I was pleasantly surprised that someone had “liked” my post on October 8, 2011 on the SELF-life. My surprise comes at the back of my experience yesterday when I also tackled the lesson on the “SELF” which was, I thought, blandly received. It was frustrating in the same way after the storm Pedring had passed, electrical power had come back on and we were finally able to charge our cellphones only to find that our text messages could not be sent or received because there was no signal. We just could not connect. That was how it felt like when I taught the lesson on the self-life yesterday. I looked at the faces of the students and I saw that there was little or no connection. This is why I was pleasantly surprised that someone liked my post on the “self.”
It might be that the message cannot well be received because it is so opposed to all that the media feeds us. It might be that the messenger failed to deliver the message coherently. Or it might be that the audience was just too young to be aware of the overwhelming tyranny of the “SELF” and its destructiveness. Whatever the reason, there just was no connection.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. In real life experience even within the christian churches I have been to, I have seen that very few people ever agonize or live in conflict about the “self.” We have grown up with society telling us that we must know ourselves and love ourselves and seek ourselves and promote ourselves, project ourselves and glory in ourselves that we think nothing of it. It is the old-fashioned preaching of “deny self” and “reckoning ourselves dead indeed unto sin and alive unto Christ” that somehow has become alien.
I proceed then to present the matter of the self from another frame of reference. I will delve into the matter of the SELF and the Self-life but I will present another form or facet of it so as to make the self-life recognizable to us. Some may say that this is madness: madness, it seems, has been defined as doing something over and over again, expecting different results. But the message of the SELF has to be presented for it poses a great danger to the eternal soul. The alarm must be sounded: no serious persons can ever consider themselves to be truly christian unless they have “reckoned” the SELF “dead indeed unto sin.” So, here it goes.
Last week, before Steve Jobs died, I happened to have tuned in to CNN and found a feature on how Steve Jobs built up Apple Computers. I found the feature so interesting as it showed pictures of old PCs that I called my children for them to see what PCs looked like in the 1980s when they first came out. Even they found the computers shown in the feature quaint.
A few days later, the whole world was in mourning because Steve Jobs had passed away. The Philippine Daily Inquirer had a picture of Steve Jobs on the front page. His passing and the mourning of the world at his passing made it to the headline. It was that important.
Even local TV stations showed news feature after news feature on Steve Jobs and hisiPod, iPhone and iPad. People were reminiscing and tweeting about Steve Jobs. And I could hardly relate. A “friend” on Facebook said that it was probably because like him, I do not have either an iPod, iPhone or an iPad; that like him I have not become dependent on these devices in my everyday life and that is why I could not mourn his passing.
I thought about it. I can relate to mourning the loss of a genius among us mere mortals. I can relate to mourning the loss of someone so young and vibrant to so vicious a disease as pancreatic cancer. I can relate to mourning the loss of someone who so valiantly fought the losing battle to a terminal disease. I can relate to mourning the loss of a leader of a company who provides inspired leadership. I can certainly relate to mourning the loss of someone who defied the odds handed to him at birth and rise as captain of an industry. Steve Jobs was all this. And it is only right for people to mourn the loss.
But I cannot help but think that the loss becomes more of a practical concern to ordinary people because Steve Jobs is Apple and Apple is Steve Jobs. Such that with the loss of Steve Jobs, people are wondering whether or not their Apple devices might just prove to be just another rotten apple in time. People are afraid that without the charm and mystique of Steve Jobs behind their smart devices, the devices would soon be “so last season” so passe that they will be relics.
Apple devices are status symbols, they are “must-have” devices to those who wish to be fashionably “high-tech” and “high-end.” Apple devices have become trappings of disposable wealth that everyone seems to want. In this dwindling economy, disposable wealth seems to be so scarce that it has become most desirable and stratospherically out of reach to most people.
Those devices are so useful, but in the end, they are fashion accessories. They are immediately recognizable trappings of a sought-after lifestyle. Steve Jobs’s genius does not just lie in the invention of those things: he has a whole factory full of smart techies who help invent these devices. Steve Jobs’s genius lies in creating in us the perceived need for those devices. His genius is that he made us want these devices. When he launched a product, he did not come across as the slick car dealer kind of hard-sell salesperson, or a greedy smooth-operator guy who will rob you blind. He came across as a geeky boy-next-door who has a fabulous product that you can’t do without. He created in us a desire for something that we previously never thought of as something we simply cannot do without.
For the most part, this is what media does, this is what advertising the public relations do. They create in us a perceived need for the products they are promoting, the products they are selling to us. And their sales tactics hone in on our desire to possess things. We desire to possess things that are pretty and sleek. We desire to possess things that would give others the impression that we are rich, smart, successful and beautiful. Among the rich, smart, successful and beautiful, having these devices gain us universal acknowledgment that we are indeed rich, smart, successful and beautiful.
The only problem with this is that the desire for things is never satisfied. It feeds on itself such that we find ourselves not just wanting things, wanting to have things and doing all to possess those things. Soon, we don’t own things anymore: the things own us. We become a slave to the very things we possess. The iPod was soon replaced by the iPod Shuffle and then the iPod Nano. The iPhone was soon replaced by the iPhone2, the iPhone 3 and just recently, the iPhone 4. And to keep up with the trend, we change phones and devices as soon as new ones are in the market.
This is another facet of the self-life. The lure of things and having things is so prevalent, so pervasive that we think that it is normal, it is desirable and worth pursuing. We get baited and soon, we get hooked. When we get hooked, we are dragged along to the point of soul-exhaustion.
A.W. Tozer in his book, The Pursuit of God says that “before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are called simply ‘things.’ They were made for man’s uses, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and ‘things’ were allowed to enter. Within the human heart ‘things’ have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of our real spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to posses always to possess. It covets ‘things’ with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant….they are verbal symptoms of our deep disease…Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
Breaking this truth into fragments for our better understanding, it would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we tolerate at our peril. Jesus called it ‘life’ and ‘self,’ (see Matthew 16:24-25) or as we say, the self-life. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness: the words ‘gain’ and ‘profit’ suggest this. To allow this enemy to live is in the end to lose everything. To repudiate it and give up all for Christ’s sake is to lose nothing at last, but to preserve everything unto life eternal. And possibly also a hint is given here as to the only effective way to destroy this foe: it is by the Cross: ‘Let him take up his cross and follow me.’
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. They are ‘poor in spirit.” They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word ‘poor’ as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’
Jesus Christ said: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosover shall lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
I pose this question directly to the reader: what have you done to your SELF lately? Does our SELF remain as the silent enemy within us still? Or has the enemy within been crucified with Christ at the cross such that the self no longer lives, instead, Christ lives in us?
Another truth about the SELF is this: we cannot enshrine self and God at the same time. When we deny SELF, we enthrone Christ. When we enthrone self, we deny Christ. It is folly for anyone to think themselves believers in Christ if they are willing to take Christ only as Savior, but not as Lord. It is entirely self-deceiving for us to think that we can live lives pleasing to God by merely having Christ in our lives as Savior without casting out SELF and crowning Christ LORD of all. If Christ is to reign in us, Christ must reign as LORD of ALL.