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BP31–a supplement to BP30

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why ~ Mark Twain

You’ve heard of it. You’ve seen it. The Great Wall of China. It’s the longest wall in the history of the world, measuring 13,170 miles in length. Are you kidding me! The flight distance from Minneapolis to Bangkok is only 8300 miles in comparison. Built to protect against invasion, the Great Wall winds its way over steep mountains and through deep valleys taking advantage of natural geography to help serve as a formidable defensive barrier against any and all threats.

Some sections of The Great Wall are 2,300 years old, and parts of it measure 21 feet wide at the base and 23-26 feet tall. The wall has fortified strongholds where it intersects with trade routes as well as watchtowers to observe the approach of enemies at great distance and to direct troop movements during battle for optimal results.

This extensive protective wall system is regarded as one of the most impressive archaeological feats in human history.

But the Great Wall of China pales in comparison to the walls that humans construct around their hearts. How can this be?

For one thing, heart walls are built not solely due to the influence of human motivation but are aided and abetted by a dark spiritual ruler who always lives to divide and conquer, to isolate you from all other living beings—maybe not physically, but certainly relationally. We can live our lives rubbing shoulders with others but still be so emotionally distant.

So near and yet so far . . .

Tragically, we build walls to keep other humans out of our hearts—and even God–but we allow our greatest opponent to waltz right into the holy of holies of our hearts with his demonic armies to our destruction.

How many people die in this world without ever having been known? They are icebergs—only 15-20% of them is above the water line where they can be seen by others.

When we think of Satan, we often imagine direct attacks against us like accusations and lies and disease and death. However, the deadliest tool your enemy wields against your heart are not obvious frontal attacks but the isolating defenses he encourages you to construct against other humans and your loving Creator. Like the Great Wall of China. He whispers to you to protect yourself to a fault.

To the death.

For a second thing, humans often build not just one wall, but two walls. One is erected on the outside to defend against other humans who have assaulted our hearts with aching losses, weeping hurt, jarring unpredictability, frightening abuse, and crushing abandonment—physical and emotional. We’ve been hurt (harmed) once and we’re certainly not going to let that happen again now that we have access to adult power that is capable of further solidifying our childish defenses.

Hurt me once. Shame on you. Hurt me twice. Shame on me.

Another wall is built on the inside of our hearts to protect us from all the emotions (rage, hatred, bitterness) within us that have accrued from the hurt of others. This second wall also divorces us from the ugly blotches of shame, loneliness and self-hatred that are graffitied on the inside of our hearts.

What might we hate about ourselves? The imperfections of our physical bodies, or the fact that we always seem to need others more than they need us, or our hyper-sensitivity to rejection, or because of what we feel when we are in a group of people and find ourselves unnoticed, or because we despise how we criticize others in the deep silent places of our minds when we feel less than them, or the secret temptations we mightily wrestle against, or the things we have done in the past that seem to disqualify us from love. These are but to name a few among hundreds.

It’s only human to split off these parts of our souls from the awareness of self and others, right? As followers of Jesus, we’re not supposed to feel these things anyway, so just shut them in the closet and then we’re acceptable to the holy God. Out of sight, out of mind.

Many people, then, build an exterior wall to fend off the hurt from the outside and an interior wall to avoid the pain of being themselves with all their unholy needs, emotions, doubts and unlovability.

Thirdly, humans build walls because they are hard-wired to keep God out. Remember, we are born in an active position of defiance against authority, especially the greatest authority of all—the Creator of the universe who makes demands on us. We defy His commandments even though they are perfectly designed for our greatest good. Oh, how we suffer needlessly because we want to do things our way.

So, while it seems wise to build defenses like the Chinese dynasties did to guard against enemies, so often our walls are dangerous to us with eternal separation from God as a potential consequence. Yes, we all need walls to defend against those who would harm us, but too often our walls shut out God, others and even our own self. The divorce engineered by the enemy is total.

According to plan.

Today’s blog post focuses on Satan’s desire to divorce us from our own selfs, and how that self-separation ultimately leads to separation from God and others as well.

In previous DTFL posts, we have considered John 10:10 where Jesus says that the thief came to steal, kill and destroy but that He, quite to the contrary, came to give us abundant life.

Why does the thief want to kill men and women? Because he has been a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44ff). He desires to destroy anything that his arch enemy loves. Humans—creatures made in God’s image–are at the top of his hit list. He indeed exists to assassinate people.

Yes, Satan is a spiritual assassin who seeks to rub you out. Do you doubt that?

What exactly does the thief want to steal, kill and destroy? Our physical bodies? Yes, maybe. It is possible that the devil is the author behind the plot of every suicide. Our comforting intimacy with God? Our marriages and our friendships? Our confidence that we are going to be in heaven one day?

I believe these are all on the table–without a doubt.

Fortunately, Jesus came to give us abundant life by reconciling us to the Father after our sin and rebellion had totally separated us from Him. What does reconciliation mean anyway? It’s all about re-establishing friendship between us and the Abba Father. It’s all about restoring relationships, intimacy, closeness, and being lovingly adopted into the family of God.

So, Satan is dying to steal, and kill and destroy our intimacy with God while Jesus lives to reconcile us to Him so we might have peace and joy and know unconditional love. Yes, unconditional.

But we can only experience deep relationship with God if we love Him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. What if we’re divorced from Him in our hearts, hidden behind the two walls? How can we love God (and others and even our own self) if we are separated from our own hearts?

We just considered that an aspect of John 10:10 is that the thief came to steal, kill and destroy the relationship between God and His children (see the Garden of Eden). On the other hand, Jesus very quietly slipped into our world to reconcile us to the Father by His sacrifice on the cross—an event like no other that sent explosive shock waves throughout the spiritual realm.

But even after we have experienced the miracle of reconciliation with the Father, Satan still attempts to sow the seeds of divorce in the believer’s heart. When he creates distance between you and your heart (the True Self), he also separates you from your heavenly Dad and from other humans.

The enemy does not want us to connect with God out of our True Self. He wants us to hide, to relate to God and others out of a False Self. If Satan couldn’t prevent your rebirth as a new creation, he will do all he can to steal your ongoing closeness to God by convincing you to connect to Him out of a persona. He will persuade you to hide parts of yourself from God.

And so, like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves to be (which we assume to be unacceptable and unlovable) behind some kind of appearance which we hope will be more pleasing. . . And in time we may even come to forget that we are hiding, and think that our assumed pretty face is what we really look like ~ Simon Tugwell, The Beatitudes.

Nicholas Harnan writes that “this [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic feature of our humanity that most needs to be embraced in order to restore our human condition to a healed state.

So often, we feel that our true self with its sin and brokenness is inferior, unwanted, less than, unlovable. This territory gets tricky for Christians, because we are people who are usually highly aware of our sinfulness. Why did we agree that we needed salvation in the first place besides an awareness of our sin? So how do we reconcile the awareness of our ongoing sinfulness (after we have been saved from sin) with God’s perfect holiness?

Often, we hide. We send away the bad parts of ourselves so we can be seen (in our own eyes) as good and acceptable.

Call it pride. Call it fear. Call it shame. These are reasons we hide. Even when Jesus says, Come, we run. How can we conceive of a love so great that says Approach and enter when we feel so bad and unwanted—lies whispered into our ears by the dark assassin?

If we don’t truly believe this unconditional love, we will believe that God’s love is conditional. At this point, we believe in a god made in our image who sees us as we see ourselves; who hates us as we hate ourselves; who somehow is in cahoots with the prince of darkness who invites us to isolate and die.

This false god fashioned in our own minds to Satan’s glee might speak in the tone and voice of the internalized parent who says you’re never good enough, or you’re unwanted, or you should have never been born. Some parents don’t even have to say a word to erase you. The stony face and the dismissing eyes speak volumes. They say that you are nothing.

Annihilated by a look.

Certainly, the thief will convince us that our sin is so bad that not even God will love us. He will lie to us and accuse us and tell us that God’s love is indeed conditional and so we must do something or become somebody to be good enough to earn His love. Grace is too good to be true. So, we must hide our bad (true) self and create a good self worthy of God’s love.

When we hide our true self that still sins or that feels unlovable or that has been disqualified by past behaviors and thoughts (even though Jesus has told us that there is no more condemnation for us who are in Him), we must then present a different self to the world. We must construct a mask to wear out into the world—the mask of a good self, a sinless self, a strong self, a performing self, a self that is good enough or lovable enough.

Sadly, when we hide our true self—or aspects of it–and become a new self, we unknowingly create another reason to hide: since our true self is shut away from public interaction, it remains young and so we feel socially inadequate–behind everyone else. Since we feel this additional shame about our immature true self, we then have another reason to be the false self who acts more mature.

(Do you see now why Satan accuses you and lies to you and convinces you to hide your inferior self? He wants to isolate you from others and from God and drive you into the Dungeon of Utter Despising.)

Another problem that arises when we divorce our true self is that our exiled true self becomes ravenous because it is not being fed by healthy love and attention. Yes, the false self might be fed and praised and even adored. But our true self, the personality God created, is alone inside and hungry for love. Who will see that lonely self? Who will pursue that child? Who will be safe enough to trust?

Who will hear what we’re not saying or see who we’re not being.

Below are the essential points to walk away with today:

• When you build the external wall to keep people out, you’re left alone with your pain and the intense hunger to be loved. Now you must construct the inside wall to escape the unbearable agony you feel being all by yourself. So, the internal wall usually appears alongside the external wall.
• When you build one or both walls, God will feel distant because you are denying Him access to your grief, anger, fear, abandonment, hunger and possibly even your sin. You feel like God left you when, in reality, you left Him. So, you’re angry with Him. But you shouldn’t be angry with God because a good believer doesn’t do that. Now you’re in a real bind. God loves you and saved you but you hate Him. How could a perfect God ever allow you within a million miles of Him if you hate him, so screw the whole faith journey.

• Be aware of the Divide: between head and heart, between true self and false self, between doing and being. When the interior wall is built, you live in your head and attempt to divorce your heart (not just your emotions, but everything unacceptable about your true self like strong temptations and sin).
• There is another aspect to the Divide. If you build the external wall because there is someone in your life you must emotionally take care of due to their fragility or unpredictable anger, part of you grows up too fast and part of you is left behind. The false self may be fifty years old while the true self that must be exiled is seven years old. How can you let anyone see that inside self who is so young and scared? So, you hide the weak, unacceptable self.
• Be alert for the compensatory self who strives to be loved for performance. Eventually you will believe the lie that you can only allow yourself to be seen when you achieve or do well. You can never expose the self that is less than perfect.
• Control is essential for the two-walled person. Control people around you so they won’t scare you or hurt you and control your own emotions because they are young, untrustworthy and impulsive. A wild lion that escaped from captivity might be less dangerous than your true self on the loose.
• When you hide your true self behind the inside wall, your intellect may grow while your heart with its social self remains hidden and immature. One day you may walk around with your head tilted because your left hemisphere is so much more developed than your right. Ha.
• When you live as a false self constructed to protect you from severe consequences, you will often find it easier to lie than to tell the truth—especially if you’ll be in trouble. It’s all about being safe.
• You may have been born again spiritually, but now you need to be born again emotionally. The exiled true self must be born into the outside world and grow up into the image of Jesus.
• You cannot deeply love others if the true self that God created is incarcerated in the dungeon.
• Since the outside world is not safe, you hide your true self in a safe room. But then the true self is alone and hungry to be seen and loved. When the true self happens to be discovered by a special person who has been gifted with the superpower to see through the mask of the false self, you will feel emotionally close to that person and may even experience deep attraction. You will attach to that person quickly. You will become giddy because your ravenous true self is finally seen and loved. Be aware of interpreting this giddiness as romantic love. It has the potential to blow up your marriage or your thought life with its obsessive intensity.
• Your hidden true self will be hungry so be aware of seeking out mirrors to reflect you perfectly. You will end up loving people not for who they are but for what they do for you; for how they make you feel seen and known and emotionally held and even idealized. After all, the false self can be quite amazing with its perfectionism and niceness and charm.
• You will be threatened by negative evaluation. Internally, you will say, “If you criticize me, I will be angry with you on the inside. I might even blame you and hate you. I cannot be at fault because then I experience hopelessness and a sense of being all bad. I must protect myself because you will annihilate me with your negativity.” So, you strive to keep everyone happy. Perfectionism and being nice are your armor. Then no one will ever say a negative word about you. You will be safe. You won’t be real, but you will be protected.

Satan is the accuser, the murderer, the liar, the terrible wall builder. He exists to separate. He is desperate to divorce you from your own self because then you will be unable to deeply connect with God or other people except on a detached intellectual level that is far from love.

But God . . . sent His only son to rescue us from hiding our true self and living out of the false self.

He hates divorce.

He hates walls.

He hates anything that separates us from ourselves, others and Himself.

It was He who said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself ~ Matthew 22:37ff

God wants us to love Him with all of us–our heart, mind and soul. We can’t do that if we wall off parts of ourselves due to fear and shame. He also commands us to love other humans as we love ourselves—something else that’s impossible if we divorce our true self.

So, come to Jesus as you are. Bring all of you to Him. Throw off everything that entangles you including the false self and run the race looking trustingly at Him.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Know today that the reason God brought you into this world was to believe in Him and to be loved by Him. Love casts out all fear and frees us to approach the throne with confidence.

Come to Jesus with all of you. Leave no part of you behind.

No walls. Only doors.

Since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His flesh . . . let us draw near with a true heart [true self] in full assurance of faith ~ Hebrews 10:19ff