t asked forgiveness for something, I wouldn’t go to heaven. I thought if I could just tell God how bad I was before he or someone else got the chance to, then I’d never run the risk of dying with sin in my life. I hated myself because I thought I was supposed to. I thought it was good to.

What are the consequences of teaching a child that in order to please God they must “die to self”? We understand the concept of “self” as adults, sure, and that gives us an understanding of God’s Word when it tells us to put our inner man to death. But the idea of a spiritual self is too abstract for a child to understand.

Developing a positive self image is crucial to healthy child development, so what happens when a child grows up in an environment that emphasizes that their self is wicked and must be killed? While they’re beginning to individualize, become their own person, and take responsibility for their actions, their self image is convoluted with this abstract idea of some part of them that is sinful and wicked and they must learn to control it and kill it. How do children learn to separate their sinful inner man from who they are… as people and as image bearers?

The truth is, children can’t.

There’s a lot of talk these days about healing the inner child and part of that for evangelical kids is learning to stop viewing ourselves through the negative identifiers we picked up as children. We learned to hate our sin nature, but many of us didn’t learn how to see or love the image of God in us.

Our parents and grandparents and teachers and elders in the faith were raised during a time where the theological emphasis was on the events of Revelation. They believed that the rapture would happen in their lifetime and that hell was hot and they needed to do whatever they could at whatever cost to save as many souls from eternal damnation. They grew into adulthood feeling the urgency of Jesus’ return and the panic of being responsible for not doing enough to keep their kids out of hell. Imagine the pressure they must of felt. They didn’t just feel the pressure of being good parents but they also carried the sole responsibility of their children’s eternal souls.

We can point our fingers and get angry and blame the elders in our lives for everything broken in us. Maybe there’s healing in that. Maybe there’s more pain in that. But it’s helpful to understand where people come from and a lot of what was passed on to us, whether intentionally or environmentally, was beaten into them. Sometimes literally. We don’t have to retaliate. But we do need to acknowledge what hurts and allow it to heal so we don’t pass the pain to anyone else.

We have to learn to adopt new identifiers. Not ones that we internalized as children, but ones that come from recognizing God’s image in us.

I had the whole dying to self thing down to a science. I could kill my inner man with the best of them. But I needed to learn how to kill the image of myself that defiled the image of God in me. Like identifying as a Black Sheep, Rebellious Kid, Contentious Woman, Jezebel Spirit, Selfish, Dumb, the list could go on. I have to make the choice, every day, multiple times a day, to identify as Loved. Worthy. Held. Child of God. Beautiful. Kind. Good. Righteous.

God’s love is so unfathomable to us that Paul wrote in Ephesians 3 that we would need super natural power to understand it.

I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

This is paradigm shifting truth. His love is so long, so wide, so high, so deep, that it confounds our knowledge so much that we need the power of the Spirit and the combined power of all of the saints to even begin to start to get it. And then we can be filled with the fullness of God. Not when we understand his wrath. Not when we understand his judgment. When we understand his love.

Phew.

My greatest battle as an adult has not been with my sinful nature but with the inner voices that tell me I am ugly, broken, damaged, evil, mean, and worthless. What a wonderful battle strategy the enemy has. If he can break the image of God in us, he can disconnect us from the Father completely. He did it in the garden with Adam and Eve and he does it with us even now. Shame is a powerful and effective weapon.

Loving who you are and having a healthy self image isn’t loving your sinful inner man. It isn’t humanistic or self centered. It’s loving who you are because God loves who you are. It’s loving the image of God that he has reflected in you. It’s seeing yourself the way he created you, in his image, and how he sees you now, as a daughter or son. Why are we so cautious of acknowledging how much God loves us? What are we afraid of? That we’ll believe in his love too much? That we’ll take advantage of it? That we’ll abuse it? Why does cursing ourselves feel safer than liking ourselves? Why does that feel sinful, when it isn’t? How could loving others as we love ourselves be a positive commission when we so deeply hate ourselves?

James 3:9 says, “With the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in God’s likeness.”

When we insult ourselves, we curse the image of God in us. When we identify ourselves by our sin, we deny the redemptive and transformative work of Christ. When we decide to follow Jesus, those old identifiers die with our “self”. He gives us new names.

“And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then God has made you an heir.” - Galatians 4:6-7

Daughter. Son. Forgiven. Chosen. Healed. Worthy. Loved.

What does God say about you?

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